Rise of the Minoans

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Speaker 14 Hello, Tristan here. I hope you're doing well.
We're all good here at History Hit Towers.

Speaker 14 Now, you might not know, but on and off, I've been posting polls on Spotify asking listeners which topics you'd like us to cover in future episodes.

Speaker 14 Now, one that was popular, overwhelmingly popular, was the Minoans. And I'm delighted with that.
There is so much interesting stuff about this Bronze Age civilization.

Speaker 14 So much mystery, so many million-dollar questions for archaeologists. In fact, we quickly realized when recording this episode that we couldn't do the Minoans justice with just one interview.

Speaker 14 We needed more time. So this is Rise of the Minoans.
We're talking about the roots of these people and how they flourished.

Speaker 14 There'll be more episodes to continue the story really soon, and we'll delve into more marvels and mysteries of the Minoans, who were complete game changers. So let's get into it.

Speaker 14 3,500 years ago, the island of Crete was home to one of the most extraordinary Bronze Age civilizations in the world. The Minoans.

Speaker 14 Named after the legendary Minos, king of Kanosos, who controlled the Minotaur in a great labyrinth beneath his palace.

Speaker 14 Now the myth of the Minotaur, half man, half bull, is of course fictional, but the great wealth and prestige of the Minoans, now archaeology has proven that to be true.

Speaker 14 From their beautiful frescoes to the monumental palaces, the Minoans have fascinated millions ever since their rediscovery in the 19th century. and we're covering part of their story today.

Speaker 14 It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.
Today we're going to explore the emergence of the Minoans on Crete.

Speaker 14 We'll delve into the origins of this culture at the dawn of metallurgy. We'll look into the surviving sources and the Minoans' mysterious writing system, Linear A.

Speaker 14 We'll explore the emergence of more complex societies on Minoan Crete centered around great palaces and strange words like wanax. that came to be associated with them.

Speaker 14 All of that and more is to come in today's chat.

Speaker 14 Our guest is Professor Nicoletta Momigliano from the University of Bristol.

Speaker 14 Nico has been on the ancients before to talk all about the legacy of the Minoans, how they were interpreted and reinterpreted by different peoples over the 19th and 20th centuries after their rediscovery.

Speaker 14 We'll put a link to that episode in the show notes. Now Nico's back to delve into some fascinating topics of the Bronze Age Minoans.

Speaker 14 Nico, oh, such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. Welcome back.

Speaker 10 Thank you for having me again. Thank you.

Speaker 14 You're more than welcome to talk more about the Minoans. I mean, are the Minoans, are they still quite a mysterious Bronze Age civilization, Nico?

Speaker 10 Yes, definitely, definitely still very mysterious. If only because

Speaker 10 although we can sort of read some of their writings, we don't understand them because the few remaining inscriptions that we have that seem to express the language or languages spoken by the Minoans are very, very few.

Speaker 10 And although, as I said, we might be able to read them, what we read doesn't sound like any language we really know. People have made all kinds of suggestions.

Speaker 10 I mean, we may know some of the names of the divinities, also because we know some of the names of the divinities. We can make educated guesses from

Speaker 10 later texts, texts written in Linear B, which is another script that was in use in the Aegean during the Bronze Age. And we know that linear B expressed a form of Greek.

Speaker 10 And in some of the linear B inscriptions, we have names of what seems to be names of deities

Speaker 10 that are not Greek names. And these deities are recorded in Linearbi tablets that were found on Crete at the famous archaeological site of Knossos.

Speaker 10 And they seem to be a list of local divinities, and they have strange names like Asasara, Pituna, and so on.

Speaker 10 But otherwise, they are very mysterious, partly because all we have is images and archaeological evidence, you know, unlike the Greeks, unlike the Romans, or even the Sumerians or Egyptians, where we have lots and lots of text for Minoans,

Speaker 10 very little.

Speaker 10 So they are still very mysterious.

