Aegeans in Israel: Minoan Frescoes at Tel Kabri

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More than 3,500 years ago, the Aegean civilizations that produced the gorgeous frescoes of Minoan Crete and Santorini impacted Canaanite civilization in what is now northern Israel. We are presently excavating the palace in western Galilee that makes the connection—at a site called Tel Kabri.

The link to Tel Kabri is confirmed by tiny fragments of Aegean-style wall and floor paintings and may also be indicated by beautifully cut blocks of stone known as orthostats that we excavated in 2011. These orthostats have architectural parallels to palaces on Minoan Crete.¹

But why would a Canaanite ruler want to decorate his palace with Aegean-style paintings or construct buildings using Aegean methods and techniques as reflected in the orthostats?

Passion for lavishly painted palaces was commonplace in the eastern Mediterranean during the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1750–1550 B.C.), the floruit of the Aegean civilizations. We know that the king of Ugarit, on the Mediterranean coast in northern Syria, wrote to King Zimri-Lim at Mari in 038 Mesopotamia in 1750 B.C. asking to see his famous painted palace,² presumably so he could incorporate some of its features in his own palace.

We also know that the inscribed tablets at Mari from this time mention all kinds of artists and craftspeople being sent from one king to another, from one city to another, including musicians, physicians, masons, weavers and singers.³ Later diplomatic texts and letters, from Amarna in Egypt and Hattusa in Turkey, show that such exchanges continued during the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.), when rulers in the Near East and Egypt loaned sculptors, physicians and “conjurers” to each other.⁴ But in the quest for elite art, did rulers also look to the west for inspiration, to the Aegean?

Or were these Minoan/Aegean artists and architects on their own—individual craftsmen not bound to a palace or ruler?

The best-known Minoan site is Knossos on Crete, famously excavated at the turn of the last century by Sir Arthur Evans. Its distinctive colorful frescoes are a part of every art history course.

While Minoan civilization flourished on Crete, the inhabitants of Akrotiri on the Cycladic island of Thera (modern Santorini) were producing their own frescoes. The Akrotiri frescoes were remarkably preserved because the site was buried by a volcanic eruption in the late 17th or 16th century B.C.

The fifth-century B.C. Greek historian Thucydides said that Crete ruled the seas through its navy.⁵ But did its culture, or that of the Cycladic islanders, extend beyond the Aegean?

Until a few decades ago, we had no solid evidence. But archaeologists are now uncovering hints of Aegean civilization in far-flung places like Egypt, Israel, and even Syria and Turkey. It is now clear that the Minoans, as well as the other inhabitants 039 of the Aegean world, had extensive contacts with Egypt and the Near East during much of the second millennium B.C.

Mentions of the Minoans are found in letters as far afield as Mari in Mesopotamia. We are even told of a pair of leather sandals made by the Minoans that was sent to Hammurabi, king of Babylon (and originator of the famous Law Code), but that the sandals were returned—for reasons unknown.⁶

Minoans are also depicted in Egypt, bringing gifts to the Egyptian pharaohs Thutmose III and Amenhotep II during the 15th and 14th centuries B.C. On the walls of tombs in the Valley of the Nobles across from the modern city of Luxor are paintings that vizier Rekhmire and other high-ranking Egyptians apparently ordered after various envoys from Crete arrived.⁷

At the Egyptian site of Tell el-Dab‘a, excavated by Austrian archaeologist Manfred Bietak, numerous fragments of wall plaster painted with Aegean-style frescoes were recovered from an ancient dump outside a palace complex probably dating to the reign of Thutmose III (1450 B.C.).⁸ Surprisingly, these frescoes depict bull leapers similar to those at Knossos, painted in front of a maze pattern (which of course evokes the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth^a).

Other fragments from Tell el-Dab‘a include lions, leopards and floral motifs. Clearly Aegean artists, or perhaps local artists trained by them, painted these wall frescoes; the techniques used had never been seen in Egypt before Bietak discovered them. Some Minoan vessels and more than 100 Aegean arrowheads (congealed together in two large clumps) were also found at Dab‘a, and literary texts may indicate that there were Minoan ships present in the harbor of the city during the time of Thutmose III.⁹ However, we have little else that indicates a substantial Aegean presence at the site; at most, a few itinerant Aegean artists, and perhaps a few transient warriors and sailors, lived there.

The frescoes at Dab‘a were discovered in the 042 1990s. Minoan, or Minoanizing, paintings were found much earlier in Turkey and Syria by two titled gentlemen, one British and the other French: Sir Leonard Woolley, excavating at Alalakh (Tell Atchana) in Turkey during the 1930s and 1940s,¹⁰ recovered fragments of wall paintings from the 17th–16th centuries B.C., depicting a bull’s head, a griffin, a possible double-axe and other features reminiscent of Minoan Crete.

Even earlier, in the 1920s,¹¹ Count du Mesnil du Buisson, excavating at Qatna in Syria, found plaster fragments with marbling in an Aegean style. Between 2000 and 2004, during renewed excavations at Qatna conducted by Peter Pfälzner of the University of Tübingen, more than 3,000 additional painted fragments were found in contexts dating to the 14th century B.C., but which were painted perhaps as early as the 16th–15th centuries B.C. These include depictions of dolphins, turtles and flora in Aegean style.¹²

The Aegean-style paintings at Tel Kabri in Israel were first discovered in 1989 by a team led by Aharon Kempinski of Tel Aviv University and Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier of Heidelberg University.¹³ The painted floor in Aegean style was uncovered in a ceremonial hall of the palace. It was decorated in a checkerboard motif, created by lines of red, the squares imitating a stone floor with a marbling effect in red, brown, yellow and grey. Pictures of plants such as irises and crocuses were featured within many of the squares. Similar painted floors are known from palaces in the Aegean.

