Knossos - where Myth meets History
Return
to Knossos Page
Back to Crete Home Page
A little about Knossos and the History of
the Excavations
It
had long been known that there had once existed a city called Knossos in this
area of Crete, the inhabitants of the region often found ancient objects as they
cultivated their fields.
The
first man to excavate in the area was Minos Kalokairinos, a merchant of Iraklio,
and a lover of antiquity.
In 1878 he uncovered two of the palace store-rooms.
Unfortunately Kalokairinos was compelled to stop by the Turkish owners of
the land.
Heinrich
Schliemann (1822-1900), a wealthy German businessman who was obsessed with the
Homeric heroes and had already discovered the site of Troy on the coast of Asia
Minor in 1874 and had carried out extensive fruitful excavations in Mycenae
attempted to purchase the Kefala Hill in Crete but was thwarted by the excessive
price the Turks demanded.
So it was in 1900, when Crete was declared an independent state that Sir Arthur Evans, the English archaeologist, at that time Director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, who had first visited Crete in order to study and decipher unknown scripts, was able to commence his work and systematic excavations began imediately. Within three years almost all the palace had been uncovered and work then began on the surrounding area.
Evans
continued his work until 1931 and published his findings in four volumes
entitled
“The
Palace of Minos at Knossos”.
As the work continued many of the artefacts were removed and can be seen
in the Archaeological Museum of Herakleion.
However from the beginning it proved necessary to preserve and restore
the monuments being uncovered and considerable use was made of reinforced cement
in the work and copies were installed of the magnificent frescoes discovered
during the excavations.
Evan’s
methods of restoration came under much criticism and some scholars even disputed
some of the conclusions he made. Nevertheless
Evans is constantly admired for his intuition and creative imagination and
profound scholarship. It is
basically to him that is owed the discovery of the marvellous Minoan world that
until this time was only dimly reflected in Greek Mythology.
Minoans or Caphtorites?
Notes
from “Crete” by Facaros and Pauls.
It
was understood that Evans was obsessed with the stories of Minos and Minotaurs
and that he labelled the ‘completely unknown culture’, he unearthed at
Knossos, ‘Minoan’ after the legendary King Minos ... and everyone will
probably go on calling them Minoans even though ancient records have finally
provided the people of old Crete with a name of their own: the Egyptians called
Cretans ‘Keftiu’ and they appear in Syrian inscriptions as the ‘Caphtorites’
who also featured in the Old Testament.
The
authors, Facaros and Pauls, explain that Minos, denotes a title rather
than an individual name, coming from the Egyptian word ‘menes’, a
royal title taken from the name of the founder of a contemporary reigning
dynasty. And it should be noted
that Cretan kings were probably religious figureheads with little political
power.
Not withstanding our perceptions of the origins
of 20th century AD European civilisation were changed radically when the first
systematic excavations began on the Kefála Hill at Knossos on the 23rd
of March 1900. The discoveries at Knossos and other Cretan sites revealed
archaeological evidence for societies which had their origins in the Neolithic
periods (7th-4th millennia BC) and which had developed, with outside influences
- chiefly from Egypt and the Near East - into socially, theologically and
economically complex communities.
These new Bronze Age societies required greater
organisation and central control with the result that around the 20th century
BC, embryo "palaces" began to be built to house the economic and
religious administrations of these developing communities. The first and most
important of these palatial communities was at Knossos.
The
great Palace was built sometime between 1700 and 1300 BCE. The Palace has an
interesting layout - the original plan can no longer be seen because of the vast
number of times that it was modified. Also, there are not several main hallways.
Instead, 1300 rooms are connected with corridors of varying sizes and direction.
The six acres of the palace included a theatre, a main entrance on each of its
four cardinal faces, and extensive storerooms.
The
storerooms contained pithoi (large clay vases) that contained oil, grains, dried
fish, beans, and olives. Many of the items were created at the palace itself,
which had grain mills, oil presses, and wine presses. Beneath the pithoi were
stone holes used to store more valuable objects, such as gold. The palace also
had many modern structures - the palace was built up to five stories high in
some place. The rooms had running water and the bathrooms had a notably
effective plumbing and sewage system, constructed of terra-cotta.
The palace also had extremely effective ventilation that took advantage of its
placement, which allowed it to receive breezes from the sea during the summer.
It had porticoes
and airshafts, and also had long vertical shafts that sent sunlight to lower
levels of the palace.
The
palace is about 130 meters on a side and since the Roman period has been
suggested as the source of the myth of the Labyrinth,
an elaborate mazelike
structure constructed for King Minos
of Crete
and designed by the legendary artificer Daedalus
to hold the Minotaur,
a creature that was half man and half bull
and was eventually killed by the Athenian hero
Theseus.
Labyrinth originally meant "double axe" referring to the symbol of the
Minoan Palace. Possibly because of the confusing layout of the Palace, it began
to mean "maze" - the source of the word in both the myth and in modern
English.
A
long-standing debate between archaeologists
is whether the Palace acted primarily as an administrative or religious center
(or, more likely, was a combination of both in a theocratic
manner). Other important debates consider the role of Knossos in the
administration of Bronze
Age Crete,
and whether Knossos acted as the primary center, or was on equal footing with
the several other contemporary palaces that have been discovered on Crete. Many
of these palaces on Crete were destroyed and abandoned in the early part of the
15th century BCE, possibly by the Mycenaeans,
although Knossos remained in use until destroyed by fire about one-hundred years
later.
The
palace also includes the Minoan Column, a structure notably different from other
Greek columns. The Minoan Column was constructed of wood, and then painted red
(unlike the stone Greek column.) They were also 'inverted' - most Greek columns
are smaller at the top and wider at the bottom to create the illusion of greater
height, but the Minoan columns are smaller at the bottom and wider at the top.
The columns at the Palace of Minos were mounted on stone bases and had round,
pillow-like capitals (tops)
One
of the more remarkable discoveries at Knossos was the extensive frescoes
that decorated the plastered walls. All were very fragmentary and their
reconstruction and placement in the rooms of the palace by the artist Piet de
Jong is not without controversy. These sophisticated, colorful paintings portray
a society who, in comparison to the roughly contemporaneous art of Middle
and New
Kingdom Egypt,
are conspicuously non-militaristic.
In
addition to scenes of women and men linked to activities like fishing and flower
gathering, the murals also portray athletic feats. The most notable of these is
bull-vaulting, where a young man apparently leaps onto and over a charging
bull's back. The question remains as to whether this activity was a ritual
or a sport.
Some have proposed that it was a sacrificial activity or early bullfighting
- indeed, many people have questioned if this activity is even possible. The
most famous example is the Toreador Fresco, painted around 1550-1450 BCE.
It is now located in the Archaeological Museum of Herakleion in Crete.