Chapter 2
In This Chapter
● Meeting the Minoans and the Mycenaeans
● Touring the palace at Knossos
● Pondering the meaning of ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’
● Colonising and expanding
These days you can very easily find out about what happened in the past. TV, the Internet, and books like this one mean that you can very quickly and painlessly have dates and facts at your fingertips.
The ancient Greeks didn’t have that ability. People living in the first millennium BC didn’t know very much about what existed before them, so they filled in the big gaps in knowledge about their own past with myths and legends that explained how their town or city came to be. (See Part IV for more on the ancient Greeks’ rich mythological past.)
Indeed, up until about 100 years ago, researchers were still in the dark about what existed before the ancient Greeks. Historians relied on myths, poems, stories, and a few ancient historical writings that mention a very successful, pre-Greek civilisation based on the island of Crete, the largest of more than 1,400 islands that lie off the coast of the Grecian mainland.
This chapter is about this early civilisation - the Minoan - as well as the Mycenaean civilisation that followed. These two unusual and hugely successful groups started the chain of events that resulted in what eventually became ancient Greece.
Starting at the Beginning: The Minoan Civilisation
At the beginning of the 20th century, archaeological digs on the island of Crete led by Englishman Sir Arthur Evans revealed the existence of a wealthy, complex civilisation that had built huge palaces. Evans named these people the Minoans, after the legendary King Minos (see the later section ‘Mythologising the Minoans’ for more info). Evan’s rediscovery of Minoan culture finally provided a solution to the origins of ancient Greece.
What historians and researchers call the Minoan civilisation flourished from around 2200 to about 1450 BC on the island of Crete. The Minoans weren’t Greek, but the culture that grew out of their civilisation had a huge influence on the people living on mainland Greece who eventually become the ancient Greeks.
The archaeological discoveries on Crete show that people had inhabited the island since 7000 BC. Sometime around 2600 BC a great deal of disruption and moving around seems to have happened. At this point Crete became an important centre of civilisation. Historians refer to this period (roughly 3000 to 1200 BC) as the Bronze Age because bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) was the most commonly used metal at the time.
Unfortunately, knowledge of the Minoans is limited because they didn’t use writing in the way that the later Greeks did. Early Cretan writing seems to have been writing in pictures - like Egyptian hieroglyphics - and later developed into a more recognisable form, a series of letter-like symbols that we would think of as writing; what you might call a script like a letter or document. Around 3,000 Minoan tablets have been discovered, and these tablets were written in Linear B script, a method of writing that was used in the formation of the early Greek language (see Chapter 1). Unfortunately, because the Minoan tablets are mostly lists of goods or inventories of resources, they’re very difficult to translate and don’t tell much about Minoan society.
Because no Minoan texts or documents exist, historians have to use the results of archaeology to interpret and make judgements about the civilisation. Hence, the Minoan culture is considered prehistory, rather than history.
Organising the civilisation
Researchers do know that at the height of Minoan power (around 1850 BC) the island of Crete was divided into six different political regions, as Figure 2-1 shows. Other palace complexes were on the island, but these six seem to have been the most influential due to their evident wealth and prosperity.
Figure 2-1: Map of Minoan Crete.
The remains of great palace complexes, which have been uncovered during the past hundred years or so, tell researchers that Crete was politically organised. The presence of a palace implies that a monarchy ruled a society, and the towns and cities on the Greek mainland were highly influenced by this arrangement. Later, Greek cities tended to organise themselves around a palace complex.
Of all the Minoan palace complexes, by far the biggest was constructed at Knossos on the north of the island (a 5-acre site with a main building that covered more than three acres by itself). Knossos is one of the most impressive sites that people can still view today (see Chapter 27).
Knossos wasn’t just a palace; it was also a seat of government, a stronghold against invasion, and a place for storing goods and wares. The main building contained around 19 rooms, the vast majority of which were used for storage.
Wealth - and in particular the visible display of it - was a prime qualification for rulers in early societies (hence, the impressive scale of Knossos). People during the Minoan period didn’t have bank accounts, so they displayed their wealth through the size and contents of their houses. The Minoans didn’t have the fast cars or impressive stereo systems of today to spend their money on, so they spent it on wine, olive oil, wool, and grain. Although these items were fairly ordinary, they were vital for existence, and having a lot of them was impressive. Another reason for stockpiling so much stuff was that the Minoans made their money from trade.
Engaging in retail therapy
The Minoans were serious traders. Their economy was based on buying and selling. Have a look at the position of Crete on the Cheat Sheet map. Being down in the south-east of the Mediterranean meant that the civilisation was ideally placed to carry out lots of trade.
Human sacrifice?
One unpleasant religious practice that's often been associated with the Minoans is human sacrifice. Even today academics can't agree on whether this practice actually took place.
