What Does The Minotaur Legend Tells Us About The Minoans | Island Of The Minotaur | Odyssey

and down he went into that doleful gulf through winding paths among the rocks under caverns and arches and galleries and he turned on the left hand and on the right hand till his head was dizzy but all the while he held his clue and when he saw him he stopped a while for he had never seen so strange a beast his body was a man's but his head was the head of a bull and his teeth were the teeth of a lion and with them he tore his prey and when he saw theseus he roared of all the greek myths the story of the labyrinth is one of the most dramatic and unforgettable a subterranean struggle between the ultimate hero theseus and the ultimate monster the minotaur the offspring of an unnatural union between a woman and a bull it was told and retold for centuries before anyone thought to write it down by which time it had become just another great story from the back catalogue of the ancient world but the roots of the myth go deep to a time before history when stories like this were the way that people made sense of themselves and their past so where did the greeks get the story of a flesh-eating bullman lurking in a dark menacing labyrinth to answer that question you have to journey far into the past fifteen hundred years before the parthenon was built more than a thousand years before homer back 5 000 years to an extraordinary time and place bronze age crete the minotaurs island on the minotaur's island everything was an experiment it was a prehistoric society yet a sophisticated and cultured one that gave birth to huge palaces and beautiful frescoes but after thousands of years the civilization disappeared so suddenly and completely that all that remained were half remembered half invented fragments the stuff of myth and then a hundred years ago in a spectacular archaeological coup its people were rediscovered and named the minoans the society that spawned the minotaur rose back out of the magical cretan earth the greeks call crete megalo nissi the big island and compared to the other islands of the aegean it is a whale in a school of minnows but it's actually not that megalo 150 miles long and never much more than 30 miles wide an isolated landmass floating in the middle of the libyan and aegean seas what is striking though is the amazing variety of landscapes that creep manages to pack into the narrow space between its shores enough to satisfy a continent there are forests of pine date palm groves skirting broad sandy beaches and no less than 15 mountain ranges three of them high enough to keep their snow well into spring rivers course year round through the veins of the island winding down deep narrow gorges and feeding the stalactites in endless subterranean caverns travel around and you understand why crete has been such a fertile breeding ground for tales of daring do love and sex blood and gore anything seems possible here even the incredible story of a king his wife and a pure white bull according to the myth crete was the realm of the powerful king minos a scrupulous lawgiver who was also prone to that very greek form of arrogance hubris one day to prove how far he was in favor with the gods he prayed for a bull to be delivered to him from the scene poseidon's very generously obliged producing this white creature assuming though that minos would do the decent thing and offer it back to him in sacrifice but the king was too enamored of his fine gift he sacrificed another in its place keeping the white ball safe in a field a big mistake the god was offended poseidon's punishment was to spark and minus his wife pacify a fierce uncontrollable sexual longing for this beautiful white creature this is where the intriguing daedalus begins to play his part in this strange story he was the master inventor an athenian according to the self-regarding mainland greeks but working in crete in the service of king minos pacifier knew that if anyone could find a way for her to satisfy her lust for the bull it would be daedalus the mr fixit of the bronze age never at a loss deidelus arranged in the squeamish victorian version of the story for pacify to interview the ball he designed a hollow cow set on wheels with room enough for the queen inside this pantomime creation was left in the field and pacify clambered in the result of the interview was the birth of the minotaur a hideous hybrid with the body of a man and the head and horns of a bull and so the story goes that daedalus came to design a huge subterranean labyrinth to hide the shameful offspring of minus his wife and there every nine years the tribute children seven youths and seven maidens will be brought from athens to satiate the minotaur's taste for human flesh that is until the brave theseus arrived minos daughter clever beautiful ariadne was the keeper of the keys to the labyrinth and with her help theseus set off to slay the beast you can't help wondering whether there's a grain of truth alongside all this mythical and ball whether the athenian tribute speaks at the time when mainland greece was under crete's thumb and the triumph of theseus over the minotaur points to the moment when the tables were turned of course there was no half man half ball perhaps there was a flesh and blood king minos and a wily princess ariadne you could speculate for hours but it's not time wasted nothing comes from nowhere and some of the greatest archaeological discoveries