Crete's Minoan Secret: A History Of Civilisation | Island Of The Minotaur | Odyssey

[Music] this is crete megalo nissi the big island to the ancient greeks this was a dark and troubling place where the appetites of a frightful monster could only be appeased with a tribute of human flesh this was the minotaur's island with a sinister labyrinth at its heart [Music] just over a hundred years ago a british archaeologist called arthur evans came here to unearth the roots of these myths he found a people lost to history for thousands of years he called them the minoans [Music] the rediscovery of this sophisticated bronze age civilization astonished the world evans believed his minoans were unique a culture that thanks to its island home had kept the rest of the world at bay while it quietly developed into western europe's first civilization but new discoveries have revolutionized our understanding of the minoans adding fascinating layers of complexity to evan's first draft from their origins 5 000 years ago to their dramatic collapse some 2000 years later it's now clear that they were connected by the sea to the world around them rather than separated by it island races have the reputation for being a little arrogant and self-absorbed but in minoan times if you wanted not just to survive to build a civilization you had to reach out across the horizons to make new connections the minoans were islanders but they weren't insular many good things came to bronze age crete by way of the sea the raw materials from which the minoans fashioned their civilization but the sea also brought bad things natural catastrophes and man-made calamities and finally as recent archaeological research has revealed it would be a combination of seaborne disasters that would cause the eclipse of minoan civilization and its journey into the shadow lands of myth [Music] [Music] [Music] this is moklos a tiny humpback island moored off the north coast of crete if you want to understand how the sea shaped the destiny of minoan civilization this is the place to come moklos was first settled 5000 years ago and so belongs to the very beginning of the minoan story this busy town's prosperity depended above all on its port the gateway that connected it to the wider world of the aegean and the eastern mediterranean just three-week sailing could land the exotic wares of egyptian merchants from the south on these shores next stop east is cyprus and beyond that the old testament ports of tyre biblos and sidon head you north and you hit the greek mainland and the great ancient city of mycenae this was a prehistoric trade center and provided welcome dry land and a good meal for the traveling salesmen of the sea little wonder that crete has been called a stepping stone for the continents [Music] a hundred years ago when arthur evans was making the first dramatic discoveries at knossos it was natural to stress the originality and distinctiveness of the minoans evans conjured up a seductive vision of what he called a free and independent people flourishing on their island home but the most up-to-date research paints a rather different picture from the very beginning the minoans ventured out into the world beyond their shores because they lacked the material that defined their age bronze an alloy of copper and tin bronze is amazingly versatile you can use it to make anything from a precision stone cutter to an eight-foot two-man saw it was to the minoans what the microchip is to us the technology on which the progress of their civilization depended thanks to its geographical position close to the more advanced cultures of the middle east the secrets of bronze manufacture came early to crete it was probably introduced by migrants from cilicia present-day turkey some five thousand years ago a thousand years before it arrived in britain though they weren't natives these settlers can claim to be the first minoans an advance guard from the future whose arrival put crete one step ahead in the civilization stakes but without regular supplies of copper and tin minoan crete was in danger of slipping back into the stone age there was only one option to take to the seas [Music] the ancient greeks would have assumed that a legendary king like minos would have had a powerful fleet at his disposal to see off pirates to intimidate his neighbors to bring in supplies for his population when necessary but in the bronze age this is what sea power was this is a replica of a boat that went down off the coast of turkey it would have had just one sail room enough for about 24 oarsmen and it was made of a thin lattice of cypress wood with a cloth skin in effect it's nothing more than a giant kayak but it was frail little vessels like this that headed off often into hostile waters packed with goods for barter and exchange stitching together the cultures of the eastern mediterranean [Music] [Music] when they set sail in search of copper and tin the minoans became players on the world stage one of the frustrating things about them is the fact that they've left us little or nothing in the way of written records but that doesn't mean that they left no historical trace the cultures they came in contact with knew them and recorded them too think