Imagining the Minoans

019

Love Crete or not—and I have yet to meet anyone who has spent much time there and doesn’t—it is hard to think of anywhere else on earth where so many firsts and mosts are crammed into a space so small. At scarcely more than 3,000 square miles in area, it comes only fifth in order of size among the islands of the Mediterranean. But this patch of land, most of it rock, was home, something like 5,000 years ago, to the first society in Europe developed enough to be regarded as a distinctive civilization. We call the pre-Greek people who lived here Minoans, without knowing what they called themselves.

Most visitors, upon arriving in Crete, head directly for Knossos, indisputably one of the greatest prehistoric sites in the world. Sometime after 2000 B.C., the Minoans built a great palace at Knossos (as they did at Phaistos, Mallia and Zakros), which lasted approximately three centuries, when it was leveled by a devastating earthquake. It was Sir Arthur Evans, the first man to carry out extensive excavations in Crete, who unearthed the palace’s remains.

Knossos is where the labyrinth, which has exercised the western imagination for millennia, is said to have been located, though the real nature of the legendary maze is still disputed. Some maintain that it derives from the Minoan habit of agglutinative building—adding rooms to already existing rooms till their houses and palaces came to resemble mazes. In that case, perhaps the palace of Knossos, which in its heyday had more than a thousand rooms on five floors, was itself the labyrinth.

The theory I like most, but believe least, is that the labyrinth refers to Cretan dancing patterns. At the close of Book 18 of the Iliad, Homer describes a Cretan folk dance whose weaving motions make maze-like patterns that form and dissolve. Here is the passage in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation:

A dancing floor as well,

he fashioned, like that one in royal Knossos

Daedalus made for the Princess Ariadne …

Trained and adept they circled there with ease

The way a potter sitting at his wheel

Will give it a practiced whirl between his palms

To see it run; or else, again, in lines

As though in ranks, they moved on one another:

Magical dancing!

Independently of the theories, the ancient myths have remained. At the heart of the palace of Knossos was the labyrinth, and at the heart of the labyrinth was the monstrous Minotaur. Here the hero Theseus came; here the king’s daughter Ariadne fell in love with him and gave him the ball of twine that helped him to find his way out after slaying the monster; here Daedalus the master-artificer made the wings for himself and his son Icarus, so that they could escape from the maze. Icarus, it will be remembered, flew too near to the sun. The wax that bound his feathers melted, and he plunged into the sea.

The excavation of Knossos has itself passed into the zone of myth—at least, it has assumed that blend of fact and legend somehow characteristically Cretan. Because Arthur Evans was extremely shortsighted, if he held things very close to his eyes he could see them in the most amazing detail. This attribute enabled Evans to make out with phenomenal exactitude the hieroglyphics on the bead-seals—an earlier form of signet ring—that he came across in various parts of the eastern Mediterranean in the late 1800s. The Athenian antiquities 020dealers told him that most of these bead-seals came from Crete. And in Crete he found still more of them. He could not decipher the signs, but he concluded that on this island there had once existed a highly developed civilization, the remains of which still lay under the ground.

In March 1899 he recruited Cretan workmen and began digging into the mound of Kephala at Knossos. He realized in a matter of days that he was in the process of uncovering the remains of a palace complex vast in its extent, showing evidence of engineering and architectural techniques so advanced that they could only have belonged to a highly developed society. It was still commonly believed at the time that European civilization began with the Greeks, sometime around 700 B.C. Evans realized he was being given the opportunity to extend Europe’s knowledge of its own past by something like 1,500 years.

Amazing things were unearthed at Knossos in these last months of the 19th century. An early find was the cup-bearer fresco, discovered in two pieces, the first representation ever brought to light of a young man of the Cretan Bronze Age, the society that Evans was to call Minoan, after the legendary King Minos. Day by day the ground plan of the palace was uncovered: porticos, bathhouses, courtyards, stairways, the throne room with the supposed throne of Minos. But perhaps the most remarkable find of all was a fresco showing a young man somersaulting, with incredible hardihood and acrobatic skill, over the back of a charging bull, and a girl standing with arms outstretched as if to catch him. In the months that followed, Evans and his team encountered this theme of bull-vaulting again and again. The meaning still eludes us—at least, it is still argued about. Popular sport? Gladiatorial contest? Religious practice based on the worship of the bull? Was one of these bull-leapers the hero Theseus?