Speaker 14 I mean, Nico, as this chat goes on, I will ask more about the writing and that linear A-text that you highlighted just there, and also something called the Phaistos disk, which sounds very, very interesting.

Speaker 14 But if we go to the source material that archaeologists like yourself have for learning more about the Minoans, I mean, what types of sources do you have available to learn more about the mysterious Minoans?

Speaker 10 Well, we have all the usual sources that archaeologists have. Their finds, their architecture, frescoes, and also other kinds of evidence such as what they ate.

Speaker 10 You know, a lot of what archaeologists dig are just garbage, literally refuse pits where you find all kinds of interesting garbage.

Speaker 10 And also we can find more about the Minoans from their own bones because apart from settlements, ritual places, places where people perform religious rituals, we also have quite a lot of cemeteries.

Speaker 10 So we can learn something about the Minoans by just looking at their bones and their rubbish. And their rubbish includes animal bones, but also seeds, pollen levels.

Speaker 10 We can gather from cores dug in the soil. And we can tell what they ate and what they cultivated and what they hunted.

Speaker 14 There's nothing... that gets a student of archaeology more interested in the topic than a very exciting prehistoric garbage pile is all I've learned over a few years, isn't it?

Speaker 14 Because it might not sound very glamorous, but actually, you can learn so much, as you say, about what they eat, about their lifestyle, their societies, and then also, I guess, DNA, looking at actual human bones, you can start piercing more about who these Minoan figures were.

Speaker 10 Absolutely, absolutely. And we know from different kinds of evidence, for example, that the island of Crete

Speaker 10 was not permanently inhabited by human beings until around, let's say, ballpark figure 7000 BC.

Speaker 10 And we also know

Speaker 10 from all kinds of archaeological evidence, like the one we have just talked about, from what they ate and what they cultivated, that these people arrived on the island of Crete around 7000 BC, as I just mentioned, from somewhere in southwest Turkey or northern Syria, you know, kind of that area of the world.

Speaker 10 And we know that because before that, on the islands, there was no trace of, say, sheep, pigs, barley, wheat, but these things had already been domesticated, cultivated in that part of the world.

Speaker 10 So we know where they roughly where they came from. And from 7000 BC onwards, we find permanent settlements on the island of Crete.

Speaker 10 Before that period, we have evidence that people probably visited the island

Speaker 10 because we find instruments dating to earlier periods, because we also have evidence of fauna like pygmy hippos and other animals that pygmy hippos

Speaker 10 that have probably been hunted to death by the people people who visited the island, but then people who actually settled permanently came later.

Speaker 10 So we have a period of explorations and using the island of Crete, the heartland of the Minoan world, well before that, but permanent settlements only a bit later in the Neolithic period, which for Crete is around 7,000 BC.

Speaker 14 So these people come over, as you say, from present-day Anatolia, from Turkey. They're farmers, so they're bringing their livestock with them.

Speaker 14 So can we say that they are the ancestors of the Minoans, or are they proto-Minoans?

Speaker 14 Or when roughly do you go from these being like the Stone Age farmers who preceded the Minoans to actually the beginnings of the Minoan civilization in Crete?

Speaker 10 Yes, the beginning of what we archaeologists have called and continue to call Minoan civilization is around 3000 BC.

Speaker 10 And between 7000 BC and 3000 BC, it is very likely possible that other people also reached the island from other parts of the eastern Mediterranean.

Speaker 10 But certainly a lot of the population of the people that we called Minoan must have descended from the first colonizer of the island.

Speaker 10 That is certain because you know there is no massive extinction of people, there is no clear mass migration of people from other areas.

Speaker 10 There is evidence of people moving from other parts of the Aegean and possibly the eastern Mediterranean onto Crete at different times of the second millennium BC.

Speaker 10 And the movement of people, the migration of people is a constant of Mediterranean life.

Speaker 10 To think that you know, there is no changes, that there are no new arrivals of populations ever, that the population is just the descendants of this small group.

Speaker 10 It's just not how life works in any country, in any situation.