yourself back to some time in the middle of the 15th century bc imagine you're leaving crete and boarding energy aegean trading vessel heading south to egypt after just 21 days travelling you arrive at the nile there you pick up a barge and continue your journey to thieves and when you arrive you're presented with a picture of the minoans that's very different from the one painted by arthur evans [Music] in the valley of the kings is the tomb of rekhmiri a high-powered egyptian bureaucrat the tomb offers us a snapshot of the people who fell within egypt's sphere of influence the people of punt or ethiopia carry incense trees and animal hides the kushites from nubia have ivory and gold the retinues from syria have pots and carts and this delegation is described as the people of keftu but from what they're carrying we recognize them as minoans [Music] the tomb of rekmirei forces you to rethink your mental map starting with the names keftu rather than minoans since that seems to be the name that the bronze age cretans use to describe themselves and rather than thinking of crete as a south-eastern birthplace of europe we should think of it as a north-westerly extension of what we now call the middle east [Music] judging from the cretan products on display in rekmire's tomb and from other evidence the minoans specialized in the production of the desirable rather than the strictly useful deluxe pottery cosmetics fancy metal work and in one recorded case a pair of fine leather boots they made a name for themselves by taking everyday objects and giving them an unmistakable minoan spin doing to the products of the bronze age what the japanese would later do to electronics but there was one luxury product above all on which the reputation of this remarkable island workshop would arrest it and it started life under the sea so [Music] [Applause] [Music] this charmless little mollusk is a murex a sea snail that feeds off rotting flesh hence the disgusting smell that you're very lucky not to be experiencing directly but the minoans recognized its true potential they could extract something from this that was worth its weight in silver it was known simply as purple a textile die if bronze meant sinew and muscle purple meant glamour status and wealth it was quite simply one of the ancient world's most desirable commodities the roman author pliny described the purple of purples as being the color of congealed blood this was imperial purple reserved for heroes and emperors the athenian aeschylus wrote poetry about it is precious silver in classical times the eastern city port of tyre was recognized as the source for this precious die but recent archaeological work suggests that centuries before the minoans might well have pioneered the production of purple archaeologists working here at the port of comos found hundreds of murex dating back to the early manon period many of them with a tiny precise hole in the shell now this hole isn't man-made but mollusk made in the wild the murex is a predator as well as a scavenger hunting down other forms of shellfish boring into them and then sucking out the insides the murex here at kamos seem to have had a taste of their own medicine attacked by their own kind in a mass act of cannibalism now when creatures behave like that it suggests they're living uncomfortably close to each other what you might have here is some form of factory farming mass production makes sense when you realize it took twelve thousand murex to create enough dye to colour the hem of a single garment purple would have made the bronze age cretans brand leaders at the luxury end of the eastern mediterranean trade this rare highly transportable commodity allowed them to exploit not just the needs but the desires of their age every time a creek and traders seal the deal at the port of tyre or the markets of mycenae the reputation of the keftu and their legendary island would have been magnified but it wasn't just products that were crossing the seas people were too all over the eastern mediterranean in the bronze age artists architects and craftsmen are on the move lent out on a regular basis by rulers keen to impress on other foreign powers the sophistication and caliber of their workforce now once you get creative workers traveling around people with greedy eyes and a natural curiosity the possibilities for the cross-pollination of cultures the interplay of ideas becomes very real which might just explain the appearance of something entirely new to crete the palace the arrival of these extraordinary and enigmatic buildings a thousand years or so after the introduction of bronze to the island marks another significant milestone in the evolution of minoan culture [Music] so far palaces have been identified at knossos and malia on the north coast at zacross in the east and here at festos in the south and archaeologists reckon they're on the scent of two or three more each has its own individual features but they're all variations on the same basic theme of the labyrinth but who wrote the original evidence suggests that around this time migrant textile workers from manoa and crete may have been active in egypt in which case it's possible that while they were there they could