When my wife and I visit, Knossos, to our dismay, is swarming with visitors, including large groups brought by touring coaches, conducted by cheerfully positive guides who give out as established fact what must surely, after so long and on such sketchy evidence, be matters of speculation. “This was the queen’s bedchamber, and this was her dressing-room, where the ladies-in-waiting attended on her …”

We clamber to identify the rooms, understand the layout of this vast place, more like a town than a single building, where monarchs and priests and artisans and slaves lived 4,000 years ago. There is a longish line of people waiting to view the celebrated throne room. After ten minutes or so of gradual forward movement, we reach the cage-like bars that separate the anteroom from the throne room. We peer through the bars, straining to make out details in the dim interior: the pale, streaky-looking gypsum throne of Minos on the right, still 021standing on the spot where it was found, flanked by copies of the original frescoes of crouching griffins; the sunken bath, perhaps for ritual cleansing (Minos, it seems, was both priest and king); a sort of recess beyond, perhaps serving as a shrine, or perhaps … But now sounds the voice of the latter-day priestess, guardian of the sacred precinct, who is keeping an eye on things from her bench in the anteroom. “Move along, please! Don’t stay too long at the viewing point!”

We are allowed approximately 30 seconds. Shuffling forward again, we get trapped in a corner, surrounded by seemingly enormous Scandinavians, in our ears the loud and confident voices of various guides. Not panic, perhaps, but feelings of oppression certainly. We are in a modern version of 022the Knossos labyrinth. How can we get out?

Very difficult, in such a crowd, to exercise the powers of imagination and intuition needed to feel the wonder of this place, get a sense of the remote society that once flourished here. We all get in one another’s way with our exclamations, our sunhats, our ungainly scramblings. Just at certain times, early in the morning perhaps, or during the hot middle hours of the day when the coach excursions have their scheduled lunchtime, the extraordinary nature of the place comes over one in a wave. The storerooms with their great earthenware jars for oil and grain; the workshops where the jewelers and smiths and potters made objects never since surpassed for the quality of their workmanship and design; the royal quarters with their spacious, light-filled apartments; the vivid frescoes depicting people in their daily lives and all manner of birds, animals and flowers—dolphins, partridges, octopuses, lilies. Any of these things, even the smallest detail, can become a focal point for wonder, and one begins to understand what the scholar John Pendlebury, who knew more about the Palace of Minos than just about anyone else, meant when he wrote thus of its final destruction, probably due to a combination of earthquake and the onslaught of invaders: “With that wild spring day at the beginning of the 14th century B.C. something went out of the world which the world will never see again; something grotesque perhaps, something fantastic and cruel, but also something very lovely.”

One thing that makes Knossos different from all other Minoan sites on Crete is the reconstruction work that Sir Arthur Evans did, mainly in the course of the 1920s. Wanting to protect the recently exposed remains from the weather, and to make the layout of the palace more easily understood by the visitor, Evans made use of bricks, metal girders and cement to rebuild the palace’s columns and door-lintels.

This use of modern materials caused heated arguments at a time when there was a strong romantic feeling about ancient remains. The French press called Evans “the builder of ruins.” Many people since 023then have felt that he went too far. But he undoubtedly saved some important buildings from collapse, among them the grand staircase of the palace, regarded as unique in architectural history, with five flights of stairs still preserved in situ.

About 3 miles northwest of Knossos is Heraklion, which has been Crete’s official capital since 1971. Whatever reservations one may have about the attractiveness of modern Heraklion, the city’s archaeological museum is one of the finest to be found anywhere, its collection of Minoan artifacts unsurpassed. Here, beautifully displayed in room after room, are the objects that give physical expression to the spirit of ancient Crete, and trace the way that spirit developed and changed—from its beginnings in the Neolithic Period 10,000 years ago, to the high culture of the so-called Old Palace period between about 2000 and 1700 B.C. (when those monumental palaces arose in Knossos, Phaistos and Zakros), and on to the time of the Mycenaean invasion and Minoan Crete’s subsequent decline.

Among a huge variety of objects from all over Crete—Knossos, Mallia, Phaistos, Tylissos, Zakros, Ayia Triadha, Gournia—are some that have become semi-legendary. Here is the Phaistos Disk, exquisite and baffling, printed on fresh clay something like 3,500 years ago. Here is the sarcophagus found in a tomb in the precincts of the palace at Ayia Triadha, its surface completely covered with painted plaster, depicting scenes of ritual worship and the cult of the dead. Once again we are in the toils of speculation: The jar the priestess is emptying—does it contain blood? What is the significance of the black bird that sits between two double axes, or the model ship that one man is holding out to another? Such images remind us that for all the patience we can muster and all the resources for research at our disposal, a world of values and beliefs forever lies beyond the reach of our understanding.

From the palace at Knossos are the two faience figures of snake goddesses dating to around 1600 B.C., one slightly taller than the other, both with prominent, naked breasts and elaborate skirts and coiled snakes wreathed round arms and body—the smaller figure also holds up rampant snakes, one in each hand. The snake was a principal object of worship among Minoans, for whom it represented eternity, immortality and reincarnation. The goddesses were fashioned for small household shrines and worshiped as domestic divinities, guardians of the house.

