Minoan civilization
The Minoan Civilisation was a pre-Hellenic Bronze Age civilization which arose on Crete, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. The Minoan culture flourished from approximately 2700 to 1450 BC when it is superceded by the Mycenaean culture on the island. The Minoans were one of the mediterranean civilizations that flourished during the Bronze Age. These civilizations had much contact with each other, sometimes making it difficult to judge the extent to which the Minoans influenced, or were influenced by, their neighbors.
Minoan Palaces are the best known building types to have been excavated on the island. They are monumental buildings serving administrative purposes as evidenced by the large archives unearthed by archaeologists. Each of the palaces excavated to date have their own unique features, but they also share features which set them apart from other structures. The palaces were often multi-storied with interior and exterior staircases, light wells, massive columns, storage magazines and courtyards.
The term "Minoan" was coined by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans taking the name of the mythic "king" Minos. Minos was associated in myth with the labyrinth, which Evans identified as the site at Knossos. It is not known whether "Minos" was a personal name or a title. What the Minoans called themselves is unknown, although the Egyptian place name "Keftiu" and the Semitic "Kaftor" or "Caphtor" and "Kaptara" in the Mari archives apparently refers to the island of Crete. The Greek: Μινωίτες was coined after Evans'use of the term Minoan for the civilisation. In the Odyssey which was composed after the destruction of the minoan civilisation, Homer calls the natives of Crete Eteocretans meaning, aboriginal Cretans.
Society and culture
The Minoans were primarily a mercantile people engaged in overseas trade. Their culture, from ca 1700 BC onward, shows a high degree of organization.
Many historians and archaeologists believe that the Minoans were involved in the Bronze Age's important tin trade: tin, alloyed with copper apparently from Cyprus, was used to make bronze. The decline of Minoan civilization and the decline in use of bronze tools in favor of superior iron ones seem to be correlated.
The Minoan trade in saffron, which originated in the Aegean basin as a natural chromosome mutation, has left fewer material remains: a fresco of saffron-gatherers at Santorini is well-known. This inherited trade pre-dated Minoan civilization: a sense of its rewards may be gained by comparing its value to frankincense, or later, to pepper. Archaeologists tend to emphasize the more durable items of trade: ceramics, copper, and tin, and dramatic luxury finds of gold and silver.
Objects of Minoan manufacture suggest there was a network of trade with mainland Greece, Cyprus, Syria, Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and westward as far as the coast of Spain.
Minoan men wore loincloths and kilts. Women wore robes that were open to the navel, leaving their breasts exposed, and had short sleeves and layered flounced skirts. Women also had the option of wearing a strapless fitted bodice, the first fitted garments known in history. The patterns on clothes emphasized symmetrical geometric designs.
The statues of priestesses in Minoan culture and frescoes showing men and women participating in the same sports such as bull-leaping, lead some archaeologists to believe that men and women held equal social status. Inheritance is thought to have been matrilineal. Minoan religion was goddess worship and women are represented as those officiating at religious ceremonies. The frescos include many depictions of people, with the genders distinguished by colour: the men's skin is reddish-brown, the women's white.
Language and writing
Knowledge of the spoken and written language of the Minoans is scant, despite the number of records found. Sometimes the Minoan language is referred to as Eteocretan, but this presents confusion between the language written in Linear A scripts and the language written in a Euboean-derived alphabet only after the Greek Dark Ages. While Eteocretan language is suspected to be a descendant of Minoan, there is no substantial evidence for this. It also is unknown whether the language written in Cretan hieroglyphs is Minoan. It is undeciphered and its phonetic values are unknown.
Approximately 3,000 tablets bearing writing have been discovered so far, many apparently being inventories of goods or resources and others inscriptions on religious objects associated with cult. Because most of these inscriptions are concise economic records rather than dedicatory inscriptions, the translation of Minoan remains a challenge. The hieroglyphs came into use from MMI and were in parallel use with the emerging Linear A from the eighteenth century BC and disappeared at some point during the seventeenth century BC.
In the Mycenean period, Linear A was replaced by Linear B, recording a very archaic version of the Greek language. Linear B was successfully deciphered by Michael Ventris in the 1950s, but the earlier scripts remain a mystery. Unless Eteocretan truly is its descendant, it is perhaps during the Greek Dark Ages, a time of economic and socio-political collapse, that the Minoan language became extinct.
