During a medium-term cycle (moyenne duree) of 600 years, or in the new scenario, a longue duree of 1000 years, a remarkable “palace”-based civilization flourished on Crete, with an undeniable organizational and cultural homogeneity. A parallel with later Greek city-states is helpful: they were continually fighting each other, but shared a religious pantheon and a common mentalite or way of seeing the world, and tended to build similar domestic and public architecture. Arguably the short-term history of each “palace” was of a world of political events and personalities, focused on competition between particular families for control over people and resources, power, and wealth. But beneath this there must have existed deeper, more long-lasting structural principles which gave rise to and helped maintain this first European civilization.
Currently this foundation is sought in communal ritual, associated from Early Minoan times onwards with feasting within the proto-palaces, the open-access “court-complexes.” This can harmonize well with my older view of the Early Minoan development of a Sacred Geography across the Cretan landscape and the later “palace” as akin to a great Medieval monastery (Bintliff 1977a—b). In sacred geographies settled and unsettled places in the landscape are given cultural meaning through ritual ceremonies or processions, or through associations with mythical and religious concepts, rather than through economic and political connections.
Some see the slow elaboration of settlements during the long Greek Neolithic era as preparing the way for the rise of “central places,” which become commoner by EBA times. Within larger settlements, the dynamics of “corporate communities” may increase intercommunity competition at the same time as a more intense internalized political structure, leading to “city-state” forms of community. Stimuli which “feed” the energy within such systems, such as the adoption of the plough and Secondary Products, Mediterranean polyculture (olive and wine cultivation) and bronze metallurgy, or the arrival of sailing-ships, continually enhanced the size and power of pioneer “city-states” emerging from the later Neolithic corporate communities. If a more communal and ritual emphasis is now prevalent for comprehending the ethos of the First and Second Palaces, then this longer-term viewpoint from Late Neolithic times, some 2500 years or so, becomes a significant but more complex developmental trend.
The suggested existence of more competitive or heterarchical social structures within the EM and First Palace corporate communities at the larger centers, could be seen as creating the potential for the observed tendency during the Second Palace era (especially after the Thera eruption), for a genuine dominant political elite to emerge. In the medium term, the suggestions of interstate warfare or absorption and a possible expansionism out of Knossos hint at varied local histories for each major region and for each political center of Crete, which then can include the short-term historical events which may have brought Mycenaean conquerors or allies to the island, achieving what finally looks like a partial conquest.
World History
