The island of Crete occupies a central position in the eastern Mediterranean. It is accessible from Egypt, the Near East, mainland Greece, and from the west. The island is fertile and well wooded and towards the end of the third millennium was able to sustain several urban settlements. In some of these, about 1950 bc, monumental ‘palace’ complexes appeared. The ‘palaces’, which have large central courtyards and a series of public rooms, also had space for the storage of surplus grain, wine, oil, and other produce. Whoever controlled the ‘palaces’ recorded the goods stored on clay tablets, first in a Cretan hieroglyphic script and later in the island’s own syllabic writing, known to scholars as Linear A. Although the phonetic values of some fifteen Linear A syllables are known, the language in which they are written is as yet undeciphered.
The civilization has been given the name Minoan, after a king, Minos, reputedly the son of Zeus, who, according to later legends, was given Crete to rule. These legends must reflect memories of the Cretan past that passed down the centuries to later Greeks. Minoan civilization was rediscovered when an English archaeologist, Arthur Evans, intrigued by carved seal-stones from the area, began digging at the site of Knossos in 1900, where he soon uncovered the palace buildings. Knossos, situated on rising land not far from the sea, is now known to be an ancient settlement with a history going as far back as the fifth millennium bc. Its status must have depended on its antiquity and even before the ‘palace’ was built it had been a centre for communal feasting. It clearly had a hallowed role and now had become the leading centre of a sophisticated civilization whose craftsmanship was as fine as any in the eastern Mediterranean. Evans exulted over his find. ‘The recent discoveries in Crete have added a new horizon to European civilization—a new standpoint has been at the same time obtained for surveying not only the ancient Classical World of Greece and Rome, but the modern world in which we live.’ Excavators from France and Italy working on other sites, among them Malia and Phaistos, soon showed that this was a civilization that extended across the island.
Evans claimed that the monumental buildings were seats of royalty, assuming that the Minoans had kings, as later legends suggested. The imagination that he breathed into the buildings and the reconstructions that he fostered have defined images of Knossos ever since. (See J. Alexander MacGillivray, Minotaur: Sir Arthur
Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth, London and New York, 2000.) This is why the description ‘palace’ became used of all the major sites and the name has stuck despite the lack of any archaeological (or other) evidence to suggest Minoan kingship. It is only later that there is any record of Minoan leaders (in the Linear B tablets, see below), and early Minoan society was not heavily centralized. Burials suggest, rather, that society was organized around clans or extended families, and excavations in towns surrounding the ‘palaces’ have shown that there were large independent households in control of their own stores. It is the relationship with the central buildings that is difficult to determine. Did a number of elite families control them? Did the arrangement of rooms suggest that the inner rooms were accessible only to a select group while the courtyards were used for more public gatherings? How far did religion play a role in coordinating communal activities? Did an administrative class actually run the ‘palaces’ and record the stored goods there? Were these handed out as offerings to those attending ceremonies? Certainly there is now evidence that goods were brought into the ‘palaces’ from further afield, not made there as was originally believed.
The monumental architecture of the ‘palaces’ and their system of bureaucratic administration are reminiscent of Egypt and the Near East. Yet, even though there is evidence of some influence from the east in imported goods and artistic styles, this was no culture imposed from the outside and the ‘palaces’ cannot be related to foreign models. Cretan society depended for its survival on the well-organized exploitation of the local countryside, something that could only have evolved over a long period of time. It was perhaps this that gave the Cretans their advantage over other communities in the Aegean. The appearances of the ‘palaces’ coincided with the creation of shrines on peak-tops suggesting a network of religious sites and this may well be a sign of the elites establishing control over the countryside by appropriating vantage points.
This was also a society of skilled craftsmen. One style of pottery of this early period (the so-called Old Palace Period, 2000-1600 Bc), Kamares ware (from the cave where it was first discovered in the nineteenth century), is among the best ever made in Greece. It is eggshell-thin and covered with flowing abstract designs in white, red, and orange. Quantities were transferred from the central plain of Crete, where it was made, to the ‘palaces’. Many different styles are known affirming this as a creative and lively community. Seals of jasper or rock crystal are engraved with portrayals of animals, birds, and insects. At Malia a hoard of exquisite gold objects was discovered by looters in a cemetery. Most eventually reappeared in the British Museum, although a beautiful pendant of two bees facing each other over a honey cake was found later by excavators on the site.