Speaker 14 No, I think you're right, Nico, and we've done a few podcast episodes on the ancients over the years on Stone Age movements of people across oceans and seas, whether you're in the islands of Britain and Orkney and Shetland and Ireland and Brittany, or as you say, in the Mediterranean.

Speaker 14 So lots of movement in those thousands of years.

Speaker 14 Before we then get to the beginnings of Minoan civilization, as you've mentioned there, so around 3000 BC, Nico, so that's exactly the same time places like Newgrange in Ireland, the Great Passage Tomb in Newgrange in Ireland, is being built.

Speaker 14 So that's a fascinating comparison there. And before the pyramids, Nico, is this also aligned in regards to time period?

Speaker 14 Do you see the rise of the Minoan civilization also with the rise of metallurgy with copper and then bronze?

Speaker 10 Yes, indeed. Indeed.

Speaker 10 Although there is evidence that mythology was already being exploited a bit earlier than that but it's when it starts becoming more common so what we call the minoan age the minoan period is another way of in calling the bronze age of crete in fact some people don't even like the term minoan civilization some people have said we should ditch this name because it's after mythical figure and we don't have any evidence that anybody called Minos or Minos ever existed, we should ditch this term.

Speaker 10 It is a term that has too much buggage and we should simply call this the Cretan Bronze Age. I like Minos.
I think it's very memorable.

Speaker 14 I think so too. And I think the name Minoan has an instant appeal and allure to many people across the world.
And I think that'll be shown by the popularity of this podcast episode too.

Speaker 14 But you raised there an important point and almost almost a quick tangent by me, kind of going back to the sources that you have to study the Minoans.

Speaker 14 So naturally, archaeology and bones and DNA are important for learning more about the Minoans.

Speaker 14 Of course, you've got the figure of King Minos and the story of the Minotaur, which are closely linked and we've done an episode on in the past.

Speaker 14 Now, how important a source is Greek mythology and these mythological stories of things like the Minotaur? How important are they in also learning about the Minoans?

Speaker 14 Can we say that they help archaeologists at all?

Speaker 10 Well, Well, I think all these stories tell us much more about the later Greeks than they actually tell us about the people who lived on Crete in the Bronze Age.

Speaker 10 These are just stories that were invented later by people who, I think, lost something in translation.

Speaker 10 people who encountered ruins of palaces that they didn't remember who were built by and were built for.

Speaker 10 So, Greek mythology doesn't tell us very much about the Cretan Bronze Age. It's as if you were trying to learn about Roman history

Speaker 10 from Shakespeare's Roman plays. These sources that we have

Speaker 10 contain some memories, but they are pretty garbled memories. And they are far more like

Speaker 10 inventions, stories to explain realities that were no longer part of living memories.

Speaker 10 I said to explain ruins or rituals that perhaps had lasted for centuries, and the origins of these rituals had been forgotten.

Speaker 10 We know that people in the Bronze Age, Minoan people, were very fond of taking votives, having parties on top of mountains, and they brought with them votives to give to their deities.

Speaker 10 Perhaps people, even after the collapse of Minoan civilization, continued to walk up mountains and take votaries, but people couldn't remember exactly why, or they decided to change deities.

Speaker 10 Some form of sacrality attaches itself to certain localities, and people continue to use these places for their rituals.

Speaker 10 If you think, for example, the Athenian Acropolis, the Temple of Athena was a mosque and a Christian temple for longer than it ever was, a Greek temple dedicated to Athena.

Speaker 10 In Sicily, in Syracuse, one of the most important churches of Syracuse, was built using an old Greek temple.

Speaker 10 There is a form of sacrality that attaches itself to certain places, and people continue to use them to venerate these places, but they change the divinities that are venerated there.

Speaker 10 But there is something about the sacrality of the place. And there is something that people remembered about Knossos or Knossos, as I prefer to say.

Speaker 10 Probably ruins of the great Minoan palace stood there for centuries, even after it was abandoned, destroyed and then abandoned.