have indulged in a bit of architectural espionage [Music] the cretans weren't the first to have a labyrinth it's thought that honor belongs to the egyptian kings who built a maze-like tomb near crocodopolis the city of crocodiles the egyptian labyrinth no longer exists but it was described by an awe-struck herodotus the greek historian who paid it a visit sometime in the 5th century bc of its endless rooms and corridors and chambers he wrote metonar anthropeon ergon it's hard to believe that this is the work of men if someone familiar with the architectural triumphs of classical greece was impressed imagine the impact such a structure would have had when it was first built around 1800 bc when the wonders of the world were fewer in number fifteen hundred years before herodotus you can imagine greeting migrant workers coming back home as fired up as he was full of stories about a building that battled the senses and left the visitor awestruck and as they were building their own masterpieces perhaps they held that image of the egyptian labyrinth in their [Applause] minds it might have been wiser for the minoans to study structural engineering rather than honing their fancy design skills because crete is earthquake country the stamping ground of the bull god poseidon whose groans and bellows from deep within the earth herald imminent disaster around 1700 bc 200 years after they were built the first palaces were destroyed in a series of devastating earthquakes if pleasing the gods was part of the reason for building them the gods didn't stay pleased for long it says a lot for the resilience of the cretans that within 50 years of the calamity they'd built new palaces on the site of the old ones bigger and better than those that had been destroyed [Music] but alongside the palaces a new kind of building began to appear in this period that is just as telling about the kind of place minoan creek had become country villas like this one at rathy petro surrounded now as it would have been three and a half thousand years ago by its own vineyards [Music] crete in the bronze age was often a troubled and unstable place rocked by natural disasters i'm not immune to man-made ones either but if you'd been able to come here to vati-petro around 1600 bc you would have tasted the good life because this was the minoan golden age the gods were on form the island was behaving itself you could have relaxed a little enjoyed the fruits of your civilization [Music] minoan palaces have been compared to medieval monasteries which would make vathi petra and the other places like it the equivalent of stately homes the big house for the surrounding area the main building would have been two possibly three stories high with some fine rooms on the east side perfect for taking in the morning sunshine in the courtyard was a shrine and around the back extensive workshops so this would have been a hive of activity in its day but the house's most intimate connection was with the land the fields of grain the olive trees and the vines this is where vata petro's grapes would have been brought to this fantastically well preserved minoan wine press this is wine making at its absolute simplest you'd have put your grapes in there kicked off your sandals clambered in and started to tread this region still produces good wine so it's quite possible that back then father petro was the toast of the island but perhaps the most significant thing about vathi petro is what you don't see here despite the wealth of vatha petro and of other country villas dotted round the island there's no evidence of any kind of fortification now that's significant in the same period over on the greek mainland mycenaean warlords the forefathers of the generation who would go on to fight the trojan war were holed up in fortress palaces often built on rocky heights divorced from the settlements down below strongholds from which they could dominate and into which they could retreat here in minoan crete a different spirit prevailed seven or eight generations would have known an island of huge palaces busy towns prosperous ports and fine villas set in a peaceful agricultural heartland a country at ease with itself but this stable sophisticated world existed on a knife edge within thirty years of being built vathi petro suffered its first but not its last earthquake damage so the world for the minoans must often have seemed a perilous and frightening place governed by potent sometimes vindictive powers who couldn't be understood only placated this is the presiding spirit of minoan crete in its golden age its icon and its pinup girl the snake goddess together with her more diminutive companion often called the votery she was discovered by arthur evans at canosos evans noted rather primly in his journals her matronly bosom before going on to describe the quality of the piece comparing it to the best mice and porcelain the goddess and her votery make a handsome duo with their fancy fashionable clothes their makeup and their jewelry but all the fine craftsmanship in the world can't disguise the fact something elemental and wild is going on here the goddess is fierce wide-eyed stare is matched by her voter's wrapped concentration and that gigantic snake