Art
The great collection of Minoan art is in the museum at Heraklion, near Knossos on the north shore of Crete. Minoan art, with other remains of material culture, especially the sequence of ceramic styles, has allowed archaeologists to define the three phases of Minoan culture discussed above.
Since wood and textiles have vanished through decomposition, the most important surviving examples of Minoan art are Minoan pottery, the palace architecture with its frescos that include landscapes, stone carvings, and intricately carved seal stones.
In the Early Minoan period ceramics were characterised by linear patterns of spirals, triangles, curved lines, crosses, fishbone motifs, and such. In the Middle Minoan period naturalistic designs such as fish, squid, birds, and lilies were common. In the Late Minoan period, flowers and animals were still the most characteristic, but the variability had increased. The palace style of the region around Knossos is characterised by a strong geometric simplification of naturalistic shapes and monochromatic paintings. Very noteworthy are the similarities between Late Minoan and Mycenaean art.
Religion
The Minoans worshiped goddesses. Although there is some evidence of male gods, depictions of Minoan goddesses vastly outnumber depictions of anything that could be considered a Minoan god. While some of these depictions of women are believed to be images of worshipers and priestesses officiating at religious ceremonies, as opposed to the deity herself, there still seem to be several goddesses including a Mother Goddess of fertility, a Mistress of the Animals, a protectress of cities, the household, the harvest, and the underworld, and more. Some have argued that these are all aspects of a single goddess. They are often represented by serpents, birds, poppies, and a somewhat vague shape of an animal upon the head. Some suggest the goddess was linked to the "Earthshaker", a male represented by the bull and the sun, who would die each autumn and be reborn each spring. Though the notorious bull-headed Minotaur is a purely Greek depiction, seals and seal-impressions reveal bird-headed or masked deities.
"To what extent one can and must differentiate between Minoan and Mycenaean religion is a question which has not yet found a conclusive answer"
Minoan religion has not been transmitted in its own language, and the uses literate Greeks later made of surviving Cretan mythemes, after centuries of purely oral transmission, have transformed the meager sources: consider the Athenian point-of-view of the Theseus legend. A few Cretan names are preserved in Greek mythology, but there is no way to connect a name with an existing Minoan icon, such as the familiar serpent-goddess. Retrieval of metal and clay votive figures— double axes, miniature vessels, models of artifacts, animals, human figures—has identified sites of cult: here were numerous small shrines in Minoan Crete, and mountain peaks and very numerous sacred caves—over 300 have been explored—were the centers for some cult, but temples as the Greeks developed them were unknown. Within the palace complex, no central rooms devoted to cult have been recognized, other than the center court where youths of both sexes would practice the bull-leaping ritual. It is notable that there are no Minoan frescoes that depict any deities.
Minoan sacred symbols include the bull and its horns of consecration, the labrys , the pillar, the serpent, the sun-disk, and the tree.
Warfare and The Minoan Peace
Though the vision created by Sir Arthur Evans of a pax Minoica, a "Minoan peace", has been criticised in recent years, it is generally assumed there was little internal armed conflict in Minoan Crete itself, until the following Mycenaean period. As with much of Minoan Crete, however, it is hard to draw any obvious conclusions from the evidence. However, new excavations keep sustaining interests and documenting the impact around the Aegean.
Many argue that there is little evidence for ancient Minoan fortifications. But as S. Alexiou has pointed out, a number of sites, especially Early and Middle Minoan sites such as Aghia Photia, are built on hilltops or are otherwise fortified. As Lucia Nixon said, "...we may have been over-influenced by the lack of what we might think of as solid fortifications to assess the archaeological evidence properly. As in so many other instances, we may not have been looking for evidence in the right places, and therefore we may not end with a correct assessment of the Minoans and their ability to avoid war.".
Chester Starr points out in "Minoan Flower Lovers" that Shang China and the Maya both had unfortified centers and yet still engaged in frontier struggles, so that itself cannot be enough to definitively show the Minoans were a peaceful civilization unparalleled in history.
In 1998, however, when Minoan archaeologists met in a conference in Belgium to discuss the possibility that the idea of Pax Minoica was outdated, the evidence for Minoan war proved to be scanty.
