And while Stonehenge stood weathering on the Salisbury Plain,
And while Egyptian civilization recovered from the First
Intermediate Period into the Middle Kingdom, on an island in
The middle of the Mediterranean Sea, another palace civilization
Was reaching its own apex.
Crete. The largest island of the
Aegean Sea. The civilization of the Minoans.
Minoan is a modern name, coined by Arthur Evans in the late
Nineteenth century after King Minos, the legendary Cretan
King of Greek mythology. The Minoans themselves called
Themselves something else—we do not know what, because their
Language, written in the script we call Linear A, has never
Been deciphered. The Minoans are the second great undeciphered
Civilization of the Bronze Age. (The Indus Valley is the first.)
We can read the shape of their society—we know how they built, what
They ate, what they wore, what they painted, how they organized
Their economy, how they traded, and roughly how their religion was
Structured. We cannot read their words. The Linear A tablets are
Legible as symbols. They are not legible as language. A thousand
Tablets. Ten thousand fragments. Their speech is silent.
The
Minoan civilization emerged in its palatial form around nineteen
Hundred BCE and flourished until approximately fifteen hundred BCE.
The great palace complexes—at Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, and
Zakros—were the administrative, economic, and religious centers of
The civilization. They were not fortified. Minoan Crete, astonishingly,
Had no city walls. The palaces rose directly out of the landscape
Without defensive architecture. The interpretation is that the
Minoans had naval supremacy in the Aegean and did not need
Land fortifications; their security was provided by their fleet.
The idea of a civilization secure enough to live in unwalled
Palaces is, by Bronze Age standards, extraordinary. Almost every
Other civilization of the period had walled cities as a matter
Of survival. The Minoans did not.
And inside the palaces,
The culture was visually extraordinary. Minoan frescoes depict
Dolphins, octopuses, flying fish, wild goats, lilies, crocuses,
Saffron-gatherers, bull-leapers, priestesses, processions of
Offering-bearers—a visual vocabulary that is unmistakably alive
With nature, color, and movement. The Minoans loved the sea and
Loved the land and loved the animals and plants that surrounded them.
Their palaces are full of light-wells and air-shafts and colonnaded
Courtyards. They invented indoor plumbing—the palace at Knossos
Had flush toilets, drainage systems, and hot and cold running water
In the royal apartments, four thousand years ago, a luxury that
Most of the world would not match until the twentieth century. The
Palace architecture is labyrinthine, multi-story, open-plan, with
Frescoes in every major room. Knossos itself may have been the
Historical basis for the Greek myth of the Labyrinth—the winding
Maze in which the Minotaur was imprisoned. The palace has some
Fifteen hundred rooms arranged around a central court, connected by
Corridors and stairways that have no single organizing axis. A
Greek visitor, confronted with this layout, might reasonably have
Concluded that the place was built to confuse and conceal. And the
Bull motif—so central to Minoan iconography, with bull-leaping
Frescoes, bull-horns of consecration on every altar, bull-headed
Rhyta—would have lent itself naturally to the Minotaur myth. The
Minotaur, a bull-headed man at the center of a labyrinth, is a
Greek memory of Minoan religion, distorted through the lens
Of centuries of cultural intermediation after the Minoan collapse.
The Minoan religion itself was probably centered on a mother goddess—
A figure depicted in the famous Snake Goddess statuettes, a woman
In an open bodice holding two writhing snakes. The snake symbolism
Is associated with chthonic earth-goddess worship throughout the
Ancient Mediterranean. The Minoans had priestesses, not priests—
Nearly every religious scene in the frescoes features female
Officiants. The religion appears to have been goddess-centered, with
A male consort figure (a young god who dies and is reborn, possibly
Related to the later Greek Dionysus) but with clear priority
On the female divine. This is the old European goddess religion
That Marija Gimbutas argued survived in pockets across the
Mediterranean into the Bronze Age. Crete is one of those pockets.
The mother goddess and her snakes. The saffron gatherers. The
Priestesses with their processional garments. Minoan religion is
The female-centered religion of old Europe, preserved on an island
Long enough to become the Bronze Age's most visually sophisticated
Civilization.
