Minoan Culture, Religion & Decline

Last time we left off with the Minoan palaces emerging around 1950 BCE, centred around Crete. Today, I want to focus more on the Minoan civilization & culture itself, exploring the Palatial Ages & addressing some key themes and debates in current Minoan Archaeology. Once the Minoan Palaces appeared, they lasted for a few centuries until gradually being adapted to Mycenaean culture. There are three major palatial centres on Crete, many of which were excavated in the early 20th century. We have Knossos, which was the largest, Phaistos, famous for the Cretan Disk, and Mallia. While Mallia is often a party/clubbing destination nowadays, the palace there has a unique bunch of 8 silos in the southwest corner, an oblique building in the north court, and an altar in the Central Courtyard. 

There is sometimes a fourth palace mentioned, Zakros, on the eastern coast, which was found in the 1950s by a Greek archaeological team, and is the only palace to have been found by native archaeologists. Phaistos is an Italian project, Knossos a British and Mallia a French one. Alongside these major centres, we also have smaller villages and settlements that don’t fit the typical structure and style of a palatial compound, such as the village of Gournia. Gournia was most likely built in the Prepalatial period as a substantial village, but as time went on it developed a structure that looks like a simplistic palace in one of the corners of the town. The original name for the site is unknown. The modern name comes from the abundant hollow vessels found all over the site though.

The Gournia palace is strange, it’s simplistic, but doesn’t seem to work like a domestic building. This kind of thing is typical of smaller settlements throughout Crete, they are not quite big enough to be major palatial centres, but are definitely bigger than the average village. Alongside these, the primary archaeological sites and deposits come from a mixture of distinct country houses or compounds, tombs, sacred caves such as Idea, Kamares & Psychro and Mountain Sanctuaries such as Vrysinas, Kato Syme & Ioutkas.

The Nature of Minoan Evidence

Now we need to address some problems and challenges with the evidence for Minoan culture. A huge amount of the public understanding of Minoan culture, including its usual imagery, art, and even its religious motifs owes its origin to Sir Arthur Evans. Evans was the pioneering 19/20th century British archaeologist in the study of the Bronze Age Aegean. He is most famous for unearthing Knossos and coining the distinction between the Minoan civilisation & the Mycenean. He was also the first to define Cretan scripts Linear A and Linear B, as well as earlier Cretan Hieroglyphs. Evans really pushed his vision and interpretation of the Minoans, that even today is difficult to shake off & rethink. 

His ideas centred around an idealistic society that was close to nature, largely peaceful, perhaps matriarchal and having deities such as the famous Snake Goddesses. A lot of what people generally think of as “Minoan” in popular imagination is in fact part of his 20th century reconstruction. Let’s look at the supposed Snake Goddess as an example. Here is the reconstruction that has become quite synonymous with Minoan religion…

Here is what was actually excavated, before they attempted the reconstruction:

The two figurines were found by Evans's excavators in one of a group of stone-lined and lidded cists, which Evans assumed were "Temple Repositories", since they contained a variety of objects that were presumably no longer required for use, perhaps after a fire.

As you can see, there is a lot of artistic liberty at play here. For instance, we don’t know if her “cat” even goes on her head, and it’s questionable whether what she is holding is even a pair of snakes, as we haven’t found many comparable images, and snake goddesses play little to no part in what we currently know about Minoan religion. They could just as easily be ropes. In reality, Until after the Mycenaean conquest we have no names for deities. So during this period, we do not have any real idea of how Minoans thought of their gods or what their relationship with them was..

Evans was also heavily ritually biassed, believing that nearly everything in Minoan culture was ritual focused, in opposition to the later Myceaneans who were inherently patriarchal and more warlike. Another major example of Evans’ questionable reconstructions are the famous Blue Ladies frescoes from Knossos:

This famous fresco has become almost synonymous with Minoan art, style & fashion, but you might notice that the women’s hairstyles & dresses look suspiciously 1920s, which was when the reconstruction was done. In reality, here are the parts of the fresco that were actually recovered from Knossos:

From this you can see how sceptical we have to be when it comes to generalisations and reconstructing Minoan culture. Thankfully, more complete frescos and artwork have since been discovered that fill out our understanding, but we are still searching for more stuff to give better reconstructions.

The Palaces

Another one of the big questions in Minoan Archaeology is centred around how exactly we define a palace. These major palatial compounds were excavated in the 20th century and practically defined Minoan culture. The general layout of a palace is usually standardised and quite regular; they have a central court, as well as a western court, usually outside the main palace. The orientation of rooms is usually done to maximise sunlight, and they generally positioned important rooms towards the rising sun.
Knossos Palace Plan

At places like Mallia & Knossos we have heavily ornamental facades, looking out. Interestingly, some of the rest of the compound is sometimes poorly made, but the facades appear to have been of very high quality. Clearly whoever is occupying the Western Courts is wanting to show off their prestige & artistic specialisation. The central court of most palaces, especially Knossos, seems to have been placed behind many winding corridors, affording limited access, shutting it off from the outside. Mallia however has more direct access through the south. 

