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The Minoans - 2600-1450 BC

The traditional center of Crete was Knossos, the seat of Minos aud capital of his seaempire, the scene of the famous Labyrinth and of the works of Daedalos. Crete, or Candia (called in the most ancient times Id^a, from Mount Ida, afterward Creta, whence the Turkish name Kirid), one of the most important islands of Greece, is situated in the Mediterranean, 81 miles from the southern extremity of the Morea, and 230 from the African coast; is 160 miles long, 7 to 35 broad, and contains 3,326 square miles. A high chain of mountains covered with forests runs through the whole length of the island, in two ranges. On the northern side it declines moderately to a fertile coast, provided with good harbors; on the south side, steeply to a rocky shore, with few roadsteads, and reaches its greatest height in the lofty Psiloriti (the ancient Ida), 8,060 feet high, and always covered with snow.

The civilization that developed in Crete is called Minoan after the mythical King Minos. A ruler of Crete, Minos was said to have been the son of Zeus and Europa, and a brother of Rhadamanthus. During his lifetime he was celebrated as a wise lawgiver and a strict lover of justice, and after his death he was made with AEacus and Rhadamanthus, one of the judges of the infernal world. All three sat at the entrance to the kingdom of shades. Minos, as the chief justice, delivered the sentence.

Another Minos was a grandson of the preceding, son of Lycastus, son of the elder Minos and of Ida. Homer and Ilesiod, however, know of only one Minos, of whom they give nearly the same accounts as subsequent traditions do of the later Minos. This second Minos was the husband of Pasiphae, whose unnatural passion gave birth to the Minotaur. He was king of Crete, but is not represented as having succeeded to the kingdom, but by one tradition as having acquired it through the favor of the gods, and by another aa having conquered it over his brother Sarpedon. He also is said to have been a Cretan lawgiver, and was famed for his wisdom and justice, although later accounts make him out to have been a cruel tyrant.

He is said to have made war upon the Athenians to revenge the death of his son Androgeos, who was killed at the festival of the Panathenrea by the candidates whom he had defeated at the games, according to others by AEgeus himself, the king of Athens. Minos having defeated the Athenians, exacted from them every year (other accounts say every nine years) a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens, who were devoured by the Minotaur. Theseus delivered the Athenians from the burden of this tribute.

Fable made the Minotaur the son of Pasiphae and a bull, and ascribes to him the body of a man with the head of a bull, or the head of a man and the body of a bull. He ate human flesh, on which account Minos confined him in the labyrinth built by Daedalus, and at first exposed to him criminals, but afterwards the youths and maidens yearly sent from Athens as a tribute, until at length Theseus, who was comprehended among the youths, and was instructed and armed by Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, killed him, and freed the Athenians from this tribute.

Minos was the first person known by tradition as having established a navy. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into most of which he sent the first colonies, expelling the Carians and appointing his own sons governors; and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use. For in early times the Hellenes and the barbarians of the coast and islands, as communication by sea became more common, were tempted to turn pirates, under the conduct of their most powerful men; the motives being to serve their own cupidity and to support the needy. They would fall upon a town unprotected by walls, and consisting of a mere collection of villages, and would plunder it; indeed, this came to be the main source of their livelihood, no disgrace being yet attached to such an achievement, but even some glory.

As Minos had formed his navy, communication by sea became easier, as he colonized most of the islands, and thus expelled the malefactors. The coast population now began to apply themselves more closely to the acquisition of wealth, and their life became more settled; some even began to build themselves walls on the strength of their newly acquired riches. For the love of gain would reconcile the weaker to the dominion of the stronger, and the possession of capital enabled the more powerful to reduce the smaller towns to subjection.

According to the common accounts Daedalus lived in Crete, some three generations before the Trojan war, and was distinguished for his talents in architecture, sculpture, and engraving, and as the inventor of many instruments; for instance, the axe. the saw, the plummet, the auger; also of glue, and masts and yards for ships. As a sculptor he wrought mostly in wood, and was the first who made the eyes of his statues open. He built the famous labvrinth and a temple of Artemus Britomartis in Crete; and executed for Pasiphae the notorious wooden cow.