Kempinski and Niemeier also found approximately 2,000 fragments of a Minoan- or Cycladic-style wall painting at Kabri. Most of the fragments are from a scene depicting a landscape of hills and sea. Other images from Kabri include possible ships, architectural features and perhaps a griffin. The entire composition is similar to the miniature fresco from the West House at Akrotiri on Santorini, which depicts complex scenes of coastal towns and maritime travel.¹⁴

We began our renewed excavations at Tel Kabri in 2005.^b By the 2009 and 2011 seasons, we were finding more fragments of painted wall plaster from a new scene and a fragment from another painted floor. Our fragments are also painted in an Aegean manner, using red, orange, yellow, brown, black, white and blue paint.¹⁵ The blue paint is unusual; this is the first time this color from this period has been found in Israel. We have it on six or seven pieces that fit together, and on dozens of other pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces missing. These fragments depict a figure, 043 more likely an animal than a person, in white with a black border, against a blue background. One parallel is from the flying fish fresco at Phylakopi on the Greek island of Melos, in which case our pieces would be from the fin of a flying fish. Another possible parallel is the griffin from Mycenae, in which case our pieces would be from the wing of a griffin. Other small pieces might be from the griffin’s front and hind legs.

In addition, late in the history of the palace at Kabri, toward the end of the Middle Bronze II period (c. 1600 B.C.), an extremely fancy and expensive building was constructed against the palace’s western wall. This new structure was lined with orthostat blocks. Each measures between 1.3 feet and 5 feet in length. With their square dowel holes,^c they look to be more at home in the Minoan palaces on Crete, such as at Phaistos and Malia.¹⁶

Combining the finds from the earlier excavations at Tel Kabri and our own, we have evidence for at least two wall paintings and two painted floors, all using Aegean-style painting, as well as architecture reflective of Aegean practices. But we have no pottery or anything else to indicate that Minoans or anyone else from the Aegean world were physically 044 present. The same is true of the sites of Qatna and Alalakh in Syria and Turkey. The only exception is Tell el-Dab‘a in Egypt, which may show evidence for Minoan warriors and sailors in addition to the itinerant Aegean artisans.

So, what’s going on? Who painted the walls and floors at these palaces in the east—and why?

Although we may never know the answer for sure, we can make some educated guesses. Since we know that in the Middle and Late Bronze Age, rulers in Egypt and the ancient Near East sent various artisans and craftspeople on short-term loan to each other, it may be that the Aegean rulers were part of a similar exchange network to the east. Or, it may be much simpler: Perhaps the artists were itinerant and independent, moving around the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean on their own. We have already mentioned the similarity of the paintings in the houses of Akrotiri on the island of Santorini to those we have in Israel at Kabri, possibly indicating the presence of Cycladic artisans commissioned by the Kabri rulership.

However, the situation may also have been much more complicated, especially since the paintings at Kabri, Alalakh, Dab‘a and Qatna are not contemporaneous but follow each other 064 in time. Also, those at Alalakh and Dab‘a look as if they are more likely to have been painted or influenced by Minoan artists from Knossos than by Cycladic artists from Santorini. Thus, each site may have had a different trend of transmission, the details of which we have yet to work out.

Still, even this would answer only half of the question; that is, it would tell us who made the paintings. The other half of the question is perhaps even more intriguing: Why did the rulers (or inhabitants) at Dab‘a in Egypt, Alalakh and Qatna in Turkey and Syria, and Kabri in Israel decide to decorate their palaces in an Aegean style?

We suspect that the rulers of the four sites with Aegean decoration that we have been considering—Kabri, Dab‘a, Alalakh and Qatna—wanted to show that they belonged to a “cosmopolitan” Mediterranean club, with contacts that most other kings did not have. The foreign paintings would have impressed visitors with the ruler’s importance and long-distance contacts across the Mediterranean, rather than simply heading overland to their old neighbors in Mesopotamia and Syria.¹⁷

It is also a puzzle as to why most of these wall paintings were torn down and discarded before the palaces themselves were destroyed. The only exception is Qatna, where paintings were apparently in place on the wall when the palace was destroyed.¹⁸ All of the others had been removed during remodeling phases while the palaces remained in use, rather than after they had been destroyed or abandoned. What happened? Why did the trend of Aegean-style painting come to Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean in the first place and then why did it come to an end so soon, never to be repeated?

Naturally, we are also wondering about the nature of the ruler at Tel Kabri. At the larger Canaanite site of Hazor, and at other sites in Egypt and Mesopotamia, including Dab‘a, Qatna and Alalakh, there is good evidence for the presence of a king. This evidence ranges from administrative and personal texts to pictorial and sculptural representations. That is not the case at Kabri; there is no evidence yet for the presence of an actual king—no trappings of royalty, no throne or even a throne room, no indication of who was actually in charge.

We live in hope. Perhaps more answers will come. Our excavations at Tel Kabri are continuing, as are those at Dab‘a, Qatna and Alalakh. This season, follow us online.

More than 3,500 years ago, the Aegean civilizations that produced the gorgeous frescoes of Minoan Crete and Santorini impacted Canaanite civilization in what is now northern Israel. We are presently excavating the palace in western Galilee that makes the connection—at a site called Tel Kabri. The link to Tel Kabri is confirmed by tiny fragments of Aegean-style wall and floor paintings and may also be indicated by beautifully cut blocks of stone known as orthostats that we excavated in 2011. These orthostats have architectural parallels to palaces on Minoan Crete.1 But why would a Canaanite ruler want to decorate […]