Archaeologist Jan Driessen, for example, said the Minoans frequently show ‘weapons’ in their art, but only in ritual contexts, and that The construction of fortified sites is often assumed to reflect a threat of warfare, but such fortified centers were multifunctional they were also often the embodiment or material expression of the central places of the territories at the same time as being monuments glorifying and merging leading power.
On the other hand, Stella Chryssoulaki's work on the small outposts or 'guard-houses' in the east of the island represent possible elements of a defensive system. Claims that they produced no weapons are erroneous type A Minoan swords were the finest in all of the Aegean.
Regarding Minoan weapons, however, archaeologist Keith Branigan notes that 95% of so-called Minoan weapons possessed hafting that would have prevented their use as weapons. However more recent experimental testing of accurate replicas has shown this to be incorrect as these weapons were capable of cutting flesh down to the bone without any damage to the weapons themselves. Archaeologist Paul Rehak maintains that Minoan figure-eight shields could not have been used for fighting or even hunting, since they were too cumbersome. And archaeologist Jan Driessen says the Minoans frequently show ‘weapons’ in their art, but only in ritual contexts. Finally, archaeologist Cheryl Floyd concludes that Minoan weapons were merely tools used for mundane tasks such as meat-processing. Although this interpretation must remain highly questionable as there are no parallels of one-meter-long swords and large spearheads being used as culinary devices in the historic or ethnographic record.
About Minoan warfare in general, Branigan concludes that The quantity of weaponry, the impressive fortifications, and the aggressive looking long-boats all suggested an era of intensified hostilities. But on closer inspection there are grounds for thinking that all three key elements are bound up as much with status statements, display, and fashion as with aggression. Warfare such as there was in the southern Aegean EBA early Bronze Age was either personalized and perhaps ritualized or small-scale, intermittent and essentially an economic activity. Archaeologist Krzyszkowska concurs: The stark fact is that for the prehistoric Aegean we have no sic direct evidence for war and warfare per se sic.
Furthermore, no evidence exists for a Minoan army, or for Minoan domination of peoples outside Crete. Few signs of warfare appear in Minoan art. Although a few archaeologists see war scenes in a few pieces of Minoan art, others interpret even these scenes as festivals, sacred dance, or sports events. Although armed warriors are depicted being stabbed in the throat with swords, violence may occur in the context of ritual or blood sport.
Although on the Mainland of Greece at the time of the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, there is little evidence for major fortifications among the Mycenaeans there (the famous citadels post-date the destruction of almost all Neopalatial Cretan sites), the constant warmongering of other contemporaries of the ancient Minoans – the Egyptians and Hittites, for example – is well documented.
Possibility of human sacrifice
Evidence that suggest the Minoans may have performed human sacrifice has been found at three sites: (1) Anemospilia, in a MMII building near Mt. Juktas, interpreted as a temple, (2) an EMII sanctuary complex at Fournou Korifi in south central Crete, and (3) Knossos, in an LMIB building known as the "North House."
The temple at Anemospilia was destroyed by earthquake in the MMII period. The building seems to be a tripartite shrine, and terracotta feet and some carbonized wood were interpreted by the excavators as the remains of a cult statue. Four human skeletons were found in its ruins one, belonging to a young man, was found in an unusually contracted position on a raised platform, suggesting that he had been trussed up for sacrifice, much like the bull in the sacrifice scene on the Mycenaean-era Agia Triadha sarcophagus. A bronze dagger was among his bones, and the discoloration of the bones on one side of his body suggests he died of blood loss. The bronze blade was fifteen inches long and had images of a boar on each side. The bones were on a raised platform at the center of the middle room, next to a pillar with a trough at its base.
The positions of the other three skeletons suggest that an earthquake caught them by surprise—the skeleton of a twenty-eight year old woman was spread-eagled on the ground in the same room as the sacrificed male. Next to the sacrificial platform was the skeleton of a man in his late thirties, with broken legs. His arms were raised, as if to protect himself from falling debris, which suggests that his legs were broken by the collapse of the building in the earthquake. In the front hall of the building was the fourth skeleton, too poorly preserved to allow determination of age or gender. Nearby 105 fragments of a clay vase were discovered, scattered in a pattern that suggests it had been dropped by the person in the front hall when s/he was struck by debris from the collapsing building. The jar had apparently contained bull's blood.
Unfortunately, the excavators of this site have not published an official excavation report the site is mainly known through a 1981 article in National Geographic.