Being imprisoned with his son Icarus, he invented wings for flying. The wings were fastened on with wax, and Icarus flew so high that the heat of the sun melted the wax, and the wings dropped off, leaving him to fall into the sea, whence the Icarian Sea is said to have received its name. Daedalus himself reached Sicily, on the southern coast of which a place was called, after him, Daedalium. Philologists suppose that Daedalus is not really a proper name, but the common appellation of all the first architects, metallurgists, and sculptors in Grecian antiquity, being derived from or akin to the Greek daidallein, "to work with skill."

Minoan towns and palaces have been uncovered in different parts of the island, which recall the skill attributed to Daedalus. They exhibit architecture and engineering of a high order, unsurpassed for domestic conveniences in modern times. At Cnossus in the ruined palace of Minos, the thalassocratic king of the eastern Mediterranean, in the Hagia Triada and its shrine near Phaestus, in the palace at Phaestus, in the uncovered ruined towns at Palaikastro, Gourni and Zakro, in the shrine and Dictaean cavern, the legendary birthplace of the Cretan Zeus, near Psychro, and in the ruins on the neighboring islets of Pseira and Mochlos, the finds include archives of clay tablets in great quantities inscribed with the early forms of Minoan pictographic and linear script, polychrome decorated pottery, lifelike ivory and clay figures, mural paintings revealing the customs of the period, enormous decorated storehouse jars, stone and bronze votive figures and objects of cult, sarcophagi, etc.

At Cnossus, also, have been unearthed the foundations of what are acknowledged to be the traditional labyrinthine prison of the Minotaur or bull of Minos, the incestuous monster for whose gratification Athens was compelled to send an annual tribute of seven noble maidens and seven boys until Theseus killed the beast, probably during an invasion of the island which consummated the catastrophe that overwhelmed this early Cretan culture.

The result of excavations from 1900 onwards was to bring to light a vast pre-historic palace, the structure and contents of which revealed the existence of a high civilisation going back some 2,000 years before the earliest records of archaic Greece. The legendary "works of Daedalos" substantiated themselves in the shape of sculptures, moulded reliefs, and wall paintings showing extraordinary artistic skill; but the crowning discovery was the existence of whole archives of clay documents written in an advanced linear script. These had been contained in chests secured by seals, countermarked and countersigned, showing an elaborate bureaucratic organisation.

The inscriptions represented three different writing systems: a 'hieroglyphic' script, Linear A and Linear B. The hieroglphic script appears only on seal stones and has yet to be deciphered. Linear A, also undeciphered, is thought to have evolved from the hieroglyphic script, and Linear B probably evolved from Linear A, though the relationship between the two scripts is unclear. The language represented by Linear B was an ancient form of Greek, while Linear A was used to write Minoan, a language unrelated to Greek.

The Minoan culture began producing sculpture and pottery in approximately 2600 BC, inaugurating what was known as the prepalatial (early Minoan) period. Then about 2000 BC the Minoans began constructing the palaces that became their trademark. The palace-building protopalatial (middle Minoan) period, which lasted until about 1450 BC, included flourishing economic, political, and social organization and active trade in the eastern Mediterranean, as well as the first appearance of writing in the Greek world. In the latter part of this period, Minoan traders ventured as far west as Spain.

The large, ornate palaces had a distinctive design, were built at population centers and were the scene of elaborate religious ceremonies. The Palace at Knossos is the largest (it covers an area of 20,000 square metres) and most spectacular of all the Minoan palatial centers. It has all the typical features of the architectural type established in ca. 1700 BC: four wings arranged around a rectangular, central court, oriented N-S, which is actually the nucleus of the whole complex. The east wing contains the residential quarters, the workshops and a shrine. The old (first) palace was built in around 2000 BC but it was completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1700 BC. The new (second) palace, more complex in plan, strongly resembling a labyrinth, was constructed immediately afterwards.

