Minoan Civilization

lecture/BQEC6/minoan-civilization-ca-1800-1500-bce

Let's start a little bit out of time, with Homer, who says in The Odyssey, there is a land in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair and rich land called Crete, washed by waves on ever side, densely populated and boasting 90 cities, because today we're going to be talking about Crete. And we're going to be talking primarily about one site in this north-central coast near the modern city of Iraklion and this is a place called Knossos. 

Crete was home to a great Bronze Age civilization. 

Remember last time when we talked about archaeology and about durable remains, well now, one of the most durable remains is metal, and metals give their names to large periods of history. We will move From the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, for example. 

So where are we? We are on Crete, which is sort of the southern shell, if you will, of Greek civilization, and we are here at a place called Knossos. 

Before we start talking about this site itself and about the history that surrounds it we're going to do a little bit of something with a couple of interpretive models. Remember we also talked about the need for finding ways to interpret the stories that we put together. 

This may look a little bit complicated at first, but don't panic, it'll be fine. 

The Peer Polity Model, as it's called, was devised by an archaeologist named Collin Renfrew, and then developed and sophisticated by other archaeologists and scholars. 

Fundamentally what it means is that you have in a relatively limited area a group of communities that are structured along the same lines. They engage in competition and rivalry, emulation They can also share many things in common, and this is what's called symbolic entrainment, which is just a very, it's a scholarly way of saying that they share certain images and ideals, perhaps divinities. Perhaps standards or morals who knows that we'll figure out later on and they also engage in economic exchange. The reason it's called a peer polity which means that they are in an even level that there is no centralized government. Even though as you'll see we'll come to call this Minoan civilization there was notihing like a capital at Knossos. Instead you had a number of independent communites structred along the same lines that interacted in a variety of complex ways as we will see. 

So where are we? We're in a place that was dug by a British archeologist named Sir Arthur Evans. Born in 1851, he was the son of a wealthy businessman. 

He benefited from an outstanding education at the best, one of the best private school, Harrow in England and at Oxford University. 

He had a sort of a varied career after that, which included serving for a time as keeper, that is director, of the Ashmolian Museum at Oxford. But then, in around 1900, he went to Creed, bought a large section of land, and began to excavate there. And this is what was called Knossos. Not was called, still is called Knossos. It's a massive palace complex. Here, you can see it in an aerial view. There is a great central courtyard surrounded by a variety of rooms and other buildings, and there are storage areas out on the outer edges as well. We'll come back to those in a little while. 

In Greek mythology, this was associated with King Minos. The Greek historian Thucydides, whom we'll be spending a lot of time with in a few weeks, says that Minos was the first who was known to us to have established a navy. Now, Thucydides was writing at a time when navies were very important, especially in his home city of Athens. We'll come back to that too. But Evans, taking his cue from mythology, called this society Minoan, after King Minos. 

The legend was that Minos, the ancient king, had built a trackless maze called the Labyrinth, in which he imprisoned the bestial, the bull headed, man bodied son of his wife Pasiphae. Minotaur is eventually, as he's called, is eventually killed by the Athenian king Theseus. 

Some people thought that maybe, this vast palace with, it's jumble of rooms might have been somehow connected with the idea of a Labyrinth. 

Linguists have shown though, that Labyrinth is actually based on the root of the word labrys. Which means a double-bladed axe. This appears both as artifact and as decorative motif in this palace. Here you can see something that is far from functional, these are beautifully made gold, ceremonial double-bladed axes. 

And Evan said about constructing or reconstructing or reconstituting as he put it this extraordinary place. I've mentioned already that [UNKNOWN] said that Minos was the first who was known to us to have established a navy. That's clearly a fiction, but what is equally clear is that the Cretans were great sailors. Here you have a wonderful fresco from the site called Akrotiri, not on Crete itself but from, dating from about the same time. Showing a fancifully decorated ship, while around it swim wonderful dolphins, and dolphins, too, are part of the decorative motif in the palace at Knossos this famous dolphin fresco. 

But even here, we have to start to be cautious. Because scholars have shown this is one of the most famous pictures, I think, that survives from antiquity, and it's up there on the wall. But it was probably originally a floor decoration which Evans and his reconstituters put up in this vertical position to give it better visibility. 

