ing in shape the Vaphio cups, though
much larger than these, some of them of the type of the bronze
ewer found in the north-west house at Knossos.

[Illustration XX: (1) MAIN DRAIN, KNOSSOS (_p_. 98)

(2) TERRA-COTTA DRAIN PIPES (_p_. 98)]

Rekh-ma-ra, in whose tomb are the other notable pictures of the
Keftiu, was also a great figure in Egyptian history in the next
reign. He was Vizier to Tahutmes III., the conquering Pharaoh of
the Eighteenth Dynasty. The pictures on the walls of his tomb are,
at least in some cases, evidently more than mere racial studies;
they are careful portraits. 'The first man, "The Great Chief of
the Kefti, and the Isles of the Green Sea," is young, and has a
remarkably small mouth with an amiable expression. His complexion is
fair rather than dark, but his hair is dark brown. His lieutenant,
the next in order, is of a different type--elderly, with a most
forbidding visage, Roman nose, and nut-cracker jaws. Most of the
others are very much alike--young, dark in complexion, and with
long black hair hanging below their waists and twisted up into
fantastic knots and curls on the tops of their heads.'[*]

[Footnote *: H. R. Hall, 'Egypt and Western Asia,' p. 362.]

These Keftiu, then, were the Minoans of the Great Palace period of
Crete, the pre-Hellenic Greeks, the Pelasgi of old Greek tradition,
in whose time the great civilization of the Minoan Empire reached its
culminating point, and was within a little of its final disaster.
It is a fortunate circumstance that Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra should
have caused them to be portrayed when they did, for in two or three
generations more the glory of Knossos had passed away, never to be
revived. Greece gave to Egyptian scholars the key to the translation
of the hieroglyphics in the Greek version of the Egyptian text on
the Rosetta Stone; the paintings of the Theban tombs have paid
back an instalment of that debt in showing us the likenesses of
those 'Greeks before the Greeks' who dwelt in Crete. Perhaps some
day the debt will be fully repaid by the discovery of a bilingual
text in Egyptian and Minoan, giving us in hieroglyphics a version
of some passage of that Minoan script which now exists only to
tantalize us with records of an ancient history which we cannot read.
Such a discovery is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility.
It is not so long since Boghaz-Keui supplied us with a cuneiform
version of the famous treaty between the Egyptians and