Malia Palace Plan

Each of the winding corridors to the central chamber are heavily decorated with frescos, showing considerable detail. This tells us that not only was there an intended “in” and “out” group, but also that the insiders wanted to show off their considerable work. The palace at Knossos was a place of rich colour, not just white marble. In the EM Period, the walls and pavements were coated with a pale red paint, derived from red ochre. The wall fresco backgrounds are almost entirely red. In the MM Period, whites and blacks were added, and then blue, green, and yellow. The pigments were derived from natural materials, such as ground hematite.

The decorative motifs were generally bordered scenes: humans, mythological creatures, animals, rocks, vegetation, and marine life. The earliest designs also seem to have imitated motifs originally found on pottery from earlier periods. A large part of the palaces were however, devoted to storage, with so many rooms that it was common in earlier archaeology to assume the palace belonged to a benevolent and sharing king, with hypotheses that taxes were collected from the surrounding hinterland and then stored in the central palaces, and then during bad harvests, the palace could redistribute to the community. With recent data about the communities around palaces however, we know there is not enough storage space to make this likely. 

Instead, it may be more likely that the palatial storage was for localised feasts. While taxes may still be coming in, the palace could be giving back to the community by hosting communal feasts with the resources acquired, and so giving back ceremonially. Naturally, this raises more questions around who it was that remained in charge of this redistribution of resources, because the person (or people) don’t seem to have heavily hierarchical power like in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Other major areas of the palaces are unknown in purpose, but are too small to be domestic, so are most likely ritual in nature. Evans’ King & Queen’s Hall are too small to have been domestic, so are in fact ritual in nature.

The palace at Knossos would actually have been multistoried, although we know very little about the second floor. From what can be inferred, there likely would have been domestic rooms and bedrooms up there, but they don’t seem to have been royal or elite rooms. Could they be more ritualistic in nature? Perhaps being used for feasting or hosting guests from other palaces? Either way, the level of social and political organisation is clearly huge, but we still don’t understand who rules or orchestrated a lot of it.

One thing I should say here, is that the ground plan you’re seeing here isn’t 100% accurate. What you’re looking at is a multi phase plan that is approximately 600+ years superimposed over each other. The original excavation of Knossos was not done well by modern standards, so the reality is that we don’t know the different moments and layers of the palace and how it changes through time. Many places on this plan were not in use at the same time. The central throne room for example, was something that was added to the palace complex later on, perhaps even during the Mycenaean period, and might not even be Minoan. 

Where things really start to get interesting is when we look at the disparity in palatial compounds across Crete. The assumption that palaces only existed at the major sites has been disproven by numerous excavations of smaller settlements during the Palatial Age. In reality, settlements across Crete share a lot of characteristics and exhibit a gradient or spectrum of sizes along a similar layout pattern. Knossos and Mallia are major centres, complete with religious areas, central courts and storage areas, but comparing these to smaller palatial compounds like Zakros & Galatas or the later discovered Petras and Makri Gyalos, these do not seem to be much different than normal village settlements. 

What this implies is either the centralisation of power around sites like Knossos, who is delegating or serving as a regional inspiration for smaller settlements to copy, or, the only thing that definitely marks difference of status or power is scale & complexity. Therefore, the nature and use of the larger palaces is really not that much different to what is happening on a local scale. This question of organisation on Crete, whether meditated from capital palaces that are taking local ideas and ritual practices and pushing them to the extreme to make something new, or the other way round, that major palace centres are actually just big communal village centres, is still an unanswered question. Equally, with no iconography of a centralised power, questions like purpose, meaning & use of the space are all still unanswered.

Writing

As we move toward the High Minoan period from 1700 BCE onward, we begin to see the development and spread of writing systems. There are several scripts on Crete, the earliest of which is the Archanes script, which look mostly like pictograms, although their number and frequency suggest a syllabic script; this script was only described as a distinct stage in development of the Cretan hieroglyphic in the 1980s. Most of these seals contain a very repetitive "Archanes formula" that is the same 2–3 signs, but we don’t know what they mean. 

Alongside early Cretan Hieroglyphs, we have the development of Linear A, the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoans. As of the recording of this video, the language behind Linear A & Cretan Hieroglyphs is still unknown. It is not an Indo European language that we know of, and we don’t have a lot of tablets to work with to help in deciphering it. Later on, during the Mycenaean world, they developed a new script, known as Linear B, which was used to record an entirely different language, which is in fact an early form of Greek. Linear B is hypothesised to have developed on Crete as a result of Mycenaean influence adapting the local Linear A script. 

Art  

From around the MB III, we reach the Zenith of Minoan culture, in terms of artistic expression. We have a collection of tablets written in Linear A, hypothesised to be telling us about administration, but also very high quality elite objects and production zones. 

Notably, we have extensive gold work from this period, which tells us much, since gold is not native to Crete, implying a resurgence of the EB networks of exchange I mentioned in the last video. In the realm of ornate art, we have adorned frescos such as that in the throne room of Knossos, which is unclear how to interpret alongside fine pottery ware often stylised with maritime and ocean motifs.

