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 The First Sea-going Peoples 93 THE PALACE AT GNOSSOS The painted walls of the Throne' Room Photo • Fi-ed Boissonjias. benighted savage. But indeed he was an Aryan tribesman, of a race and culture of which we shall soon have much to tell, and the strange gibberish he spoke was to differentiate some day into Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, German, English and most of the chief lan- guages of the world. Such was Cnossos at its zenith, intelligent, enterprising, bright and happy. But about 1400 b.c. disaster came perhaps very suddenly upon its prosperity. The palace of Minos was destroyed, and its ruins have never been rebuilt or inhabited from that day to this. We do not know how this disaster occurred. The excavators note what appears to be scattered plunder and the marks of the fire. But the traces of a very destructive earthquake have also been found. Nature alone may have destroyed Cnossos, or the Greeks may have finished what the earthquake began.