Evans’ interest in prehistoric inscribed clay tablets and gems sourced to Crete stimulated the first major palace excavations, and the tablet archives certainly form a key source of information regarding Aegean Bronze Age palatial life, but sadly not yet for the First and Second Palaces of Crete. The reason was appreciated from the first, that the Cretan tablets fall into two main groups, both deploying a syllabic script, Linear A and B, with a small number in another writing style (the pictographic).
Linear A archives (Figure 5.10) are in an unknown language and were produced by the Minoan culture. Very similar in signs and form are Linear B archives, but these are written in an early form of Greek, hence can be translated; they were produced by Mycenaean states on the Mainland, and for the Mycenaean administration of “Post-Palatial” LM2—3 Crete, based at the Palace of Knossos and at Khania. Nonetheless, the similar format of these records, and a wide overlap in signs (allowing names to be read), suggest strongly that
Santorini-Thera and the Destruction of Minoan Crete
Marinatos (1939) suggested that the Greek myth of Atlantis, where as reported by Plato a great island civilization vanished underwater in a giant catastrophe, was a memory of a great eruption on the Cycladic island of Thera in LM1. Minoan Crete, close neighbor to Thera, was devastated by tsunamis (tidal waves) and a poisonous ash-fall, whilst associated earth tremors might have caused violent fires in the palaces. Following this natural catastrophe, the Mainland Mycenaeans invaded Crete, either taking advantage of its political collapse, or being responsible themselves for the fire-destruction of the palaces.
Marinatos’ and subsequently Doumas’ excavations at the town ofAkrotiri on Thera (see Chapter 6), buried under the volcanic eruption, ultimately ran into a central contradiction in this scenario. The style of Minoan pottery imported and imitated on Thera at the time of its abandonment, very shortly before the eruption, is LM1A, whilst that in use on Crete at the time of the destruction of the Minoan palaces is LM1B; this should separate these disasters by at least 50 years, maybe much longer. A related problem is the date of the eruption, because cross-dating of artifacts from excavated levels in Minoan, Egyptian, and Levantine sequences, tied to dates inferred from Egyptian historical texts, indicates a lower date, ca. 1450 BC (some 100—200 years later), than the balance of so-called absolute dates from Aegean C14 samples. A recent series of high-resolution C14 dates from Crete and Santorini (Bruins et al. 2008) places the LM1A volcanic catastrophe around 1628 BC, perhaps bringing the chronology debate to an end. This creates a satisfactory timescale to allow later phases to unfold. A date in the sixteenth century BC for the main phase of LM1B now seems correct. Finally, new associations between LM1 and a seventeenth-century date in the Levant allow better synchronisms with Near Eastern chronologies.
However, Marinatos’ concept that the Thera explosion destabilized Minoan civilization has not disappeared. Although scientific study has shown that the claim that the ash-fall was thick enough on the soils of Crete to bring agricultural disaster cannot be sustained, the hypothesis of a giant tsunami devastating Minoan harbor-towns has been revived from the coastal town of Palaikastro (Eastern Crete) (Bruins et al. 2008). Here extensive traces have been claimed for a 9-meter high tidal wave, associated with LM1A artifacts, and fragments from the ash-fall. Although one of the excavators, MacGillivray, agrees that a significant period elapsed before the subsequent fall of the Cretan palaces, he believes that the immense psychological trauma occasioned by this and similar effects elsewhere in coastal Crete broke the cohesion of the palatial system and laid the island open to external conquest. However co-director Driessen thinks the sediments concerned are local flashflood deposits (pers. comm.) and prefers the idea that a widespread crisis occurred in the religious system sustaining Minoan society, since the cataclysmic natural disaster on Thera might have brought into question the ability of the Minoan population and especially their community leaders to negotiate prosperity with the gods (Driessen 2001).
Driessen and Macdonald (1997) have suggested that the consequent destabilization of the palatial political system paved the way for a Mycenaean coup at the end of LM1B. They speculate that the eruption traumatized parts of Minoan society, allowing one family to assume control of the Knossos palace, reflected in changed iconography and ground-plans (and the throne room?). Perhaps also in LM1B the new centralized power at Knossos attacked other palaces, a conflict in which the Mainland power of the new Mycenaean states became involved, ultimately precipitating the destruction of all but Knossos at the end of 1B and the assumption of control over most of the island by Mycenaeans, who were ruling from Knossos by LMII.
Figure 5.10 Clay archive records in Minoan Linear A script.
P M. Warren, The Making of the Past. The Aegean Civilizations. Ekdotiki Athenon SA, Athens 1975, 37. Heraklion Museum, Crete. Photo: Ekdotiki Athenon, Athens.
Regarding internal and external politics, so significant to our understanding of the Bronze Age civilizations of the contemporary Near East, where such letters were preserved on clay tablets or even stone.
In terms of the traditional “royal dynastic palace” model for Minoan Crete, these elaborate and widespread recording systems seem appropriate for a centralized bureaucracy keeping a close control over the island out of the major palatial centers. For the revisionary “court-complex, heterarchic” model, it is argued that these records were primarily concerned with the semi-communal organization of products necessary for the all-important religious rituals and feasts held at the numerous “palatial” foci across the island. In addition, since they occur in non-palace, private contexts, they could also have monitored the production and marketing of surpluses from the agricultural estates of the wealthier landowners and the marketing of local private workshops for ceramics, metal, and stone vessels.
The untranslated A series is broadly comparable to B. Moreover, the numerical system in Linear A is also understood, and occasional pictograms provide rare detail of what is being counted. It is thus inferred that the Minoan, as the Mycenaean, tablets existed to document the income and outgoings of the palaces’ central administration, in aspects such as agricultural and craft production, and the provision of ritual. Although the specific script is not derivable from earlier, Near Eastern state systems, the idea of developing such clay archives was clearly adopted from Near Eastern administrative practices, from whence also some aspects of mature palatial architecture are likely to have been copied.
Apart from archive tablets, inscribed clay discs (roundels) and nodules were attached to objects or containers, inscriptions were painted on pots, and most tantalizingly, clay sealings occur, whose folds betray that they once wrapped parchment letters. Nearly all these stamped and inscribed objects appear to be associated with controlling the storage and movement of products, probably both public and private, and their occurrence in the Aegean islands under strong Minoan influence has variously been seen as proof of resident merchants or colonial officials. The lost letters surely account for the absence in both Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations of that correspondence
World History
