Lost Cities – Week 5 (lecture 2)

Unit 2: Legendary Cities of the Aegean Bronze Age

The Minoans and Knossos

- Minoans: people who lived on Crete during the Bronze Age
o Southernmost of Greek islands
o Mountains and sea (Aegean and Libyan)
o Regions and microclimates
- Named after mythical King Minos by Sir Arthur Evans
- Excavator of Knossos palace (1900-1935)
- ‘Discoverer’ of Minoan civilisation
- Minos Kalokairinos – excavator of Knossos (1878)

Minoan Chronology
- Based on ceramics, e.g. Early Minoan II (EMII)
- Based on ‘palaces’ e.g. Prepalatial
- Dates are approximate
- NB – Knossos, and Crete, seems to have come under Mycenaean influence (from
Greek mainland) in LMII – LMIII

Cite Topology
- Palaces; villas; towns; peak sanctuaries; caves; ports; burials
- Ongoing archaeological work by Greek and non-Greek archaeologists across the
island since Evans has discovered a vast range of sites of varying type

Ritual Activity in Caves and on Mountain Peaks

- Ceramics
- Figurines
- Votive offerings

How did Minoan religion work?

- Priests, priestesses, gods, goddesses, and spirits…?
- The challenges of accessing beliefs via material remains of people’s actions

How did society work?

- No evidence for a single ruler (King Minos or a “priest king”
- Skilled craft production and external contacts
- Complex, hierarchical society with writing
- Regional centres of power (palaces & villas) under elite control
- There is writing & organisation

How many Minoan palaces on Crete?

- It depends on how you identify a ‘palace’
- Large complex, structures of the Middle and Late Bronze Age that share key
characteristics and functions, ritual spaces, and high quality goods
o Monumental architecture
 o Facilities for storage
o Evidence of craft production
o Evidence of witing and administration
o Ritual activity
- Origin of a ‘palace concept’? (around 200 BC)

Knossos
- Long history of settlement
- A labyrinth? – excavated by Sir Arthur Evans early in C20
o Myth od Minotaur at Knossos perhaps originated in its complex layout
- Central court & West Court
o Knossos ‘Sacred grove and dance’ fresco = West Court?
o Frescoes and archaeology correspond?
o Note raised walkways
o A ceremonial area?
o Rituals in the palace – courts for processions and bull-leaping?
 Bull-leaping very common in frescoes and other art forms
- Ritual in the palace: the throne room (a Mycenaean addition)
o Lustral basin in Throne Room complex – associated with washing, purification
o Solar alignment on solstices?
 Rolls along the mountain and shines on the person who sits on the
throne(?) – could be coincidental
o Comes from period when mainland Greeks were in control, more Mycenaean
than Minoan
- Storage magazines with pithoi (jars)
o Centralised control of food supply – controlling regional food supply?
o Writing as part of administration
o Certain hieroglyphic at Knossos
- East Wing – “industrial area” = craft production
o Faience (early form of glass)
o Sealstones (square/circles used for stamps)
o Metal
o Ceramics
o Ivory (carving tusks for ivory sculptures)
o Controlling/having access to luxury goods, people who are making them
- Grand staircase
- King’s and Queen’s chambers (Sir Arthur Evans’ naming)
o Hall of the Double Axes
o Note the ‘polythyron’ – the Minoan multiple door
- Minoans palaces within towns, e.g. Knossos Urban Landscape Project
o Not palaces in isolation, a part of the community but still the focal point

Function of Minoan Palaces?

- Ceremonial centres
- Administrative centres
- Production and consumption of goods
- Residential?
- Bastions of power (knowledge centres)
- What should we call them?
o Palace
o Court-centred compound
- Who was in charge?
o Evans = a priest king
o Factions of elite (how get/maintain authority?)

- Problems interpreting Knossos

o Evans’s “reconstitutions”(recreated)
 Throne room complex as it was vs. restored
o Evans’s Victorian world-view
 Queen’s megaron
 Lustral basin
 Piano nobile
 Throne room
 Priest king – royalty
o Multi-period site but excavated bias towards Minoan material