Speaker 10 And people attached wonderful stories to these ruins, like the stories of King Minos and the Minotaur and the Labyrinth and so on and so forth.

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Speaker 3 Put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 1 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

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Speaker 14 I've got in my notes that I mean, of course, we think of the palaces when you get to the Minnoans, but I don't think those appear straight away.

Speaker 14 So do we have an idea what these earliest Minoan societies looked like? Should we just be imagining small farming settlements dotted around the place?

Speaker 10 Yes and no, in the sense that, yes, certainly. At first, even the great site of Knossos

Speaker 10 was just like almost like a migrant camp. It was tiny.
But then population grew.

Speaker 10 And yes, we had lots of small settlements, settlements of perhaps one hectare or even less, two hectares, where perhaps only five or six families live. But then

Speaker 10 we also get

Speaker 10 at some point in the middle of the third millennium, even larger settlements, settlements where the population was probably reaching already perhaps a thousand, fifteen hundred people.

Speaker 10 But also throughout the history of Minoan Crete, and also in later periods, you have a combination of different types of settlements, smaller places, larger places.

Speaker 10 But already, even before the construction of the palaces, there seemed to have been some places that were more larger than others, where people were already attracting larger populations.

Speaker 10 And one of them was Khnosos.

Speaker 10 And people always have to remember that palaces are not isolated buildings, as indeed Buckingham Palace is not an isolated building is bang in the center of a thriving city of London and the same with Minoran palaces they are not isolated buildings they emerge within larger settlements so the foodstuffs that they would have so I'm guessing crops pastures for animals is it like sheep and cows maybe please sheep goats above all sheep and goats above all Cattle, a bit less, but there is also cattle.

Speaker 10 Because that's what the kind of environment can sustain better.

Speaker 10 You know, for cattle, you need quite a lot of water. And there are areas of Crete where there is some water, but sheep and goat, top.

Speaker 14 Sheep and goat economy. Those Bronze Age Minoans, they loved it.
Are olives and wine, are those also big parts of the farming out there?

Speaker 10 Oh, God, yes. Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely. And already cultivated even before the palaces.

Speaker 10 And we can see that also very, very well when you take cores inside the soil of Crete, the spike in the pollen from olives and vines that you get in the third millennium, it's already something quite remarkable.

Speaker 10 So yes.

Speaker 10 Are you wondering whether they were already having a lot of drink?

Speaker 14 Yes, I'm sure they did. So the Cretans were growing wine and olives by some 5,000 years ago.
That's insane. So, Nico, let's go on to those settlements that you've already highlighted.

Speaker 14 So, you mentioned different sizes of settlements, even during the third millennium BC,

Speaker 14 and those bigger places like Kenossos. How do we then get to the next level with the emergence of palaces? Do we know much about the context of the appearance of palaces?

Speaker 10 It's a million-dollar question, in a sense. I mean, people have been debating exactly what led to this next step forever and ever.

Speaker 10 I mean, since Sir Arthur Evans, and why do we have the emergence of palaces on the island of Crete and not,

Speaker 10 for example, in mainland Greece, where we have similar developments?

Speaker 10 There is something that happens towards the end of the third millennium BC and possible there may be some evidence of some big droughts affecting part of the eastern Mediterranean, possibly even elements of warfare and some people managed to react to adversity in

Speaker 10 different ways and one way in which perhaps the people on Crete reacted to some form of adversity was to create more complex society, more bureaucracy.

Speaker 10 There is also the fact that already throughout the third millennium, Crete had very close contacts with very complex societies like Egyptian society.

Speaker 10 And for example, it is very likely that the Minoans got the idea of using writing for bureaucracy, seals,

Speaker 10 seal impressions to control the movements of goods or to lock rooms that stored particular goods.

Speaker 10 They got possibly some of these ideas from Egyptians or other contemporary societies with whom they were already in contact. Because, you know, earlier we were talking about migrations.

