Cretan Text
Found in a Cretan dungeon near the Granatus river in Asia Minor. Said dungeon was inhabited by a zombie minotuar, probably THE minotaur.
Our venerable King Idomeneus has directed that all the treasures of Knossos be dispersed so that the People of the Sea might not seize them. Most have been given to our ancient guardians, the Taloi, who are powerless against the People of the Sea but can still bear our treasures to the various storehouses of the gods, for the gods still remember Minos the Just. But I, a lowly Kydonian, have been sent back to the land we dwelt in before we sailed to Crete millennia ago, that some record of us might slumber forever in the cradle of our race, and some memory might be retained of mighty Crete and her ninety beautiful cities, Knossos, Phaestos, Gortys, Lytos, Kydonia, Rhytios, Malia, Zyko, Hania, Agia Triada, Tylissos, [etc.]. [A rather tedious enumeration of the splendors of Crete here follows.]
King Idomeneus, who fought in the greatest war that men have ever known scant miles from here, will prove to be the last king of Crete, and all because of a fluke of Tyche’s—a Cretan vase happened to be in a palace in Egypt, and the People of the Sea who saw it vowed to raze the island of its makers. The lands of the Hittites have already crumbled before them, and now Egypt, the most ancient country on earth, still weakened from the loss of its slaves and the inundation of its army, will once again fall to the sea.
Despite the glories of the court of Minos, the most powerful man of his day, what they say is true, and our fortune never recovered from the desecration of Thera. We have become too Greek, and even the Eteocretans have forgotten some of the old ways.
Nevertheless, let our memory lie here in this grave we have constructed, guarded by the son of Pasiphae, who slumbers after his death at the hands of the kidnaper Theseus. In time no sign will remain in the world that Crete had ever been save the stone statue of Minos’s dog, which Zeus cursed or blessed. Let Minos’s miraculous lance lie here forgotten with the other relics or of our glory. As Troy once stood proud, so did we; and as Troy was ground into dust, so shall we be. But dust is the bosom of Rhea.