were driven by the need to know where the myths had a historical leg to stand on the first to test the reality of the myths was heinrich schliemann one part pioneer archaeologist two parts treasure seeker in 1871 at hislick on the coast of modern-day turkey he discovered what he claimed was the site of the troy that homer had written about the fines were electrifying including a spectacular hoard of jewelry that he got his wife sophie to model for an enthralled world it seemed that the works of homer were history not poetry and the public was gripped but treyman didn't rest on his laurels he turned his attention to the other players in houma's great epic at mycenae on the greek mainland what schliemann discovered there was what he believed to be the home of the greek warlord agamemnon graves just inside the city walls were opened to reveal the military trappings and wealth of the high king swords daggers cups rings and most famously of all the death masks crafted from wafer thin glittering gold for some classically educated scholars this was a real shock for them prehistoric civilization was a contradiction in terms and yet there was something undeniably civilized and sophisticated about all this stuff but while some simply gaupped at schliemann's fines there were others whose instinct told them that the horde from mycenae was just the beginning one of britain's leading egyptologists flinders petrie argued that the myceneans as they were now known were no sudden apparition these pottery fragments some of his own finds from egypt had already got him thinking these are 300 years older than that treasure from mycenae he knew they weren't egyptian and he had a strong hunch that they came from somewhere in the aegean find the people that made these petrie said and you'll find whoever it was that came before the myceneans and i bet they'll turn out to be europe's first civilization the starters pistol had been fired and one of the greatest archaeological races of all time was up and running somewhere in the aegean there was a lost world just waiting to be found and so in 1900 chasing the lead of schliemann and petrie a 48-year-old british archaeologist with a long distinguished career behind him came to crete to a place called knossos his name was arthur evans and knossos was soon to be inextricably linked with him when arthur evans began digging here on the morning of march 23 1900 he could have given you a dozen sound archaeological reasons for picking the site the place was littered with tantalizing clues roman coins pottery shards from homer's time ancient walls disappearing into the hillside and then there were these exquisite prehistoric seal stones and rings that locals have been finding in the area for generations knossos was a site with a big label on it saying excavate me layer upon layer of topsoil was carried away at first in wicker baskets by the 31 strong workforce then two weeks later as the size of the task dawned on evans by 100 men using iron wheelbarrows and as the speed of the excavations picked up so did the excitement evan's sketched plan of the emerging walls with scrolled edges like the pirates maps in children's books complete with an x to mark the spot where treasure had been found the buildings they were uncovering here were far bigger and more complex than anything that troy or mycenae had to offer wherever they dug they just seemed to go on and on cascading staircases twisting corridors a bewildering complement of rooms some small and intimate others elegant and imposing this was a labyrinth but far more than just a monstrous cage the site that arthur evans and his men had uncovered at canosos surpassed the expectations of even the most optimistic hunter of the past a 5 000 year old civilization previously buried in myth had been brought blinking back into the real world he hadn't found a city of gold but the horde from knossos was even richer than that of troy or mycenae the quality of the finds was extraordinary but it wasn't just the craftsmanship that made a powerful impression a month into the excavations the men digging at the west entrance discovered a huge imposing fresco fragment of a charging bull it was life-size and life-like sculpted from lime plaster in high relief meeting this creature head-on as it emerged from the earth was a spine-chilling experience as one of the workmen brushed back the soil to expose its flaring nostrils and sharp horns he screamed out in terror believing he disturbed a demon or worse still the devil himself evans had found his labyrinth and his bulls all he needed now was evidence of the king minos and the myths would be fully realized on the 13th of april 1900 just three weeks after the first basket of earth had been filled workmen began to uncover a complex of little anti-chambers leading into a main room behind on the south wall workers unearthed a fresco fragment of a bull's hoof and all around the room fine gypsum benches but it was the north wall that harbored the most exciting secret here evans uncovered something he must have dreamt about finding an elaborately carved throne harriet boyd a pioneering young american archaeologist was lucky enough to be with evans when the throne was revealed in her journal notes she described the moment of discovery intense excitement she wrote as a workman removed the last earth from the oldest throne in europe and the stone chair stood forth intact evans toyed with the idea that this