The destruction of many of the society's palaces by a severe earthquake began the postpalatial (late Minoan) period. In that period, the rival Mycenaean civilization took control of Crete's Mediterranean commerce. In the middle of the 15th century BC the Achaeans from the Greek Mainland conquered the island of Crete and settled at the palace of Knossos. They used the Greek language, as is indicated by the clay tablets they left, written in the Linear B script. By 1200 BC development of the Minoan culture had ceased.

Since Plato ’s day much search had been made for the site of Atlantis, in every part of the world-—America, Palestine, Arabia Felix, Ceylon, Sardinia, and Sweden—but without avail. By the early 20th Century the suggestion was made that the great Minoan Kingdom of Crete was the original of Atlantis. The suggestion, first made by an anonymous writer in an English newspaper, was further elaborated by Mr. James Baikie1 in 1907 and urged again by Mr. E. S. Balch in 1910. Mr. Balch argued that Plato ’s descriptions might well apply to Crete, once a kingdom of great extent and power, which might readily have ruled over Libya and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia; that Athens and Egypt combined may have put an end to the Minoan Kingdom in 1200 BC; and that the tradition of the impassable seas may refer to the cessation of the commerce between Egypt and the Minoan Kingdom.

The sea dominion of King Minos seems to have afforded a historical basis for Plato's legend of Atlantis,1 although the philosopher himself was wholly unaware that Crete was the island state of whose existence the Egyptian priest had told Solon. Plato says of Atlantis that it was an island, lofty and precipitous toward the sea, lying on the way to other islands, whence you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent; that in this island there was a great and wonderful empire which had ruled over the whole island, and several others, as well as over parts of the continent. He tells us of the great harbour, with its shipping and its merchants coming from all parts, the elaborate bath-rooms, the stadium, and the solemn sacrifice of the bull. When Plato relates that the bull is hunted 'without weapons but with staves and nooses' there is an unmistakable description of the bull-ring at Knossos, the very thing which struck foreigners most, and which gave rise to the legend of the Minotaur. The only point in the description of Atlantis which is at variance with Crete is its situation outside the Pillars of Hercules. But this can be explained by the fact that, whereas the 'island furthest west' would well describe Crete to a home-staying Egyptian of the Theban Empire, the same expression must needs mean to Solon, a far more distant isle; moreover, in his day Crete showed little evidence of ever having possessed the fabulous power which he attributed to Atlantis.

This theory, that the Minoan Kingdom was Atlantis, seems to demand that the Minoan Kingdom was absolutely destroyed and that memory of it faded away from the mind to such an extent that the possibility of a visionary Atlantis may have replaced it. That the memory of it did so disappear is not borne out by what little is known of the traditions of the period. Herodotus relates that the grandson of Minos (ldomeneusi), in defiance of warnings, joined the expedition to Troy and that, in consequence of his absence, his kingdom was invaded and destroyed. Thucydides, as keen an exponent of the influence of naval supremacy as Admiral Mahan, alludes to the fact that Minos was the first to establish it when by his fleet he had made the seas safe against the pirates.

The “Timaeus” is, in a way, a continuation of the “Republic.” There Plato had described his ideal state. He goes on in the “ Critias” to describe a state laid out with wonderful exactness and regularity—a state that seems, from the fragment, to be literally as utopian as his Republic. He is rather fond of references to Egypt. Phaedrus says to Socrates: “You can easily invent tales of Egypt,” and so Plato ascribes the origin of this imaginary island of Atlantis to a tale of Egypt.

The accurate date of the "Minoan" eruption of Santorini is a controversial issue, with estimates running from as early as 1627 BC to as late as 1390 BC. By using carbon-14 dates from the surrounding region, cultural phases, and Bayesian statistical analysis, in 2006 a group of investigators established a chronology for the initial Aegean Late Bronze Age cultural phases (Late Minoan IA, IB, and II). This chronology contrasts with conventional archaeological dates and cultural synthesis: stretching out the Late Minoan IA, IB, and II phases by approximately 100 years and requiring reassessment of standard interpretations of associations between the Egyptian and Near Eastern historical dates and phases and those in the Aegean and Cyprus in the mid-second millennium BC.