Not all agree that this was human sacrifice. Nanno Marinatos says the man supposedly sacrificed actually died in the earthquake that hit at the time he died. She notes that this earthquake destroyed the building, and also killed the two Minoans who supposedly sacrificed him. She also argues that the building was not a temple and that the evidence for sacrifice is far from … conclusive." Dennis Hughes concurs and also argues that the platform where the man lay was not necessarily an altar, and the blade was probably a spearhead that may not have been placed on the young man, but could have fallen during the earthquake from shelves or an upper floor.
At the sanctuary-complex of Fournou Korifi, fragments of a human skull were found in the same room as a small hearth, cooking-hole, and cooking-equipment. This skull has been interpreted as the remains of a sacrificed victim.
In the "North House" at Knossos, the bones of at least four children were found which bore signs that "they were butchered in the same way the Minoans slaughtered their sheep and goats, suggesting that they had been sacrificed and eaten. The senior Cretan archaeologist Nicolas Platon was so horrified at this suggestion that he insisted the bones must be those of apes, not humans."
The bones, found by Peter Warren, date to Late Minoan IB (1580-1490), before the Myceneans arrived (1320-1200) according to Paul Rehak and John G. Younger. Dennis Hughes and Rodney Castleden argue that these bones were deposited as a secondary burial. Secondary burial is the not-uncommon practice of burying the dead twice: immediately following death, and then again after the flesh is gone from the skeleton. The main weakness of this argument is that it does not explain the type of cuts and knife marks upon the bones.
Architecture
The Minoan cities were connected with stone-paved roads, formed from blocks cut with bronze saws. Streets were drained and water and sewer facilities were available to the upper class, through clay pipes.
Minoan buildings often had flat tiled roofs plaster, wood, or flagstone floors, and stood two to three stories high. Typically the lower walls were constructed of stone and rubble, and the upper walls of mudbrick. Ceiling timbers held up the roofs.
Palaces
The first palaces were constructed at the end of the Early Minoan period in the third millennium BC (Malia). While it was formerly believed that the foundation of the first palaces was synchronous and dated to the Middle Minoan at around 2000 BC (the date of the first palace at Knossos), scholars now think that palaces were built over a longer period of time in different locations, in response to local developments. The main older palaces are Knossos, Malia, and Phaistos.
The palaces fulfilled a plethora of functions: they served as centres of government, administrative offices, shrines, workshops, and storage spaces. These distinctions might have seemed artificial to Minoans.
The use of the term palace for the older palaces, meaning a dynastic residence and seat of power, has recently come under criticism, and the term court building has been proposed instead. However, the original term is probably too well entrenched to be replaced. Architectural features such as ashlar masonry, orthostats, columns, open courts, staircases, and the presence of diverse basins have been used to define palatial architecture.
Often the conventions of better-known, younger palaces have been used to reconstruct older ones, but this practice may be obscuring fundamental functional differences. Most older palaces had only one story and no representative facades. They were U-shaped, with a big central court, and generally were smaller than later palaces. Late palaces are characterised by multi-storey buildings. The west facades had sandstone ashlar masonry. Knossos is the best-known example. See Knossos.
Columns
One of the most notable contributions of Minoans to architecture is their unique column, which was wider at the top than the bottom. It is called an inverted column because most Greek columns are wider at the bottom, creating an illusion of greater height. The columns were also made of wood as opposed to stone, and were generally painted red. They were mounted on a simple stone base and were topped with a pillow-like, round piece as a capital.
Theories of Minoan demise
Thera is the largest island of Santorini, a collapsed caldera about 100 km distant from Crete. The Thera eruption has been identified by ash fallout in eastern Crete, and in cores from the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean seafloors. The cataclysmic eruption of Thera led to the volcano's collapse into a submarine caldera, causing tsunamis which may have damaged naval installations and settlements near the coasts. The level of impact of the Thera eruption on the Minoan civilization is debated.
Claims were made that the ash falling on the eastern half of Crete may have choked off plant life, causing starvation. It was alleged that 7-11 cm of ash fell on Kato Zakro, while 0.5 cm fell on Knossos. However, when field examinations were carried out, this theory was dropped, as no more than 5 mm had fallen anywhere in Crete. Earlier historians and archaeologists appear to have been deceived by the depth of pumice found on the sea floor. It has now been established that the pumice oozed from a lateral crack in the volcano below sea level.