was the throne of ariadne apparently reasoning that the wide moulded seat was more suited to the ample buttocks of a woman but before long he was decided and in a telegram to the times he announced the discovery of the throne of king minos the minoans had arrived the discovery of the throne was the culmination of years of dreaming evans later said it was as though he'd been given an open sesame and a prehistoric civilization beyond his wildest imaginings had appeared from a crack in the earth if kenoshos was indeed the seat of king minos he certainly had good taste in palatial pads this was an incredible structure and befitting one of the most powerful kings of the bronze age it's built with no expense spared at its peak knossos covered an area of 700 000 square meters more than three times the size of buckingham palace and its grounds with an approach as grand as the male if you thought the romans had the monopoly on precision road building then think again this is europe's first made road it was constructed out of clay cement and stones and faced with limestone slabs you have to imagine it flanked on either side with grand houses leading straight from the town of knossos right up to the palace deidolus himself would have been proud of this elegant boulevard it's a masterpiece of prehistoric urban design at the risk of sounding like an estate agent the palace boasts an impressive array of original features hinge doors drainage systems and what evans famously described as a flush toilet another first for the minoans is a building that adds up to more than the sum of its parts you feel you're being taken on a journey that's been expressly designed to beguile and seduce as well as bewilder and confuse you find yourself in gorgeous stone clad rooms and then walking past rows of pithoi man's size alibaba jars in dark sunken storms each of the seven or eight separate entrances feels like it's reserved for a different occasion some for privileged access some like here at the north entrance for immediate or inspiring impact but whatever route you take brings you here the immense central court 54 meters from north to south 27 meters wide the size of four tennis courts fitted together with room enough to spare clearly this space could accommodate huge numbers of people but no one knows what it was used for it's a giant question mark at the heart of knossos archaeologists are still trying to solve the riddle of this enigmatic space but the most enduring theory is also the most dramatic that the central court was the stage for a spectacular religious ritual this was tauro cathapsia bull leaping and it was to kanosos what gladiatorial combat was to rome there are lots of clues from the known art as to how these scary sounding ceremonies would have been performed although there's still plenty of room for interpretation and i'm sure every seasoned bull leaper would have had his own repertoire of tricks one possible technique though would have been to have grabbed the bull by its horns as it charged towards you to be flung up onto its back as the animal tossed its head and then somersault back down onto the ground whoever pulled off these crazy stunts must have been fantastically strong and supple especially bearing in mind the sheer size of these animals because these were cross-breed orgs foul tempo standing six foot high at the shoulder and with a horn span to match aurochs have been extinct for nearly four centuries so just try to imagine being in the presence of a beast whose hoof print is the size of a man's head bulls had been worshipped as symbols of fertility since the stone age so perhaps bull leaping was an attempt to capture some of their elemental power the people who did this were clearly revered as you can see from this beautiful ivory figurine of one of the leapers confident and sinewy his limbs have been elongated to emphasize his agility for the minoans bull leaping was as much about self-belief as religious belief you should think of the bull as an honoured guest the king of the beasts invited to the palace an envoy from the natural world he's here as a dancing partner formidable and impressive but it's still the bull leapers that are calling the tunes these displays weren't designed to reduce the potency of the ball but for the minoans one thing was clear the bull charges because that's what he does man leaps because he chooses to but it wasn't just in the bull-leaping ritual that the minoans reveled in their intimacy with the natural world their art is infused with the same spirit of self-confidence and daring it seems there was no style they wouldn't try no materials they wouldn't use no technique too complicated to employ it's almost as though once the minoans realized what humans were capable of they couldn't stop themselves they became addicted to creating from ivory carving to fiance beads from fresco painting to stone sculpture it was all done with elegance and panache minoan artists took their cue from the natural world but they weren't its slavish imitators nature provided the raw materials texture form colour and they felt free to play with them to manipulate and extemporize the hot house culture of this island produced some fabulously exotic fruit these eggshell thin cups are called kumari's wear named after the cave where many examples were found they are almost 4 000 years old but they'd sit happily on the style pages of a glossy magazine and it's not just the artifacts