it must be between eight and ten feet long grips her in a protective embrace from her slender waist right up to the tip of her headdress for all her glamour and sexual power this is a goddess that feeds off respect and fear not love [Music] [Music] [Music] few the precise details of minoan beliefs and rituals have been lost but tantalizing clues remain in seal stones and signet rings widely used in manoa and creatures stamps of ownership and identity and even it's been speculated the bronze age equivalent of a credit card close-up examination of these finely carved artifacts reveals a ritual world of chanting and singing ecstatic dancing as well as the famous bull leaping and playing a leading role throughout are what a clearly female priestesses for some these dominant women are proof that the mother goddess was worshipped in minoan crete the cult of this supreme female deity is said to have its roots back in the stone age predating by tens of thousands of years the male-dominated pantheon of gods that we're more familiar with the mother goddess was said to have authority over everything that really mattered from the fertility of crops and animals to the movement of the planet she rules over life and death from womb to grave the existence of one top female god is pretty hotly disputed these days what seems much more likely is that the island was crammed with a whole host of nature goddesses each with her own particular area of responsibility bringing the rain ripening the corn keeping those terrifying earthquakes in check the priestesses were their earthly representatives and may even have had some kind of economic control over the exploitation and distribution of their bounty a powerful position to be in but you have to remember in the bronze age that man's relationship with nature was much more about negotiation than exploitation when it took just two bad harvests to wipe out your entire food supplies you'd have been a fool to take earth's plenty for granted so led by their elegant priestesses the minoans would have spent a great deal of time and energy wooing and placating the powers that be it's long been assumed that the palaces played a key role in the religious rights of manoa and creed but there were other kinds of religious experience on offer less polished perhaps but just as intense [Music] hmm on mountain peaks in secret palace shrines deep in sacred caves narcotics would have played a part in consummating the minoans relationship with their gods bringing them closer to those elusive powers that controlled their lives one effigy of a blank-eyed goddess has the seed heads of poppies in her diadem already split open waiting for the opium to be extracted a cave like this is eerie and otherworldly enough as it is you can hear the stalactites growing faces and figures leap out at you from the rocks just imagine what visions you'd have seen if you'd shared in the mind-altering gift of the goddess scotino is a place where religious experience would have been raw and intense where faith was dosed with fanaticism where followers became true believers but what happened to those true believers when things started to go wrong when the deities in whom they'd invested so much suddenly appeared no longer to care the minoans were soon to find out [Music] [Music] after more than 1500 years of spectacular progress something very bad indeed happened to the minoans in crete sometime around 1450 bc from vati petro to moklos from festos to malia towns ports country houses and palaces all went up in flames all that is except for the preeminent palace you can still see the scorch marks of the fire that raged here three and a half thousand years ago this was a storm packed with pithoi those giant alibaba jars each of which could hold 40 gallons of highly flammable olive oil when this place went up it was the bronze age equivalent of a fire in an oil refinery the heat was so intense that the stone floor has vitrified turn to glass [Music] the thing about the fire here and the fires at all the other sites is that these were no accident at zacross a little palace in the far east of the island someone even went to the trouble of thawing off the necks of the pithois so that the oil could ignite more easily but what could have provoked these carefully planned acts of arson what lay behind this island-wide [Music] catastrophe the cataclysm that would engulf minoan civilization and pave the way for its ultimate destruction started here 70 miles north of crete on an island called therapy fira is the southernmost of the greek cycladic islands perfectly placed to act as a middleman for the trade routes that ran north from crete to the greek mainland and across to the coasts of asia minor the therians weren't minoans but they were under the spell of minoan culture their pottery their houses their way of life all followed a pattern set by the big island to the south fera had grown fat on the profits of bronze age haulage but its prosperity was built on shaky foundations because the island of thera is one big volcano [Music] at some point around 1530 bc the island began to stir first came a series of earthquakes so severe that most of the towns had to be abandoned but the gods were just