Nonetheless, Minoan civilization was clearly, deeply involved with sea travel and with overseas trade. And it supported, a fairly lavish lifestyle. But again, we have to be careful. 

These are all reconstitutions. Evans had his architects, his builders, his workmen rebuild these, put these columns back up, paint them so beautifully. There are wall paintings as well. Of decorative shields. The construction of the palace at Knossos was very sophisticated, with light wells and excellent plumbing, and a general kind of openness, and a sort of elegance. And as I mentioned before, some motifs do appear Here, if you look carefully among the columns on this parapet, you can see yet another bull. And the bull was very, very important in the society. It's important in the myth. It seems to have been important at the time. And the Minoans supported a high degree of craftsmanship and technology. This is in the museum at Heraklion, it's a fantastic bull's head drinking cup called a rhyton. But much of it is, an early 20th century reconstruction. We're dealing here, with a story, a powerful story, a story that in fact has taken over. 

And we can find bits of evidence that seemed to cohere. Again, one of the most famous pieces of art from Knossos is the so-called Bull Leaper fresco, which shows, it seems, something like a sequential action. This may have taken place in the great central courtyard of the palace. Where one athlete grabbed the horns of the bull, as the bull tossed his head to get them off they landed on the back and then if everything went the way it was supposed to they gracefully vaulted off behind it. [LAUGH] The sport of kings perhaps. But if you look carefully at this fresco, you can also see how much of it is the result of later restoration. The original bits are the ones that look kind of more beat up. The other parts were all put in by the artists that Evans commissioned. The whole picture of life in Knossos at least as Evans depicted Minoan civilization was one of a peaceful, harmonious perhaps even slightly self indulgent society. Here you have another famous painting The Prince of the Lilies sometimes called The Priest King. Almost all of it was painted later. It was also [LAUGH] if you look at it very closely, it's anatomically a little bit odd. The head and the torso don't go quite in the same direction. It's still a wonderful picture, but one has to be careful. Likewise, the famous Three Ladies, as they're called. With their bust revealing dresses, their elaborate hairstyles, their wonderful little smiles are almost all later reconstitution or confection. When the great English writer Evelyn Waugh went to Knossos in the 1930s. He said of the ladies like this that they would be completely at home on the cover of Vogue magazine, and indeed they would. 

We can figure out a little bit more, perhaps a little bit more solidly, if I may put it that way, about some of the structures of this pure polity We'll look now at the second term here which is a redistributive economy. 

This again is perhaps an over complicated way of describing something fairly simple. 

The palace at Knossos had huge storage magazines like this one. Which contained these great jars called pithoid. Some of them as big as a human being. I mean, these are big jars which would have been used to store the produce that was brought in by the people who lived outside the palace, who grew the olives and the grain and the grapes. That Mediterranean triad that we talked about. And legumes and whatever else. 

They brought it into the palace, where it was stored and then redistributed by the people, the elite, who lived there. 

The advantage to the growers was that presumably the members of the elite provided some kind of protection for them. And for the people in the palace it gave them foodstuffs, of course, but also gave them something that they could trade. They could engage in the kind of economy, a border economy with other communities, especially those nearest by. 

There are some works of art From the Minoan period, that actually do give us, like that black figure vase we saw a little while ago, in another lecture, give us some sense of what work might have been like. This is the famous Harvester Vase. It's made out of black steatite. It's a black stone. And carved in high relief, it shows a procession. Of workers who are carrying over their shoulders the long sticks that they would use to knock the olives from the trees, knock them into sheets and then gather them for harvest. 

How did they keep track of all of this? This is also very important. 

The people at Knossos were literate. They had two kinds of scripts. An earlier called Linear-A, not much of which survives and which still hasn't been deciphered and then later called Linear-B which was deciphered in the 1950s by some English scholars. 

This is a clay tablet, a linear B tablet that was found in Knossos. And when these tablets were deciphered, what was discovered was, and this was very exciting and very important, was that they're a kind of proto-Greek. They're a syllabary. Each one of these little signs stands for a syllable. And you find things like [FOREIGN] which means wine, comes into historical Greek as Or [FOREIGN] which means lord comes into historical Greek as [FOREIGN] which means Lord or king. 