that seem to speak to us across the millennia the recovery of this fresco fragment during the second season at knossos is one of the most charming of all the stories to have come out of the dig the visiting french scholar when he saw the pieces being reassembled burst out may cesande parisienne the basic idea being that this three and a half thousand year old woman wouldn't have seemed out of place strolling down the champs-elysees for evans la parisienne as she became known was the perfect minoan refined sophisticated strangely modern and above all european right from the start he'd believed that the prehistoric cultures of greece and the aegean were different from contemporary cultures of egypt and the middle east knows on its artistic riches had only served to strengthen this impression the culture of the minoans he said expressed a free and independent spirit independent that is of the powerful pull of the other cities and kingdoms of the eastern mediterranean evans pictured his minoans as lords and masters of their own island culture able to keep the rest of the world at arm's length he came to see minoan creed as the place where europe's first nations or birth took place and the culture from which all subsequent renaissance sprang classical greece imperial rome even the good old british empire itself all of them had a trace of minoan dna in their genes evidence for what was arguably the western world's first civilization had emerged from the earth at knossos how many more secrets was the rest of crete still hiding while evan's worker ants continued to pick over the bones of knossos other archaeologists went minoan hunting elsewhere on the island further along the north coast from knossos french archaeologists turned their attention to a site here at malia and what they discovered along with similar finds in the south added a rich intriguing layer of complexity to the picture that evans had started it soon became clear that although the palace at knossos was a prodigy it wasn't unique and if daedalus had designed it then others had been playing copycat all over crete here at malia in festas on the south of the island other palaces were discovered in quick succession they're all more compact than knossos and each has its own unique features but they're still built to the same blueprint everyone has its central courtyard everyone has its warren of pithoy packed storms and everyone has its public arena where palace and the people met suddenly labyrinths were cropping up all over crete they all clearly belonged to the same architectural family as knossos said they were all immediately given the same family name palaces it's a tribute to the persuasiveness of evan's vision that the name is stuck but how appropriate is it you might think buildings as grand as mali are all the proof you need for the existence of some kind of monarchy why build a palace fit for a king other than to put a king in it but then when you look for other telltale signs of a ruling dynasty bronze age crete seems surprisingly republican because unlike other contemporary cultures such as egypt and the middle east here there are no giant or inspiring statues no insignia stamping a badge of ownership on buildings on the land around them there is only an empty throne king minos is conspicuous by his absence when minoans are shown performing some kind of public function they usually share the stage with others suggesting power is also shared no one emerges as top dog all men seem equal and if anything the women seem more equal than the men cretan girls loom large in art and myth not just decorative creatures but women who appear to be prestigious and influential custodians of their culture but however prominent women are the overriding atmosphere in the palaces is unexpectedly corporate and anonymous so maybe malia and knos weren't palaces at all but places where the minoan people came together to exercise their collective power and as soon as you managed to put the seductive vision of kings and princesses to one corner of your mind the possibilities are endless what i'm reminded of when i visit the palaces are monasteries just imagine those powerful institutions with one foot in heaven and one foot planted very firmly in the real world alongside the abbeys and shrines there were workshops and offices turning out anything from illuminated manuscripts to potent liqueurs the surrounding farmlands would have been worked by the people but the fruits of their labor belonged to the monastery the palaces too may have functioned as granaries for the gods and festival halls in which the harvests could be stored and the generosity of the gods honoured like other bronze age cultures the minoans relied on the food that they could grow to survive without rich farmland timely spring rain and the sun at harvest time these storms usually fall to bursting would have been empty and bitter with the taste of dust keeping on side those gods that decided whether you ate that year or died hungry was a serious business in egypt at this time we know that over a third of the year 120 days were devoted to agricultural festivals it's where the festival hall theory comes into its own perhaps these palaces were giant venues dedicated to the celebration of the island's fertility on this beautiful vase you can sense both the relief and the joy in the faces of the harvesters as they carry symbolic sheaves from the fields singing and laughing perhaps they're