Speaker 10 In addition to migrations, and people think of mass movements of populations, but there are even smaller migrations that happen

Speaker 10 because of trade routes and trade links, and sometimes for marriage purposes.

Speaker 10 And we have evidence that Minoan Crete was in contact with all kinds of other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, and Egypt in particular, already from the final Neolithic and from the third millennium BC.

Speaker 10 So it's, I think, another reason why perhaps certain things may have happened on Crete before they happened in other places, because

Speaker 10 somebody got the idea of using bureaucracy, extracting more taxes from their neighbors, exploiting other people from nearby civilizations that had already developed this kind of social organization, more complex.

Speaker 14 Exactly. So, new social organization ideas could come from those trade routes, which is a really good point to highlight there, Nico.

Speaker 10 I'd like people always to think of, say, what happens, for example, in the UK

Speaker 10 when the Romans arrive here.

Speaker 10 Big changes. You know, the Romans didn't stay here very long.
I think it was too cold.

Speaker 10 No, I'm joking. But even simply the contact with other civilizations, more complex organizations, sometimes can bring other changes in neighboring countries, even if they're not necessarily conquered.

Speaker 14 Well, you certainly do see that, Nico, in Britain before the Romans arrive and the elites in the south and east wanting to get access to like Roman wine and starting their kind of new practices based on it.

Speaker 14 And so, you do see that influence.

Speaker 14 So, it's interesting to speculate whether that kind of neighboring power influence from Egypt or somewhere did influence the creation of the idea of palaces and so on.

Speaker 14 With these palaces, I'm sure they evolve over the hundreds of years, Nico. But just how monumental and complex did they become in their design?

Speaker 14 And what do we think were the functions of these massive massive buildings?

Speaker 10 That's exactly another million dollar question.

Speaker 10 I mean, we have clear evidence of what some of the rooms in the palaces were used for

Speaker 10 because some rooms were clearly used for storage of products. We know that.
Other rooms had a more ceremonial function.

Speaker 10 Other rooms had perhaps ritual functions, like little shrines.

Speaker 10 shrines in terms of monumentality well i can imagine that the palace of gnosos or knossos is built around a central court which is about 50 meters long now isn't that about like a football pitch or perhaps a bit smaller than a football

Speaker 10 i don't know don't test me yes no exactly i don't know no i think it's smaller than a football pitch but you know 50 meters 50 yards it's a long rectangular square. And this is built around this.

Speaker 10 There are hundreds of rooms. There are clearly at least two floors in part of this construction because we find remains of stairs and so on.
So they are vast structures.

Speaker 10 Okay, not as large as Buckingham Palace, but for those periods, they are large structures.

Speaker 10 They are obviously controlled by the elite of Minoan society, but whether this elite was a kind of monarchical system, as the myth of King Minos would imply, or more like

Speaker 10 a corporate group, a kind of theocracy, these are speculation. One thing that is clear, and it's very peculiar about the Minoans, is that

Speaker 10 the iconography of the elite and the iconography of the rulers and the difference between elites and priesthood is very difficult to distinguish.

Speaker 10 And sometimes even you can't tell whether something that is being depicted is necessarily a deity or a priestess or a priest representative of that deity, or whether this could be a member of the elite.

Speaker 10 In other contemporary societies, it's easier to understand, also because we have the help of inscriptions.

Speaker 10 But it is something peculiar about Minoan Crete that there doesn't seem to be the elevation of one person particularly above others, or if there is, it's not so clearly visible.

Speaker 10 And also, for lots and lots of centuries, especially

Speaker 10 until the mid of the second millennium BC,

Speaker 10 a lot of the tombs are communal tombs, like family or clan vaults used over centuries with dozens of burials inside.

Speaker 10 And again, there doesn't seem to be specific burials that are elevated above others.

Speaker 10 And that has been interpreted by some people as showing that perhaps this was a slightly more egalitarian society, or at least that it was not

Speaker 10 so

Speaker 10 hierarchical as in later periods, where you have a supreme ruler. But as I said, we perhaps it was simply people simply chose not to show this in their iconography.