These were storehouse records. They have no narrative drive. But they are invaluable. In terms of allowing us to chart a kind of historical evolution. And to get at least some sense of what the social structure was like in this community. 

What we know is that the palace culture, now called Minoan, thrived from roughly 1700 to about 1400. It was this period, those 300 years, it was the time of the art works, the technology, the trade, the high point, so to speak, of Minoan society. [INAUDIBLE]. Then, at around 1500 or 1450, it collapses. There is widespread evidence of destruction at all of those sites around the island, at almost the same time. 

Theories abound as to why this occurred. Was a natural catastrophe? This is a very seismically active earthquake-prone zone. Was it some kind of revolution, the people who were living outside the palaces finally decided they had enough of the redistributive economy and decided to redistribute it to themselves? 

Or, it seems most likely, was it invasion? Or some combination perhaps of all of these, but we'd still have to answer the question now, what is Minoan? 

Before Arthur Evans there was no such thing as Minoan civilization. 

One great modern historian of the ancient world has said That Minoan civilization is the only great civilization created in the 20th century. 

Evans had a powerful vision of a peaceful maritime monarchy with friendly relations on its own island. 

So peaceful, in fact, Evans claimed, that it didn't need fortification. But archaelogists have found, long since, evidence of fortification, of defensive walls. It's also Evans who planted, around the site at Knossos, these trees. There by setting it off as a kind of shrine from its natural surroundings, from the farms and the vineyards and the olive groves that must've supported it. 

I don't want to dismiss this entirely as a lie. That would be silly and be stupid. We don't need to do that. But what we do need to do is to think about how evidence can be constructed or reconstituted to create something that has had enormous staying power. Any standard textbook of ancient Greek history will now include the Minoan period as part of the Bronze Age history. 

What I've tried to do, in these few minutes is to give you some sense of the complicated genesis, of this remarkable society, and of our understanding of it. 

Next time we're going to move to the people who might have wreaked it, and that is the mainland communities now called Mycenaean. See you then. [BLANK_AUDIO] 

The Ancient Greeks: Natural Setting, Geography, and Climate

/ancient-greeks/lecture/vRCjO/introduction-the-natural-setting-geography-and-climate


