How archaeology rewrote the myths of ancient Greece
The Trojan War, the Mycenaeans and King Minos were once dismissed as baseless figments of ancient imagination. But everything changed in the heroic age of archaeology.
In the beginning, there were only myths. For the Greeks, the island of Crete was a distant and strange land and yet the site of some their most important traditions: Zeus was taken there to save him from being swallowed by his father Kronos, and raised in a sacred cave on Mount Ida. Later he took the form of a bull to abduct the beautiful Phoenician princess Europa and carry her across the sea to Crete, where she became the mother of King Minos. Her brother Cadmus was sent to look for her, but failed in this quest and ended up founding the city of Thebes instead.
Then there were more tales of bulls. Poseidon sent a magnificent bull from the sea, which Minos was meant to sacrifice to the god, but instead kept for his herd. As punishment, his wife Pasiphaë, daughter of Helios, was inspired with an unnatural lust for the bull; the cunning artificer Daedalus constructed a model of a heifer to help her fulfil her desire, and she conceived the bull-headed Minotaur. Daedalus then built the labyrinth to imprison the monster, which was fed on human flesh until it was eventually slain by Theseus with the aid of Minos’ daughter Ariadne. The original bull was later captured by Heracles in one of his labours, and later still taken again and finally sacrificed by Theseus.
By Homer’s time, in the 8th century BC, Crete was dominated by Dorian colonies; looking back over four centuries to the bronze age, he describes it in the Iliad as having a hundred cities, and its most important king, Idomeneus, is an important ally of the Achaeans in their war against Troy. The island appears in the Odyssey too: when Odysseus returns home in disguise, he claims to be a Cretan merchant. Perhaps this ultimately inspired the famous paradox attributed to the Cretan Epimenides, who declared that all Cretans were liars: if he is telling the truth, then he is lying; if he is lying, he is telling the truth.
In the modern period, the Trojan War, the Mycenaeans, King Minos and so on were generally dismissed as baseless figments of ancient imagination. But everything changed in the heroic age of archaeology, from the middle of the 19th century to the early 20th. First, spectacular discoveries were made in Mesopotamia in the middle of the century. Then in the 1870s Heinrich Schliemann set off to find Troy; not only did he discover the site of the ancient city, but a few years later that of Mycenae as well. Other Mycenaean sites followed, from Tiryns to Pylos. Following the leads of epic and legend, it turned out that all of the cities mentioned by Homer had really existed. The Achaeans of the Iliad were not just a legendary people, but were now the fully historical Mycenaeans: the civilisation of bronze age Greece was beginning to be understood as an historical period.
But there was more: from 1900 to 1904, Sir Arthur Evans revealed the site of ancient Cnossus, resurrecting a people even more thoroughly consigned to mythology in previous generations, the ancient and pre-Hellenic Minoans. Then further sites were found, at Phaistos, Malia, Gournia and elsewhere. When the relative chronologies of the Mycenaeans and Minoans were compared and matched against the more settled timeline of ancient Egypt, the history of civilisation in the Aegean in the three millennia before Christ could finally begin to be written.
It also turned out that there was some basis for the association of the island with bulls in the minds of the Greeks – most likely going back to the earliest impressions of Mycenaean visitors to the island. A celebrated fresco in the palace at Cnossus depicts a terrifying ceremony in which young men and women would seize the horns of a charging bull and vault over his back. The same ceremony is represented in a beautiful ivory figure of a bull-leaper in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. But as a number of smaller images on seal-rings attest, this incredibly dangerous sport or ritual did not always end well: we also see youths trampled or transfixed by the bull’s horns.
This could plausibly have been the starting-point for the tale of a monster that devoured young men and women. And the labyrinth was probably inspired by the layout of the immense and elaborate palace, with over a thousand rooms, three to five storeys and countless staircases and lightwells, that surrounded the vast open space in which the bull ceremonies were held. It was certainly a far greater and more complex structure than any known to the early Mycenaeans.
But the palace of Cnossus, like the other smaller palaces found at the other principal sites, was not the home of an overbearing monarch like the Mycenaean king Agamemnon portrayed by Homer, or of a brutal despot like the rulers of Assyria and Babylon. There is in fact no sign of a systematic celebration of kingship, and even the throne room is modest in scale, in no sense designed to project an impression of power; nor have we found effigies of the ruler, let alone the colossal stone statues of the Egyptian Pharaohs.