For many, the crowning glory of the museum is the room containing the pottery known as Kamares ware, which dates back to the Old Palace period. This beautiful pottery owes its name to the Kamares cave in the eastern zone of Psiloritis, where a great quantity of it was discovered. The discovery is yet another scene for the imagination to work on: A group of Italian archaeologists, in the 1890s, exploring caves in this wild and rugged terrain, stumble upon a treasure trove of painted pottery, some fragmented, some virtually whole, bowls, cups, jugs, amphoras, all of unique quality. This at a time when almost nothing was known about the Minoans (they had not even been named yet), and the excavation of Knossos had not yet properly begun. I have never read an account of this discovery, but I like to imagine that the magnitude of it came to the Italians only gradually and with growing delight as they moved here and there in the recesses of a cavern, the light from their lamps falling on these heaps of pots that had rested so long unseen and unappreciated.

Now we know that most of this pottery was fashioned in the palace workshops of Knossos and Phaistos. They superbly illustrate the Minoan feeling for dynamic movement based on interweaving patterns. The tentacles of an octopus, the shoots and tendrils of a plant, the fronds of a palm tree mingle with abstract curvilinear designs, spiral and coil and turn in on themselves, in a way that recalls yet again the stories of the labyrinth.

So we wander from room to room in this splendid museum, tracing the development of a culture, the search for form, which is a search also for meaning, through all the meanderings of taste and fashion. There is a strong 024religious feeling expressed here, and a joy in natural forms and in the pleasures of the senses. There is no depiction of war. The Minoan people, throughout most of their history, enjoyed a freedom from conquerors. The only way to attack Crete was by sea, and for that a strong navy was needed; but only the Cretans possessed that kind of a fleet. The Minoan kingdom was a thalassocracy, a sovereignty of the sea. They traded far and wide, they established colonies, they cleared the sea-routes of pirates; but they fought no battles on their own soil, until the final ones that put an end to them.

A combination of circumstances brought them down. Between 1500 and 1450 B.C. Crete suffered a succession of earthquakes that damaged its centers of power, weakening the island so that it became vulnerable to invasion just at the time when the power of Mycenae on the Greek mainland was expanding. The Mycenaeans were the first to occupy the island. When their day was over, it was the turn of Greek tribes from the north, with their sky-god and their iron weapons. It was the beginning of a dark age in the eastern Mediterranean that was to last for some centuries. The palaces were never rebuilt and never again inhabited, the invaders regarding them as uncanny, haunted places. Writing disappeared completely. What art was produced was crude and botched.

In the objects on display in the last rooms on the museum’s ground floor one feels this crushing of the spirit as an almost palpable presence, like an affliction, as if the collective mind of this gifted people had been stricken by the cultural equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease. There is an increasing number of large, crudely molded terracotta figures of goddesses with rounded lumps for breasts and blind, coarsened faces. Their arms are raised in the conventional posture of prayer. They seem like creatures in mourning for their own ruin and for their ruined world, raising their arms in terrible mute grief.

It isn’t only in the Heraklion museum, however, or at a place like Knossos where once can feel the sense of Crete’s continuity with its own distant past. Chania, generally held to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in Europe, located on the island’s less-frequented western coast, has unspoiled villages, virtually deserted coves and the constant, spectacular presence of the White Mountains, the most imposing range on the island, with a score of peaks that rise to around 8,000 feet, capped with snow from December to June. Standing on Chania’s old harbor front on a summer evening, facing toward the open sea, with the sun sinking beyond the barren headlands to the west, you are looking at what the earliest inhabitants of this very ancient city looked at, the same tints of bronze and fire-red and gold that shift across the sheltered water, the same tremulous and fugitive reflections, the same gathering softness in the sky as the light fades. Crete is a harsh land in some ways, unyielding, but its nighttime skies in summer are marked by this indigo softness.

Tastes differ, in places as in most other things. Often enough it is what the place stands for as much as what it is in itself that draws our regard or rouses our affection. To leave them always with regret is the gift some places—not so many—make us. It’s the gift life itself makes us, if we are lucky.

This essay is adapted from Barry Unsworth’s new book Crete, which documents the author’s extensive travels around the largest of the Greek islands. Part history, part meditation on place, Crete is available now in bookstores. (Copyright © 2004 Barry Unsworth. Published by National Geographic Books.)

Love Crete or not—and I have yet to meet anyone who has spent much time there and doesn’t—it is hard to think of anywhere else on earth where so many firsts and mosts are crammed into a space so small. At scarcely more than 3,000 square miles in area, it comes only fifth in order of size among the islands of the Mediterranean. But this patch of land, most of it rock, was home, something like 5,000 years ago, to the first society in Europe developed enough to be regarded as a distinctive civilization. We call the pre-Greek people […]