The Minoans: No Bull

Ancient Crete: A Reconstruction

Do you know was the first civilization to emerge historically in Europe? Interestingly, before 1900, no one did. In that year a very dedicated British explorer, historian and reporter-turned-archaeologist named Sir Arthur Evans began excavating on the large island of Crete in the southeast Mediterranean. What he uncovered there were the remains of a once-mighty maritime empire, which had flourished during the second millennium BCE. To his delight and amazement, Evans and his team uncovered an ancient "palace" composed of over 1000 rooms at the site of Knossos, located near the northern central coast. The rambling edifice put Evans in mind of the legendary Cretan "labyrinth" of Greek mythology, and inspired by the thrill and sense of wonder at his discovery, he dubbed this ancient civilization "Minoan," after the famous King Minos, the Homeric master of Crete and his island realm - the home of the mighty monster, the Minotaur.

King Minos

Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941)

Palace at Knossos

It was one of those extraordinary discoveries where fact met fancy, and our entire picture of our own ancient history began to change. As Evans and his team worked on, it soon became obvious that this "Minoan" civilization was so old that it even pre-dated the recently discovered Bronze Age "Mycenaean" civilization that had been unearthed by Evans’ German forerunner and contemporary, Heinrich Schliemann just a few years earlier. A long-distant world that had been considered for centuries as the invention of later Greek minds was being summoned from the earth into actual factual existence!

But what was myth and what was reality? In ancient legends, Crete had a complex and important role in the development of the Greek world. There the mighty Minos, a son of Zeus by a mortal woman named Europa (who gave her name to the continent) ruthlessly ruled for generations. His wife, Pasiphae (the daughter of Helios, the sun god) had a thing for . . . well . . . a bull. To be fair, this was no ordinary bull. It was a beautiful white one that was a gift from Poseidon, god of the sea himself. Indeed, so much did she crave the "company" of this mighty beast that she instructed the master craftsman Daedalus to create for her a hollow cow in which she could she could hide, and through her positioning and its strategic design, she could safely mate with the object of her passion.

Unfortunately, after one such coupling (which one imagines must have been pretty intense), Pasiphae unfortunately conceived, and ultimately gave birth to the monstrous beast known as the Minotaur, who had the head of a bull and the body of a man.

Greek bust of the Minotaur

Naturally, King Minos was not terribly pleased when he heard the news, especially since this hybrid creature devoured men and women with an astonishing ferocity. Minos summoned Daedalus and demanded that he do something about it. Daedalus and his son, Icarus, immediately went to work and constructed a vast maze called the "labyrinth" to keep the creature contained.

 The Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth

Now, naturally Freud could have had a field day with all of this material, but as far as being any more that a product of the always-wild Greek imagination, no one had given much credence to the story. But as Evans and his crew continued their excavations into the Knossos palace, they were stunned to discover a wealth of bull’s horns placed as religious devotional objects. Even more shocking were statues and elaborately painted frescoes of people participating in what can only be called a ritual act of "bull-leaping!"


Bull-leaping fresco from Knossos

A "bull-leaping" figure

Just what the hell was going on here on this Greek island more that 1500 years ago, anyway? Had there really been a King Minos? Of course, nobody thought that there had been an actual Minotaur, but could the story be a very, very ancient piece of evidence of a bull-worshipping cult on Crete? Some intellectuals, such as the pioneering anthropologist and mythologist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) speculated that the bull was an ancient sun symbol, and that the myth of Pasiphae’s dalliance with the beast was a remnant of an ages-old symbolic union between a queen and a fertility god. This was just speculation, of course. But just what exactly were the Minoans religious beliefs and practices?

Well, to tell the truth, no one exactly knows. You see, we can’t read their language. In the palace at Knossos there were discovered thousands of clay plates with a pre-alphabetic script written on them. There were two different kinds, from two different time periods. The first one, Evans called "Linear A," the second "Linear B." Eventually, "Linear B" was decoded to reveal that it was a very ancient form of Greek. To this day, nobody has yet deciphered the "Linear A" texts. But we know it’s not Greek. In fact, it’s nothing that resembles anything else that we’re familiar with.

Just who were the Minoans? Where did they come from, and just what were they doing there? Did they really jump over bulls?



STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT MORE!

petey