Designs of ships with sails are found on Minoan seals (earlier Mediterranean ships had used oars) and the Minoan elite appear to have reinforced their status by importing and exporting goods to and from the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean. Minoan goods in Cyprus show that the island was, as so often in its history, being used as an intermediary stopping place to the east. In the Aegean itself a great deal of evidence for trading has been uncovered at Acrotiri on the island of Santorini,
The ancient Thera. Here there was a flourishing commercial town with between 8,000 and 12,000 inhabitants. In the second half of the seventeenth century BC it underwent a catastrophe as earthquakes and a subsequent volcanic eruption destroyed the town and then covered it in ash. Recent underwater research confirms that this was the greatest volcanic eruption in the world over the past 10,000 years. The legends of a lost Atlantis, a vanished civilization, might well be an echo of what was lost in the catastrophe.
The walls of the houses of Acrotiri, some of which still stand to two or three storeys high with internal floors intact, are covered in frescos and there is certainly Minoan influence here, with lively scenes of animals and flowers. The most famous of the frescos, the ‘Ship Fresco, shows the earliest recorded town scenes. Settlements run alongside a shoreline with boats, dolphins, and humans in the sea beyond and crowds assembled on the shore. It is assumed that the houses are those of merchants and the ‘Ship Fresco’ a record of their overseas contacts. The recent excavations, conducted by Christos Doumas, building on the pioneering early work of Spyridon Marinatos, found the use of Minoan systems of numbering and measurement and growing numbers of imports from Crete, but, so far as pottery was concerned, making up no more than some 1-2 per cent of the total volume. There was also contact with Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, enough to suggest that Acrotiri was independent of Cretan control and simply exploiting the opportunities that trade offered the city.
About 1600 BC the early Minoan ‘palaces’ were destroyed. This was once believed to be the direct result of the Thera eruption but pumice from the eruption had already landed on the island and been collected before the destruction. It is now assumed that an earthquake, followed by fires, was the cause, although this and dates of these and later destructions of Cretan palaces are still hotly disputed. The ‘palaces’ were quickly rebuilt on an even more magnificent scale than before, a clear sign of the underlying prosperity and stability of Minoan society. The walls now have timber posts inserted to give them flexibility against earthquakes. Again the buildings focus on a courtyard, but the public rooms on a first-floor level are magnificent, reached by grand stairways. The best of these at Knossos leads up to a set of ‘royal apartments’. One of Evans’s finds here was a seat that he considered a throne; it is unique in the period (but possibly a later addition, of the Mycenaean period). New ‘palaces’ appear for the first time, at Zakros on the eastern end of Crete and at Ayia Triadha, not far from the earlier ‘palace’ of Phaistos that appears to have been superseded by the newcomer.
On the walls are fine frescos. Those from Knossos are especially exuberant. Some show processions, others women, bare-breasted with flowing hair, others scenes of natural life with an abundance of flowers and animals. The most famous are the scenes of bull leaping—men and women soaring over the horns of charging bulls. The leapers stood on a platform towards which the bulls charged and then launched themselves onto the backs of the bulls, completing a somersault as they landed behind them. There is some evidence that the displays took part within the courtyards but a larger arena with earth foundations is more likely if spectators were to be
Accommodated, with the bulls being brought back into the courtyard for sacrifice. (This is certainly some kind of cult activity, and later Greeks recorded the legend of the Minotaur, half-bull and half-man, supposedly the offspring of a liaison between Minos’ wife Pasiphae and a bull, which was kept in a labyrinth below the royal palace.)
This New Palace Period (1600-1425 Bc) was prosperous and well ordered. There are extensive towns with, at one site, Gournia, houses facing winding cobbled streets. Knossos may have been home to 17,000 people. Again, some houses are more substantial, almost palaces in themselves, suggesting they are the homes of an elite, while in the countryside villas appear. Many are working farms, but others may have been the countryside retreats of the wealthy. The elite sustained fine craftsmanship, beautifully crafted stone vessels, delicate carved seal-stones, and work in gold. The celebrated Harvester Vase, fashioned from hard stone, shows a group of robust farmers marching out to sow their land, their movement and comradeship beautifully captured by the carver. The famous gold cups found at Vaphio in the Peloponnese, but almost certainly from Crete, show bulls being taken into captivity, in one case by brute force, in another through the lure of a female.
