nassus
all knew of a story in which the whole childhood of Zeus had been
passed in a cave on Dicte, and Dionysius assigns to the Dictaean
Cave that finding of the law by Minos which presents so curious a
parallel to the giving of the tables of the law to Moses on Mount
Sinai. Minos, he says, went down into the Sacred Cave, and reappeared
with the law, saying that it was from Zeus himself. And the last
legend, related by Lucian, places in the same cave that union of
Zeus with Europa from which Minos sprang. The Dictaean Cave, then,
is of special interest in connection with the origins of the Minoan
civilization, or, rather, with the fancies which later minds wove
around some of the sacred conceptions of the Minoan civilization.
It is a large double cavern, south-west of Psychro, and some 500
feet above the latter place. Its exploration by Mr. Hogarth revealed
ample evidence of its early connection with the cult of that divinity
upon whom the Greeks foisted their own ideas of Zeus.

A scarped terrace overlooking the slope of the hill gives access
to the shallow upper grotto, in which were found the remains of an
altar, and close by a table of offerings, while the ground beneath
the floor of the cave yielded, in regular stratification, Kamares
ware, immediately above the virgin soil; then glazed ware, with
cloudy brown stripes on a creamy slip; then regular Mycenaean ware,
with the familiar marine and plant designs; and, uppermost, bronze.
The lower grotto has at first a sheer fall from the upper one, then
slopes away for some 200 feet to an icy pool surrounded with a forest
of stalagmites; and in this gloomy cavern the evidence was manifest
of an ancient cult of a divinity to whom the Double Axe was sacred.
There was a great mass of votive offerings of all sorts--engraved
gems, bronze statuettes (including a Twenty-second-Dynasty figure
of the Egyptian god Amen-Ra), and an abundance of common rings,
pins, brooches, and knives; but the chief feature of the find was
the Double Axe, of which numerous specimens were found embedded in
the stalagmites around the dark pool at the foot of the cavern,
some of them still retaining their original shafts. It is evident
that the cave on Dicte was the seat of a very ancient worship,
connected with that worship whose emblems were the Double Axe Pillars
in the Palace of Knossos, and that this worship, as revealed by the
character of the remains in the grotto, goes back to the early
day