Several sites on Crete contain shrines with possible evidence. The best example is a shrine at Anemospilia, where a body of a young man was found in a very unnatural position on top of a platform. He was in a constricted position as if he'd been trussed up in preparation for sacrifice, and a dagger was found on top of the body. This may well have been an isolated incident. But given the fact that Minoans routinely sacrificed hundreds of animals, they could possibly have switched to sacrificing humans on occasions, perhaps when a town or city was facing major problems.
The Minoans were hugely involved in the trade of tin. They didn’t mine it themselves but imported it, manufactured, and sold it on. By combining tin with copper from nearby Cyprus, they were able to make bronze. Bronze was used for everything during the Minoan period, especially weapons and tools. Bronze was also in great demand throughout the Mediterranean. A good comparison would be with how important oil is in modern society.
But tin was far from the only thing that the Minoans had for sale. Other popular Minoan products included the following:
● Ceramics: The Minoans produced huge amounts of pottery and decorative items that they sold all around the Mediterranean region, including Greece, Asia Minor, and as far west as Spain. These must-have items were quite simple in design - usually a dark background with decorative images such as trees, fish, and animals.
● Gold and silver: The most valuable of metals, gold and silver were highly prized and used only for jewellery. Wearing it was a sign of real social status. It wasn’t until around 600 BC that the Greeks started using coins. Accordingly, amounts of gold and silver were used as a substitute for exchanges of high value.
● Timber: The mountains on Crete were thickly wooded during the Bronze Age; even more so than they are today when forest fires are still a real risk. All the available lumber enabled the Minoans to build many ships. Minoan wood was also highly prized abroad, in places such as Egypt where timber was scarce.
● Saffron: This rare spice was the most exclusive Minoan product. Saffron was highly prized and incredibly expensive - only the very rich could afford it. The spice had a number of uses from flavouring and preserving foods to treating various medical ailments.
● Wool: Wool has always been a central part of the Greek economy, even at this early stage. Sheep’s wool was most commonly used and was taken as raw fibres straight from the sheep before being dyed and spun using a spindle.
As Crete became the leading supplier for many essentials and luxury goods, the island also developed a powerful hold on some of its customers on the nearby Aegean islands. Historians don’t know exactly how the relationship between Crete and the surrounding area worked, but the ties must have been a mixture of dependency and colonisation. When the Athenians built a powerful empire more than 1,000 years later (see Chapter 7), contemporary historians made comparisons with the Minoans. Most likely, a lot of neighbouring islands became trading outposts that enabled the Minoans to take Cretan goods farther across the Mediterranean.
Trying to meet the mysterious Minoans
All their wealth and influence presumably brought the Minoan aristocracy a high standard of living, but knowing for sure is difficult. Aside from the spectacular remains of the palace complexes, historians know very little about the lives of these puzzling people.
Getting dressed, Minoan-style
Some illustrations that have survived on fragments of pottery show men wearing clothes rather like kilts or loincloths. Given the hot climate and active lifestyle it was a fairly common form of dress and can be found elsewhere at the time, such as in Ancient Egypt.
Women’s outfits were slightly more unusual. The Minoans seem to have invented the bra. The women shown in paintings wear a type of girdle that goes round the back and supports the breasts while leaving them exposed. This unusual garment was certainly not passed on to the Greeks, who were incredibly scrupulous and controlling of female dress and appearance (see Chapter 15).
Worshipping
The one area in which historians do have a little more information is religion. The Minoans often represented their gods through animal symbols, in styles much like the decoration on their pottery.
The Minoans worshipped female deities that represented different aspects of life - a mother goddess who was associated with fertility and others that represented protection of cities, animals, the harvest, and households.
The bull was also an important symbol in Minoan religion and represented a male god that was associated with the sun. In fact, some Minoan art shows young men (and occasionally women) engaging in the bizarre practice of bull leaping. This trial of strength and dexterity required individuals to leap across the back of an untethered, fully grown bull - not dissimilar to the rodeo events in modern America.
Mythologising the Minoans
Of course, this talk of bulls and human sacrifice leads to the most famous story associated with the Minoans: Theseus and the Minotaur. This story is probably a very early example of how the Greeks used myths to explain the gaps in knowledge of their own history.
Theseus and the Minotaur
According to the story, Theseus was a great hero of the city of Athens. (Indeed, a huge number of stories are associated with his legend.) His mother Aethera brought Theseus up in the city of Troezen. When he became a young man, he left home to claim his birthright as the son of Aegeus, the king of Athens, and after many adventures he succeeded in becoming heir to the Athenian throne.
At the time, Minos, the king of Crete, was exacting a grisly annual tribute on the city of Athens: Seven girls and seven boys were taken to Crete and fed to the Minotaur that lurked in the labyrinth beneath Minos’s palace. The Minotaurwas the illegitimate half-man, half-bull son of Minos’s wife Pasaphae. The creature fed on human flesh.