on their way to the palace to give thanks to their gods for another successful harvest in a world of palaces and frescoes and beautiful artifacts it's easy to overlook the ordinary minoans who would have been kept far too busy to worry about the finer points of bull leaping luckily the archaeological riches of crete weren't restricted to the pot end of the market welcome to the cheap seats while grand buildings like canosa and festos were being excavated harriet boyd the american archaeologist was exploring a site at gorneau that has told us a huge amount about minoan crete beyond the palaces the treasures found at gorneau were the stuff of everyday life fish hooks carpenters saws potter's wheels all a far cry from the stair-tied vessels and the ivory figurines of the palaces and yet it was populations like these that made the minoan world go round it was their ambitious craftsmanship that produced those objects their industry that put food on the table for the kings or priestesses or whoever it was that lived at places like knossos in a society that was so productive everyone had their role to play and if the gods had been kind and the harvest were plentiful you can imagine the men and women of gournier enjoying life in their flourishing market town we can even visualize the kind of homes the inhabitants of gournier might have lived in this three thousand year old clay model of a house is amazingly detailed it seems that the houses had no more than five small rooms on the ground level basements for storage and an open flat roof no doubt the prime spot to get some relief from the heat and increase the chances of a good night's sleep most of the houses at gorneau would have been white just like the picture postcard greek villages are today but fresco evidence suggests that some of the wealthier homes would have been given a subtle color wash the palette was taken direct from the landscape and the pigments would have come straight out of the earth yellow ochres and red oxides that had given you everything from a delicate pink to a rich chocolate brown i'd have loved to have seen gournia back then a watercolor painting clinging to its hillside looking out across the sea the people of gornia were clearly experiencing a different minoan world than the world of kanosos but the same collective spirit survives everyone working together for the good of the whole so the community could flourish and thrive in its island home by the end of the 1920s minoan civilization from the poshest of palaces to the humblest fisherman's cottage had come a long way from being lost but whatever extra details archaeologists like boyd added the master plan belonged to evans he'd been the first to enter the labyrinth he'd given the minoans their name defined the qualities that made them unique and in his multi-volume book the palace of minos he'd even sketched out a plausible history for them from their sudden rise to their equally dramatic collapse around 1450 bc as evan saw it the palace of knossos had emerged victorious from a bitter island-wide civil war that had left the rest of crete in flaming ruins even in their moments of destruction it seemed the fate of the minoans lay in their own hands free from outside influences arthur evans was a brilliant archaeologist and he was a showman his version of the minoans was made up of spade work observation intuition and flights of fancy if you enter the labyrinth you're just as likely to meet him at its heart as you are mine at all but since his death new generations of archaeologists have uncovered fresh evidence that tells a rather different story when arthur evans died the jigsaw puzzle of minoan crete appeared to have been completed apart from one piece that he never found a place for alongside the beautiful frescoes and vases what he discovered at knossos were thousands of small clay tablets covered in different kinds of writing he saw endless possibilities running across their marked surfaces if he could just decide for them he'd break a silence that had lasted for thousands of years evans named these different scripts rather prosaically linear a and linear b and he was convinced that they were examples of a unique minoan language one that would prove beyond all doubt the minoan's superior status as an independent island nation in other words evans could give the minoans their history the problem was that he couldn't make sense of the tablets and he died before he could drag his minoans out of the prehistoric world it wasn't until after his death that other scholars could get their hands on the evidence and study the tablets in depth even then it took years for anyone to break the code and when someone did the archaeological world was in for a bit of a shock when michael ventress heard evan's lecture as a schoolboy he'd become driven by the desire to recover what he too was convinced was the lost language of the minoans but after years of hard labor he announced in 1952 that what he'd been struggling with wasn't minoan at all but a difficult and archaic form of greek the language spoken by the myceneans the greek warlords from the mainland so suddenly the great fires of 1450 bc began to make more sense maybe they weren't the result of a known civil war but evidence for a wholesale mycenean takeover in crete with a mighty knossos left intact to become the invaders headquarters and when you think about it it's not surprising that the aggressive mycenaeans wanted to