An atmosphere of ritual and worship pervades Minoan society but it is difficult to make much sense of it. There is no equivalent of the large temples of Egypt; rather there is a wide range of religious sites, rooms in the ‘palaces’ set aside for cult worship, sacred caves, and shrines on isolated mountain peaks, the most prominent and continuous at Kato Syme on Mount Dikte in southern Crete. These may have been the focus of ‘pilgrimages’ and objects found there are often inscribed with a formula (untranslated as yet), in Linear A, together with the name of the shrine concerned. (One interesting finding is that the peak shrines become less important with time and several are abandoned altogether.) Lightweight ritual equipment such as vessels for offerings and figurines of deities give the impression that celebrants were mobile, taking sacred objects from one shrine to another. Leadership, in whatever form it took, must have been expressed through ritual—there is no obvious distinction between political and religious activities. The ‘throne’ found by Evans on the upper floor of Knossos is close to a lustral basin and may have been used, not by a male ruler as Evans thought, but by a high priestess. There is a strong sense, through frescos and other objects, that women played the prominent role in religious activities; scenes of women and girls gathering crocuses that are then presented as offerings are especially appealing.
Worship, in the form of sacrifices and votive offerings, was directed at a variety of deities, most of them goddesses, with one, shown in some frescos on a throne, supreme over others. The double axe (which originates in Mesopotamia) is a particularly potent symbol, and at Knossos snakes and bulls have some form of ritual significance. The so-called Poppy goddess (with three incised poppy seeds on her head) found at a small rural shrine suggests that opium was used to induce religious ecstasy. Yet in recent years a darker side of Minoan ritual has emerged. In a house in Knossos a mass of children’s bones have been found and it appears that the children had been sacrificed, their flesh cut from their bones. Shortly before, at the
Mountain shrine of Anemospelia, a sanctuary was uncovered in which was found the body of a youth, bound, on an altar, with a bronze dagger beside him. The sanctuary was preserved because an earthquake had buried it. Was he being sacrificed in a vain attempt to ward off the catastrophe or simply an injured man brought to the sanctuary for treatment?
The Minoans were by now trading throughout the Cyclades (the islands of the southern Aegean) and Near East. The stone they used came from Egypt, the Pelopon-nese, and the Aegean island of Melos. Copper, made into large ingots, came from the Laurium mines in Attica (later to be more famous as the source of Athens’s silver). In Egypt, in a tomb at Thebes, there are paintings of Cretans bringing cloth as tribute, while Minoan pottery is found not only in Egypt but also along the Syro-Palestine coast. In some cases the Minoan presence is more substantial. The frescos of bulls and bull leapers at Tell el-Dab’a on the Nile Delta (see earlier, pp. 6o-i) are evidence of a community of Minoan merchants or itinerant artisans there in the early fifteenth century BC. There are three walled city sites in the Aegean—Phylakopi on Melos, Agia Eirene on Kea, and Kolonna on Aegina—where the architecture is reminiscent of that of Cretan towns. Linear A is used, and local potters imitated Cretan styles.
So is it possible to talk of a Minoan empire? There are certainly memories of such an empire in classical writers. The Greek historian Thucydides, for instance, is adamant that the earliest navy was that of king Minos and that it dominated the Cyclades (Book I: 4). At present, however, the evidence is rather of substantial interaction of Minoan traders with local cultures with possibly the settlement of Cretan immigrants on some islands and the coastline of the eastern Mediterranean. There is no evidence in Crete itself of the Minoans as inherently expansionist or imperialist in their ambitions.
Minoan society has had its enthusiastic admirers. The colourful frescos, the apparent joy and sophistication of the people, the sense of a peaceful and ordered society that revelled in the beauties of nature, have been combined to create an image of an idyllic world. In her book The Dawn of the Gods (London, 1968) the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes argued that Minoan Crete was essentially a ‘feminine’ society, in contrast to those more ‘masculine’ cultures of the north. Certainly there is more evidence of a matriarchy here than in other ancient societies but this does not mean that the Minoans were essentially benign. It was a shock in 1981 when the Anemospelia sacrifice was found and a darker side of Minoan life emerged. There is some evidence too that war played a far larger part in Minoan life than was once thought. Large numbers of Cretan swords, dating from 1750 BC, have been found. The ‘carefree’, peace-loving Minoans may turn out to be no more than a fantasy created in the twentieth century.
World History