It is really during this period that Minoan influence hugely expands across the Aegean. During the Neopalital/Late Minoan period there is an evident push of Minoan culture all across Greece. We see evidence of Minoan imports in the tombs at Mycenae, which we’ll cover next episode, along with in Cyclades influenced sites. We even see Minoan influence as far as Egypt & Anatolia! Notably, the famous Bull Head Rhyton in Mycenae shaft grave IV testifies to Minoan influence, as it is made of silver and gold and exhibits a combination of Minoan stylistic influences with distinct Mycenaean flavour. The graves' rich contents, including this rhyton, indicate the high status of the individuals buried within and provide evidence of the wealth and power of the Mycenaean elite during this period on mainland Greece.

This direction of influence from Crete & the Minoan culture into mainland Greece stays true during the MB III & the early part of the LB I, but eventually is reversed, as Minoan culture declines, and Mycenaean begins to predominate and exert influence back on Crete… but why? 

The Thera Eruption

Toward the end of the LB I period, Minoan culture appears to decline and become less important. This happened gradually, where at first we begin to see less and less of it outside of Crete, signalling a decreased ability to expand, and even on Crete itself we see evidence of problems in the form of settlements & palaces being abandoned. One prominent theory as to why is drastic climatic change brought about by the eruption of the Thera volcano. Now, we know the Relative Chronology of the eruption, which is around the middle of LB I period, and we have major evidence from the site of Akrotiri in modern day Santorini, which is rather like a Minoan Pompeii, being preserved almost completely beneath the explosion. 

The timing of the Thera Eruption is a bit of a debate though. We know the Relative Chronology, but often struggle with the Absolute Chronology. Based on textual evidence from Egypt & the Levant we find mentions of events that may be describing the experience in the mid 1500s BCE, but based on a mixture of Radiocarbon, Dendrochronological & Ice Core dating, some research has tentatively secured a date of around 1615 BCE for the eruption.

Remarkably however, the Thera eruption doesn’t seem to have wiped out the Minoans! Even after its supposed date, we have about 80-100 years of continued Minoan evidence. 

This Subminoan cultural phase has certain things going well, and others in steep decline however. For instance, the Octopus flask from Palaikastro is dated to 1500 BCE, and is clearly an artisanal piece that testifies to surviving, clearly very skilled, Minoan artists.

On a domestic level however, we see a lot of destruction of sites, along with frequent abandonment. While the Thera eruption was major, it didn’t wipe out Minoan culture, but did severely impact life on Crete for enough years for it to decline over generations, giving space for the new rising power of the Mycenaeans to take over. 

One of the most likely causes of this decline was the ash from the eruption, perhaps up to 20cm in some areas around Thera, creating a kind of nuclear winter for the people of Crete that lasted for a generation, which created distortion in terms of agricultural production, from which the centralised Minoan sites never really recovered. 

Sources

Shelmerdine, C. (ed) 2008: The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age, see chapters 7, 10, 12

Poursat, J, C. 2022: Minoan Architecture in the First Palace Period. In Poursat & Knappett, C. 2022: The Art and Archaeology of the Aegean Bronze Age A History , pp. 87 - 94. Translated by Knappett. Cambridge University Press

Legarra Herrero, B. 2016: Primary State Formation Processes on Bronze Age Crete: A Social Approach to Change in Early Complex Societies. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1-19.

Schoep, I. 2002. The state of the Minoan palaces or the Minoan palace-state in Driessen, J. Schoep, I. Laffineur, R Monuments of Minos. Rethinking the Minoan Palaces. Proceedings of the International Workshop "Crete of the Hundred Palaces?" held at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, 14-15 December 2001 pp. 15-33. Liège: Université de Liège. historie de l'art et archéologie de la Gréce antique.

Whitelaw. 2014: Recognising polities in prehistoric Crete. In M. Relaki and Y. Papadatos (eds) From the Foundation to the legacy of Minoan Society. Sheffield Studies in Aegean Archaeology. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Schoep, P. Tomkins and J. Driessen. 2011: The urbanisation of prehistoric Crete: settlement perspectives on Minoan state formation. In (eds.), Back to the Beginning: Reassessing Social, Economic and Political Complexity in the Early and Middle Bronze Age on Crete. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Callender, G. 1987: Antiquity: The Minoans. Sydney: Shakespeare Head Press.

Castleden, R. 2002: Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete. Taylor & Francis.

The exact date of the Thera Eruption is contested, but some recent papers assessing the evidence are:

Lespez, L., Lescure, S., Saulnier-Copard, S. et al. 2021: Discovery of a tsunami deposit from the Bronze Age Santorini eruption at Malia (Crete): impact, chronology, extension. Sci Rep 11, 15487: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-94859-1

Mavromati, A. 2021: Wood as a structural element in the houses of Akrotiri on Thera, Greece. The Anthracological Evidence. Quaternary International, Volumes 593–594, Pages 71-84: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S104061822030714X

Ehrlich, Y., Regev, L. & Boaretto, E. 2021: Discovery of annual growth in a modern olive branch based on carbon isotopes and implications for the Bronze Age volcanic eruption of Santorini. Sci Rep 11, 704: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79024-4