Hello again, and welcome to our course on the ancient Greeks. We are going to be doing a lot of time travel, going back a couple of millennia. But before we do that, we should locate ourselves more firmly In the real world, the world where the Greeks themselves lived. And that world, was in the Mediterranean sea. This is a huge body of water, it extends 2400 miles from the west, at the Strait of Gibraltar, to the east at the Levant, that's about 3,800 kilometers. And from its widest expanse, north to south, it's almost 1,000 miles, or 1,600 kilometers. It's a vast, vast area. People had been talking about Mediterranean civilization, but recently this has come under question. Because we can't really be sure that, in a region this huge, there are any real things that hold them together, that hold the various societies together. So it's not that useful a concept. As we're talking, we will be going through the major events, as we've said, and the major personalities of the ancient Greeks and we'll also be looking at different ways we have come to understand them. Let's get a little bit more precise. Greece itself Is a peninsula, in the Southern Balkans. On one side, it has what is called the Aegean Sea. But it's worth remembering that Greek civilization was, from the very beginning, more expansive than just the mainland. It encompassed the islands, Crete, here to the south, the coast of Turkey, modern day Turkey which was then known as Ionia. They had settlements on the shores of the Black Sea and they had Greek communities as far as southern Italy and Sicily. What is Greece like in terms of it's climate? It's a Mediterranean climate, that we can say with some confidence. In other words, long, dry, hot summers, shorter, wetter winters, cooler winters. The geology is primarily limestone, with a lot of other minerals mixed in, especially marble. And the soil is generally fairly good, although very, very stony. We find numerous complaints in ancient Greek literature about how people were trying to plow rocks. The geography of Greece is, as I said, a peninsula, and it's cut almost in half by the gulf of Corinth here. As we'll see this north, south divide plays a great role in Greek history. Within Greece itself the landscape is fairly rugged, although none of the mountains are really huge, they're pretty impressive. Here's a lovely 19th century painting by Edward Dodwell, an English artist, of Mount Parnassus, which was the mythical home of the muses and historically the site of one of the most important Greek religious shrines, that of Delphi. We'll be coming back to that any number of times during our course. And here's a modern view of the same mountain. There are very few navigable rivers. What we have instead, is valleys separated by these mountains. It's hard to think of geography as destiny, but certainly one reason that Greek community organization took the form that it did, of relatively small compact, autonomous units called City-States or Polis, probably had a lot to do with the landscape. What was life like? A lot of it had to do with the sea. There is no area in Greece that is farther than some 80 kilometers from the sea. And the Greek coastline is shot through, is carved up I should say, with lots of these small bays and coves, perfect harbors for the ancient sailing ships. The Greeks were always sea peoples. When they weren't at sea, they farmed. And here we meet the famous Mediterranean triad, the three staple elements of the ancient Greek diet, olives, grapes, and grain. Olive trees are relatively hardy, they require some tending, but not too much. They yield one year off, one year on. You can plant other plants among them, like herbs and vegetables, and they can survive for hundreds of years. The olive was terribly important for the ancient Greeks. In myth it was Athena's gift of the olive tree to the Athenians that won her the position as their principal deity. Olives could be eaten for food, they could be cured in brine, and of course they could be pressed for oil, which was used both as a foodstuff and as a cosmetic, and even as a lighting source, because you can burn it in a lamp. In addition to olives, there are grapes. The Greek climate and the Greek landscape are hospitable to olives and vineyards. And the grape itself was, of course, used for wine. And this was under the special protection of the god Dionysus. I've mentioned already that the Greek landscape is very stony. In terms of the larger geography there are not very many big areas for cultivation, there's some up north, in the area of Macedon and Thessaly, some down south, around ancient Sparta. But mainly, Greek farming took place on small subsistence plots. Here we have a wonderful black figure painting from the Louvre, showing some people farming, it's actually plowing the land. Olives, and wine, and grain, wheat, barley, and some corn, these formed the staples, these were the bases of the Greek diet. It's also worth remembering, that from the beginning and throughout Greek history the society had an agricultural base. Even in the highly sophisticated urbanized Athens of the golden age, agriculture was the heart of the community. Looking at this wonderful pot then, also leads us to our next topic, which is how do we know about the events of the ancient past? Much of our evidence is in the form of physical remains, material culture as it's called. Archaeology is what we rely on for what we know about the earliest and indeed most of Greek civilization. Texts are relatively late, and we'll come to that in a little while. Bu when we're dealing with archaeology of course, we are dealing only with durable materials, only with those things that can survive a couple of millenia in the ground. I sometimes joke with my students about what they are wearing, what of what they have on would survive 2000 years in the ground, not much. Metal perhaps, plastics maybe, but everything else, things that we look to like cloth or leather, almost all gone. So what we have is durable remains like metal, like this wonderful pot handle. Sometimes, although this is rather elegant, it's completely functional, and sometimes of course they are magnificently decorative, like this gold diodin. But for our purposes the most important source of information is probably pottery. Pots are remarkably durable, they last for a very long time, unless you deliberately grind them up and destroy them, they'll just stay where they are. And even if they're broken up we can use them to trace developments by seeing what else appears alongside them within the layers of the ground. Then, as I said a moment ago, we do have some texts, and these are texts of all kinds. Some of them are official, documents on stone, inscriptions from various cities or even occasionally from individuals. Sometimes we, or later on, we have literary texts, which we can use for information. But no matter what we're using, what we always have to do is to find some way to weave all of these things together into a story, into a narrative. It requires interpretation and one of the things that we'll be talking about throughout this course is various ways that we interpret the evidence that we have. I like to think about this in a way that a great 19th century or early 20th century classical scholar Francis Cornford did. He said that the classics are like the sky, they're always the same, but always changing. Because, after all, the planets, the other, the stars, the solar system, the, oh, what am I trying to think of? The galaxies, remain pretty much the same, but our understanding of them changes and keeps changing and we keep re-interpreting them. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to put together a story about the ancient Greeks and the first place we're going to go is the island of Crete. And the great palace site at Knossos and that's where we're going to go to next.[BLANK_AUDIO] 

UCLA in the 1960s

ucla-in-the-1960s