In the third year of the tribute, Theseus volunteered to go as one of the seven boys in order to kill the Minotaur and bring the practice to an end. Theseus did kill the Minotaur and was helped by Minos’s daughter, Ariadne, who gave Theseus a ball of wool that allowed him to find his way out of the labyrinth and escape with her.
Separating history and ‘mythtory'
The story of Theseus has many layers - indeed, I write more about it in Chapter 4. But for now, consider how much the story tells about what the later Greeks knew of the Minoans. The story includes many of the elements I talk about in this section: foreign colonisation, bull worship, large palace complexes, human sacrifice, and bulls.
You can easily see how later Greeks put together some of the elements of Minoan civilisation and came up with a great story that explained the
Minoans’ previous dominance over their own part of the world. You can almost call this practice ‘mythtory’ - a creative filling-in-the-blanks between what you do know.
The story of Theseus shows how myths work - a topic I cover in Chapter 19. But the myth is particularly relevant at this point because the end of the Minoan civilisation certainly involved an intervention from mainland Greece.
Going out with a bang
At some point around 1450 BC, most of the large palaces on Crete were turned to rubble. With Minoan civilisation enjoying such success, why did it come to a sudden end?
The most common explanation is an earthquake, possibly tied in with a volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (modern-day Santorini), around 150 years earlier. Many people have tried to tie this event in with the legend of the lost city of Atlantis. If the volcano theory is true, it explains why so many of the palaces were destroyed around the same time but the dates don’t quite match up.
However, some people argue that human intervention may have been involved. One reason for this is that Knossos, the biggest palace of all, appears to have survived for another 50 years or so, perhaps indicating that a war won by those from Knossos led to the large-scale destruction of the other palaces half a century earlier.
Whatever the reason, by 1400 BC Knossos itself had been destroyed and Minoan dominance and civilisation was at an end. The archaeological evidence suggests that human beings destroyed Knossos. If that was the case, only one likely candidate exists: the Mycenaeans, the newly dominant force in the eastern Mediterranean.
Meeting the New Kids on the Block: The Mycenaeans
The Mycenaean civilisation flourished between 1600 BC and the collapse of what’s referred to as the Bronze Age civilisation, around about 1100 BC. Later Greeks considered the Mycenaeans to be a warlike people who were bent on conquest and the expansion of their territory, and they put Greece as we know it on the map.
Mycenaean civilisation was based in mainland Greece. As Figure 2-2 shows, its main centres were the cities of Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Athens, and Thebes.
Historians have struggled to identify the origins of the Mycenaean civilisation. Most researchers now agree that the Mycenaens were probably originally from Crete. When the Minoan civilisation began to spread out around 1700 BC, some travellers settled in central Greece. Within a century or so, these individuals had established a new society that was very different from their Minoan ancestors.
Figure 2-2: The major centres of Mycenaean civilisation.
Separating Minoan and Mycenaean: Trade versus conquest
The Minoan civilisation was primarily based on trade and commerce (see the earlier section ‘Engaging in retail therapy’). Although the Minoans must’ve fought several wars, the empire that they gained was built on trade and exchange.
This wasn’t the case with the Mycenaeans. Their civilisation was dominated by a warrior elite who gained status and influence through conquest. To become an important figure a man had to be a great warrior who had conquered towns and taken booty. One great example is the conquest of Crete around 1400 BC. Whether or not the Mycenaeans were responsible for the destruction of the palace of Knossos (skip back to the section ‘Going out with a bang’ for more), they certainly took advantage of its demise and gained control of Crete as a centrepiece of their huge empire.
One effect of the Mycenaean conquest was that the script they used, which historians call Linear B, became probably the earliest form of ancient Greek.
However, by far the greatest achievement associated with Mycenaean civilisation is the conquest of the immense and wealthy city of Troy on the northwestern coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). The legendary events around this conquest became known as the Trojan War. Read more about this fantastic piece of ‘mythtory’ in Chapter 21.
Of course, Mycenaean civilisation was much more than just war and conquest, as the following sections explore.
When looking at the Mycenaeans, you’re dealing with prehistory - no written records exist. Historians must rely on archaeology for most of their knowledge of this civilisation.
Burying the dead
Mycenaeans buried their nobles and warrior dead in beehive-shaped tombs, known as tholoi. The contents of many of these larger tombs have enabled modern archaeologists to come to a lot of conclusions about the Mycenaeans.
Nobles were often buried with a lot of grave goods, valuable possessions that tell about the person buried. Typical goods include jewellery, armour, gold masks, and weapons.