Although there were rooms where the king and queen carried out their duties, and residential apartments, the palaces seem to have been above all administrative and ceremonial centres, which included extensive storage facilities for grain, wine and oil as well as ceramic and metallurgical workshops. There were also, in addition to the great central courtyards for bull-leaping and perhaps other activities, further paved spaces including so-called ‘theatrical areas’ apparently designed for ceremonial processions, with raised paving for the celebrants and seating for the spectators.
The fact that the palaces at Cnossus and elsewhere were built without fortification walls clearly implies that relations between the various cities were generally peaceful, and peace in turn supposes a certain level of common prosperity. The social and political situation in Crete, in fact, appears to have been the reverse of conditions in bronze-age Sardinia, where the Nuragic peoples lived in massively-fortified towers built of cyclopean stones, often in view of other towers evidently representing hostile neighbouring communities.
The Minoans thus evidently possessed an advanced and elaborate civilisation, which influenced the development of the Mycenaeans before they eventually conquered the island. Unlike the Mycenaeans, however, the Minoans were not Greek. They had developed a form of writing we call Linear A, but their language remains undeciphered, and we are not even sure of their ethnicity. So we are entirely reliant on archaeology to form an idea of their social structures, beliefs and outlook, and here the excavation of private dwellings and more modest centres like Gournia have helped us to understand Minoan life better. As Professor Vance Watrous observes in a recent book, Minoan society was not divided between a very rich ruling class and subsistence peasants, but was more “middle-class” in the sense that it was based on a population of skilled tradesmen, merchants, seafarers and farmers who enjoyed a certain level of prosperity and took pleasure in the arts and crafts. Decorated ceramic wares, for example, are not found only in the houses of the rich, but in almost all dwellings.
This was confirmed by the astonishing discovery of the city of Akrotiri, buried by the massive volcanic eruption which destroyed the island of Thera or Santorini around 1600 or 1550 BC and also caused massive damage to Minoan cities on the island of Crete itself. The site has only been known for a little over half a century, and yet is ignored by the vast majority of visitors to Santorini, who only want a selfie among the white houses of the village of Oia – as indeed is the breathtaking site of the later Greek city of Thera, high on a mountain above the sea.
The discovery of Akrotiri confirmed many of Evans’ hypotheses about the design of two or three-storey houses, because so much remained relatively intact under the layers of ash. Most important, however, were the many frescoes, some still standing, and notably found in almost every house, not only the grand ones. One of these, known as the Spring Garden, was found intact and standing, and is now visible at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Most of the others are in the Museum of Prehistoric Thera on the island.
The museum contains many samples of fresco in the main display upstairs, including the delightful and mysterious blue monkeys springing over rocky hills, but two relatively complete ensembles are shown in the basement, and these can be considered among the most fascinating recent discoveries in archaeology. One of these ensembles comes from a private house, which appears to have belonged to a prosperous seafaring merchant. There are a couple of images of naked youths holding an impressive catch of fish, and other panels of decorative designs, but most importantly a frieze running around a whole room and illustrating scenes of ships and voyages to distant lands.
There are vessels of all kinds, from small two-man boats to merchant freighters or even passenger ships with travellers sitting comfortably under a canopy shielding them from the sun; many ships are being rowed, with visibly over two dozen rowers on each side, while a few others, on the open sea, have shipped their oars and raised their sails, as much later described by Homer; oars were used for getting in and out of harbours, or in battle for speed and manoeuvrability, but the wind was used for long-distance sailing.
Many details in this elaborate frieze remain enigmatic, and the same is true of the other important ensemble, recovered from a public building in the city. Here the images are religious or cultic in nature: one set shows a series of naked boys and young men, and seems to refer to rituals of passage from boyhood to manhood or perhaps to adolescence – seemingly involving ritual washing and dressing in the special garments that represent the boy’s new status.
The other room refers to the cult of the mother goddess, well-known from figures in the Heraklion museum and elsewhere, and worshipped particularly in the mountains, in the so-called peak sanctuaries. This suite of frescoes shows a number of beautiful young women collecting the crocus flowers from which saffron is made and presenting them to the goddess in her shrine. The scenes are vivid and evocative, elusive in that we know little of the faith and rituals to which they refer, and yet not esoteric in the sense I discussed a couple of months ago. They are instead evidence of the power of the human figure and features to express and convey intimate qualities of human experience even in the absence of literary or almost any other evidence of a people’s culture and beliefs.
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