stake their claim to crete for a thousand years the minoans had been showing the rest of the bronze age world how to make a serious success of things that's admiration and envy building up over 40 generations what eventually made the minoans vulnerable to a mycenaean coup is still the subject of heated archaeological debate but however they got here it seems they were here johnny come lately's usurping control for the last 200 years of a civilization that had been up and running for thousands the mitonians took up the trappings of minoan culture with relish and no little respect but inevitably they changed things this tomb is of a type entirely new to the island the monument of a warrior culture a fortified treasure house here to assert clan prestige and individual honour alien concepts to the minoans once the scholars had got over the shock of ventress's decipherment people were hungry to discover what linear bee could tell them about the kind of place mono and crete had become under the rule of the greeks from mycenae the tablets turned out to be the contents of a bronze age filing cabinet the meticulous record of the business end of palace life this one deals with a shepherd called poros and details his flock we know that he had 28 rams and 72 u's it's an extraordinary thought that every itinerant herdsmen up on the hillside was being monitored by the bean counters in the palace down below it's not a grand history but it still short-circuits you straight into the lives of the people there are references to bronze smiths bakers and farmers and even the individual names of oxen dusky noisy and spotty we also get a glimpse of loftier beings some of the gods and goddesses worshipped at places like nosos a number of the tablets record offerings to their religious powers here there are two liters of olive oil offered to pipituna an early minoan goddess down here you can see that there are 12 given to all the other gods and the lucky priestess at the winds gets 36. clearly worship had its bureaucratic side too the decipherments of linear b is one of the most significant breakthroughs of bronze age archaeology but linear a still remains a stubborn mystery most experts reckon this is the unique minoan language that evans was searching for and if the work that's being done on it ever does succeed it could unlock as many secrets as the richest of crete's excavations evans version of the minoans once apparently so complete and satisfying had begun to unravel with the decipherment of linear b and other troubling new evidence soon followed far from not leaving any cretan stones unturned it was becoming clear that the first generation of minoan archaeologists had only scratched the surface this is anima spillier the cave of the winds a small sanctuary about half an hour's drive from knossos in the 1970s a discovery was made here that changes perceptions of who the minoans were and the world in which they lived around 1700 bc the building collapsed at a time when the whole of crete was devastated by earthquakes it was this island-wide disaster that seems to have brought an abrupt halt to a gruesome right that was taking place here over there was the skeleton of a boy aged between 17 and 18 lying on his side on some kind of an altar his body was trussed up and on his bones had been laid a bronze dagger the weapon presumably that had cut his carotid artery because this young man had bled to death before the buildings collapsed behind him was a woman lying face down and out here another body someone carrying a vessel full of some kind of liquid most likely the fresh blood of the sacrifice being taken into the central room and offered to the deity there inside there was one more corpse a man lying face up next to the sacrificial victim aged between about 47 and 48 taller than average and on the little finger of his left hand a ring made of silver and iron back in the bronze age ahn was exotic and highly prized so this was someone of high status the priest perhaps who was conducting the sacrifice as the walls came tumbling down people are still upset by what was found here and try to draw other conclusions from the archaeological and forensic evidence human sacrifice even in a time of such grave crisis flies in the face of everything that seemed sophisticated and urbane about the minoans dubbed europe's first civilization it's a shock to find that their sensibilities weren't necessarily in tune with our own but the ancient greeks wouldn't have been shocked when they told stories of crete a thousand years after the sacrifice at anemis billiard they were dark and bloody for them this wasn't just the workshop of daedalus the court of king minos and ariadne this was the minotaurs realm the man-eating monster whose dark labyrinth was the foundation on which all those glittering palaces stood next on the minotaurs island recent discoveries have shed new light on what made minoan civilizations so unique and successful and the forces that finally led to its destruction you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 155,904

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, island of minotaur, crete, minotaur legend, bettany hughes, history of ancient greece, greek mythology, minoan, minoan civilization, minoans, minoans and mycenaeans, minoans documentary, minoans and mycenaeans crash course, king minos

Id: NJn94digDDw

Length: 48min 28sec (2908 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021