Conspiring religion
Historians know little about Mycenaean religious practices. The Mycenaeans apparently worshipped a number of the same gods that the later Greeks did, such as Poseidon. However, they probably didn’t worship in the same way. Certainly no evidence exists of the sort of temples that cropped up in later periods. (See Chapter 21 for more information on ancient Greek religion.)
Organising socially
The way the Mycenaeans organised their society influenced Greek cities and culture for the centuries that followed.
Mycenaean civilisation was divided into several different centres. The poet Homer (described in Chapter 20), who was composing around 500 years later, said that these centres were based around the major cities, including Mycenae, Pylos, and Sparta. The Mycenaeans didn’t have an overall ruler; their world was probably periodically dominated by whichever king was most powerful.
Each Mycenaean city had:
● A king: The king was probably the biggest landowner and most successful warrior within the local area and may well have become king by force. If you think about the fact that the Mycenaeans were descended from colonists, the leadership was probably the descendants of families that had originally grabbed the best land and became the most powerful.
● The king’s court: These free individuals were courtiers to the king and lived in large residences around the royal palace complex.
● Ordinary people: These free individuals were known as the demos. The word ‘demos’ is very important; see Chapter 4 where I look at the birth of democracy. These merchants, farmers, and artisans lived outside the palace complex.
● Slaves: The few available Mycenaean texts list slaves as having been the property of the king and working at the palace. It’s highly likely that the Mycenaeans captured slaves from their foreign wars, because this was the most common method of obtaining them.
Working for a living
Evidence indicates Mycenaean society had a far more developed set of social and work roles than what historians know of the Minoans. Farming was still the main profession for the majority of people, but in and around the palace complex some Mycenaeans worked as scribes, administrators, or artisans such as potters and smiths, depending on the king’s patronage.
More interestingly, the Mycenaeans developed what modern people think of as industry. One of the biggest industries was metallurgy, particularly the production of bronze, which was essential for a warlike people like the
Mycenaeans. Some of the tablets that have survived suggest that a significant proportion of the population were involved in metallurgy in the town of Pylos, and historians assume that other towns had similar arrangements.
The Mycenaeans were also heavily involved in the production of textiles. Evidence shows they produced up to 15 different textile varieties, mostly from wool and flax. Other industries included ivory carving, stone carving, and perfume making.
A large amount of what the Mycenaeans produced was sold abroad. For example, Mycenaean vases have been found in Egypt, Sicily, Western Europe, and as far away as Central Europe and Great Britain.
Expanding in all directions
After the collapse of Minoan civilisation with the fall of Knossos (see the earlier section ‘Going out with a bang’), the Mycenaeans became the big players in the western Mediterranean and took over much of what had been Minoan settlements. For example, they took over the town of Miletus, which had been a Minoan colony, and the same thing happened on the island of Samos.
But the Mycenaeans didn’t just focus on trading with and taking over their western neighbours. They took a much more aggressive interest in the eastern Mediterranean than the Minoans - not only trading with these areas but also establishing outposts and colonies. Bases were set up on several islands like Rhodes and Cos, where merchants stayed and acted as middlemen, letting the industries in Pylos, Argos, and elsewhere know what the local markets required. The island of Cyprus and the ports on the coast of modern-day Syria were particularly big trading centres, but the Mycenaeans also traded with ports on the coast of Asia Minor.
Eventually, the Mycenaeans were in charge pretty much everywhere, including:
● The crumbling Hittite Empire: By around 1300 BC, expansion brought the Mycenaeans into contact with the other big, warlike civilisation at the time - the Hittite Empire.
The Hittites had nothing to do with the Greeks; they were a completely different people. By the time that they came into diplomatic contact with the Mycenaeans, the Hittites had become the dominant force in Asia Minor, Syria, and as far east as Mesopotamia. The Hittites had come from north of the region and spoke a very different language. Their biggest enemy were the Egyptians, with whom they were continually fighting for control of Syria.
There aren’t any records of the Hittites and the Mycenaeans having any military contests, but within a few years of coming into contact with each other in 1300 BC the Hittite civilisation had collapsed. Historians don’t really know why, but some archaeologists have suggested that the Hittites may have experienced a devastating civil war.
● The city of Troy: The most famous of all the Mycenaean expansions was the destruction of the city of Troy around 1250 BC. Archaeology shows that the end of Troy was probably the work of a western Greek army like that of the Mycenaeans. I talk more about the myth and reality of Troy in Chapter 21.
With the Minoans destroyed, the Hittite Empire at war with itself, Troy conquered, and no real threat from anyone elsewhere in Greece, the Mycenaeans should have dominated the Mediterranean for generations to come. They were the dominant military power and economically self-sustaining, with a large trade network throughout the Mediterranean and beyond . . . but then something happened. Historians aren’t exactly sure what occurred because it happened during the region’s Dark Ages (see Chapter 3 for more info).