And the Minoans traded. Their ships reached every
Corner of the Eastern Mediterranean. Minoan pottery has been
Found in Egypt (where Minoans are depicted in Eighteenth Dynasty
Tomb paintings as the "Keftiu"—a people bringing tribute to the
Pharaoh), in the Levant, in Anatolia, in the Cyclades, on
Mainland Greece. Minoan influence shapes the early Mycenaean
Culture on the Greek mainland. The Aegean is, for several
Hundred years, a Minoan lake. And the wealth that flowed through
Crete—in olive oil, wine, copper, tin, ceramics, textiles, and
Whatever else passed through the palace storerooms—made the
Civilization one of the wealthiest of the Bronze Age.
And then, around fifteen hundred BCE, it ended.
The cause was,
Almost certainly, the eruption of Thera—the volcanic island
Now called Santorini, about seventy miles north of Crete. The
Thera eruption was one of the largest volcanic events in human
History. It ejected an estimated sixty to one hundred cubic
Kilometers of material into the atmosphere. It blasted the center
Of the island of Thera into the sea, leaving the crescent-shaped
Caldera that is now the island of Santorini. The ashfall reached
Crete, Anatolia, Egypt, and as far as Greenland (where the
Layer is still visible in ice cores). A tsunami from the caldera
Collapse would have struck the northern coast of Crete, devastating
Coastal cities and ports. The ash would have poisoned the fields
And disrupted agriculture for years. And the Minoan civilization,
Dependent on its naval commerce and its agricultural base, was
Shattered by the eruption.
The Minoan civilization did not
End immediately. The palaces continued to function for another
Generation or two. But the civilization was wounded. And then,
Around fourteen hundred and fifty BCE, the Mycenaean Greeks from
The mainland—previously junior partners of the Minoans, culturally
Influenced by but politically independent—invaded and took over.
The Mycenaeans were R1b-carriers, Indo-European-speakers, the
Bronze Age manifestation of the Yamnaya expansion that had reached
Greece. They occupied Knossos and the other palaces. They replaced
Linear A with Linear B, a script adapted to write the Mycenaean
Greek language (and which, unlike Linear A, was successfully
Deciphered in nineteen fifty-two by Michael Ventris—who showed
That Linear B recorded an archaic form of Greek). The Minoan
Civilization was not destroyed—it was absorbed. And the Minoan
Religious and artistic traditions continued, in hybridized form,
Into the Mycenaean period. The Snake Goddess became, eventually,
The Greek Athena. The bull-leaping became the mythology of the
Minotaur. The labyrinth became a Greek cliché. The Minoan
Substrate persisted in Greek culture, under the Indo-European
Overlay, for the rest of Greek civilization.
And the language—the one actual Minoan language, the one that
Linear A wrote—is still undeciphered. We have the tablets. We can
Read the signs. We cannot match the signs to words in any known
Language. Linear A, like the Indus Valley script, is one of the
Great undeciphered scripts of the ancient world. Scholars have
Proposed various possibilities—that Linear A records an Anatolian
Language, or a pre-Greek Aegean language, or an isolate of its
Own—but no decipherment has been accepted. The Minoans wrote. We
Cannot read them. The silence of Linear A is one of the permanent
Gaps in our knowledge of the Bronze Age.
The Gaiad honors the
Minoans as the great pre-Greek civilization of the Aegean.
The peaceful island civilization. The mother-goddess religion. The
Bull-leapers and saffron-gatherers. The unfortified palaces of
Knossos and Phaistos. The ships that carried olive oil to Egypt.
The priestesses with their snake-bracelets. The flushing toilets
And the light-wells and the frescoes of dolphins swimming along
The palace walls. A civilization unlike the militarized empires of
Mesopotamia and Egypt—smaller, more feminine, more nature-centered,
More sea-oriented, more confident in its own security. A civilization
That tried to live in palaces without walls. And that, for several
Hundred years, succeeded. Until the volcano erupted, and the
Northern Aegean was blanketed in ash, and the Mycenaean warriors
Came down from the mainland, and the mother goddess was folded
Into the pantheon of a sky-father religion, and the Minoan tongue
Fell silent in the mouths of its speakers. The island remained.
The palaces remained. The frescoes—repaired, restored, reconstructed—
Still show the bull-leapers and the saffron-gatherers and the
Dolphins in the light-wells. And we still call them Minoans,
By the name the Greeks gave them, which is not their own name.
Crete. Minoan. The unwalled palaces. The mother goddess. The
Bull-leapers. The island civilization. The great peaceful
Civilization of the Aegean, wrecked by a volcano and absorbed
By the Mycenaeans, but surviving—in fragments, in images, in
The substrate of later Greek mythology—into the present.
Minoan Crete. Knossos. Linear A unread. Stand.