getting warmed up a few months later things got really nasty [Music] [Music] ten times more powerful than the eruption of vesuvius of buried pompeii four times greater than krakatoa the eruption of thera was a true cataclysm a third of the island's land mass some 30 million cubic metres of hills and fields and towns was tossed 20 miles into the air or slipped into the sea the rest was buried beneath a blanket of ash and stones to a depth of 40 meters it's just 70 miles from there's crater to the north coast of crete and so the minoans had ringside seats for the death of their island neighbor first they would have heard the earth tremors distant unmistakable and all too horribly familiar mother nature throwing another tantrum [Music] but after the tremors something new and disturbing a dark stain spreading over the northern horizon the volcano stoking itself up for the grand finale and when the eruption finally came it would have been like an atom bomb going off the afterglow visible from crete's peak sanctuaries but the gods weren't finished yet now it was the minoan's turn to feel their anger centuries later a roman traveler was eyewitness to the after effects of seismic activity in this part of the world he described how the sea hauled itself back from the shore leaving in the abyss of the deep sea creatures stuck fast in the slime it must have been a ghastly and unnatural sight but it was merely a prelude to what happened just minutes later at first a low distant roar growing louder all the time and then a wall of water racing towards you at the speed of an express train the impact of the tsunami following thera varied across the northern coast of crete in some places there were waves between 10 and 20 feet tall impressive enough but here at moklos it's estimated that they reached 100 feet high that's higher than the island itself it would have swamped the town plucking boats out of the sea and spewing them up far inland the eruption of thera is one of those epoch-making catastrophes that can change the course of human history but for the minoans this wasn't apocalypse now the effects of thera on crete would be played out over a period of some 90 years not a sudden execution but a slow painful death after the tidal wave would have come the ash clouds blotting out the sun smothering the fields poisoning water supplies suffocating plants and animals the effects would have varied across the island with the east the worst hit but farming in the bronze age was a fragile affair and it wouldn't have taken much to jeopardize the harvest [Music] if the effects of thera were as profound as many believe widespread famine would have marked the beginning of a long and troubled era for crete ultimately it would pave the way for the violent climax of 1450 bc triada and other major centres of minoan power went up in flames close to the palace of knossos a discovery has been made that could cast some light on conditions in minoan crete following the therian catastrophe archaeologists found a jumble of human bones scattered around a late minoan house the remains have been identified as belonging to at least four children aged between eight and ten they seem to have been in good health when they died their flesh has been sliced away from the bone you can see the cut marks here the method is identical to that which minoans used for carving sheep some of the remains were found in a cooking pot along with the shells of edible snails for many archaeologists this is direct evidence of cannibalism whether for ritual purposes or simply because the minoans were starving in the aftermath of fira a search for scapegoats seems highly likely and it wasn't just humans who might have been on the receiving end of people's anger when the snake goddess and her follower were discovered at cornosos they'd been broken into pieces before being interred in an underfloor vault perhaps this was how the minoans negotiated the delicate business of decommissioning a once powerful deity whose protective force had apparently deserted her carefully disposing of her like radioactive waste with the old gods in disgrace this was a heaven-sent opportunity for new cults and new gods to assert their claims around this time a new style of decorative pottery appears with a gallery of creatures from the slimy deep according to some this suggests a shift of focus away from the earth and towards the sea which it just revealed with awesome emphasis its destructive powers so was this how the sophisticated and apparently stable minoan civilization collapsed not blown apart by a natural disaster but undermined by wars of religion that followed the cataclysm a recent discovery may hold a tantalizing clue to the forces that would finally tear minoan civilization apart [Music] [Music] i think this has to be one of the most poignant and beautiful artifacts to have been discovered in crete he's called akuros which means a boy he would have been decorated with rock crystal and gold and his body is made of hippopotamus ivory the choice of that material which was valuable and exotic combined with his stance which is sublime yet with a quiet power suggests that what we have here is no mere boy this is a boy [Music] [Music] the god of the workmanship is simply staggering the veins arteries sinews and bones rendered with an almost fanatical [Music] realism but of course what strikes you first about the figure is its desecration those scorched blackened limbs the face sliced off reminiscent of a catholic saint in the english reformation and this boy has been symbolically and physically emasculated his genitals are torn away despite his perfection or perhaps because of it this young god provoked in someone a passionate hatred the remains were found in pala castro an important minoan town at the eastern end of crete the litter of burned fragments was scattered around a purpose-built shrine in which the kuros would have been displayed when the shrine was first excavated the telltale's signs of fire damage soon appeared but this was no ordinary fire like the one at ayatriada it was started deliberately in fact the fire's ferocity was intensified by blocking up doorways to create a through draft like a blast furnace the result was a kind of controlled explosion that tore the place apart then the attackers turned their attention to the cross the kuros was snatched from the sanctuary broken at its base and then smashed face first against this door post its head its neck and one of its arms flew off a couple of yards over there its torso and its remaining arm fell where i'm standing its hair which would have been made of finely wrought gold filaments was carried off on the wind generated by the fire and finally its legs which served as a convenient handhold were tossed back into the sanctuary where they burned at temperatures of over 1800 degrees when times get tough even the most outward-looking cultures can turn in on themselves and despite the long-minoan tradition of artistic innovation the social dislocation caused by thera may have brought more fundamentalist instincts to the surface maybe there was something about the kuros that was just too new too alien to some it may have seemed a graven image or a foreign god but perhaps the greatest affront was that this was a male god there may never have been a single mother goddess in crete but what's certain is that female goddesses and priestesses were highly visible and possibly even dominant so what it seems to me is that the kuros represents a breakaway cult following the spectacular failure of the goddesses to protect crete after thera they were demoted and the honours usually afforded to them appropriated by what had previously been a minor male god so what happened here at palo castro could perhaps have been the revenge of scorned women against an upstart boy [Music] a civil war sparked by religion is only one of a number of theories that might explain why minoan civilization collapsed sometime around 1450 bc all we do know for sure is that by then greek speaking myceneans from the mainland were installed at knossos whether they came as conquerors or simply stepped in to pick up the pieces isn't clear but they were in many ways the last minoans rebuilding some of the ports and palaces that had been destroyed putting the island back on its feet for the next two centuries the fortunes of the minoans and the mycenaeans were inextricably linked according to homer one of the largest contingents of ships for the mycenaean assault on troy came from crete but if the islanders shared in the triumphs of the mainlanders they would also share their fate around 1200 bc mycenaean power on the greek mainland was destroyed massive tribal movements slave revolts civil war have all been blamed but whatever it was that did for the myceneans it didn't confine itself to the mainland sooner or later it crossed the sea and found its way to crete the remnant of minoan civilization was forced to take refuge in remote mountain hideouts like this one kaffi when we talk about the death of a civilization it conjures up apocalyptic visions tinged with flames and blood but for the minoans the end came creeping in like a chill mist in this bleak and inhospitable landscape the final chapter of their amazing history would be written those refugees who first made their way up here in the troubled 12th century bc must have found very little to love about carthy no bull leaping or ecstatic dancing here just time to watch the clouds roll into the lasithi plateau and spot the vultures circling in the skies overhead and all the while anxiously scanning the horizon for any signs that the cataclysm which had enveloped the coast was feeling its way up to this mountainside hideout [Music] we will never know for sure exactly why the minoans abandoned their palaces and set out for places like cathy but what i think you can say with absolute certainty standing here on the edge of the world is that the people who came here were very very scared so scared that it would take a hundred years before they dared to venture back down to the lowlands [Music] wow

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 418,985

Rating: 4.867732 out of 5

Keywords: classical history, classic history, minotaur island, theseus, ancient greece, ancient history, the legend of the minotaur, minotaur, greek history

Id: ysnzl5fdtMI

Length: 48min 19sec (2899 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021