Speaker 14 So do we think then that there were other purposes to these palaces right from the beginning?

Speaker 14 Do we think it maybe is administration centres, you know, as the societies get more complex and centers of community? Do we get any of those sorts of ideas from palaces?

Speaker 10 Absolutely. As I said, there is a storage function illustrated by the storage rooms we have, an administrative function illustrated by the tablets, the seal impressions that people use.

Speaker 10 If literacy is not very widespread, how can you explain to people that they shouldn't enter a particular room or that certain goods are meant for somebody else?

Speaker 10 One way of showing this is by using seals and seal impressions, which are still used in the modern world sometimes. And as I said, there are religious functions.

Speaker 10 I mean, there are rooms that seem to be devoted to some kind of cult. Some of the frescoes that are painted on some of these rooms seem to indicate that there were some ceremonies taking place.

Speaker 10 in the near, inside, outside the palaces. What would these ceremonies mean? Clearly, some of these ceremonies must have had some kind of religious function.

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Speaker 4 Hey, Dave, here's a tip: put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 1 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

Speaker 5 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 2 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 6 Thanks, random singing people.

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Speaker 14 So, Nico, over time with the palaces, as the Minoan period progresses, just one more question on the palaces and like the social hierarchy before we move on.

Speaker 14 Do we then get a sense as time goes on that there is a more clear social hierarchy, and you do get almost rulers at the top?

Speaker 14 Because I've got in my notes like a name like the Wanaks and figures like that. So, does it become more clear that there was almost a king-like figure who resided in these palaces as time went on?

Speaker 10 Yes, at some point you mentioned the figure of the Wanax or Wanaka,

Speaker 10 and we know about this figure because the name appears in the Linear B tablet.

Speaker 10 And we can read the Linear B tablets because they're written in Greek, even if sometimes they contain words that are not Greek, like indeed.

Speaker 10 I mean, it's a word that probably

Speaker 10 comes from minon but it's transferred to greek because the word vanaka then becomes later greek anax a word that we find in classical greek we find it in homer for example in homer though has already changed slightly its meaning And so, sure, by the time we have an administration on the island of Crete that uses linear B instead of linear A, there is clear evidence then that there is a more, even more hierarchical structure and that there is a figure that it's the first,

Speaker 10 I would say, not even a first amongst equal, primus inter pares in the Latin expression, first among equal, it's a bit more than a first among equal.

Speaker 10 And it's a figure that has also a religious function.

Speaker 10 And some people have suggested that perhaps this is the equivalent of a king, a monarch, a monarch that not only has religious function, but some people believe also

Speaker 10 was believed to be a bit divine, a bit like pharaohs in Egypt. But, you know, there is no great clear agreement on this.
But Linear B tablets date to, let's say, from about 1450, 1450-1400 BC.

Speaker 10 And it's a period when, according to many scholars, there is a switch. That is, Greek-speaking Mycenaeans have taken over the administration of Crete

Speaker 10 and are based mostly at Knosso. So we have

Speaker 10 not a change in population.

Speaker 10 We don't have necessarily a massive migration of people from mainland Greece, but some people who decided to change the administrative language from the language used by the Minoans to Greek.

Speaker 10 Some people would like even to see, think that the Minoans decided to change the language of their administration, but I mean, I personally don't buy it.

Speaker 14 But that point seems to suggest, Nico, if the palaces emerged several centuries before the arrival of Linea B and this Mycenaean outdoor influence, influence,

Speaker 14 the actual kind of local Minoan rulers beforehand, how they use the palace is potentially very different with the arrival of these Mycenaean people.

Speaker 10 Yes, because also we know, for example, that words change meaning, especially when they move from one language to another.

Speaker 10 And even if the term Wanaka, Vanaks, that you brought up, because we can read the Linear B tablets, can be interpreted as a kind of kingship, is often translated as king.

Speaker 10 That doesn't necessarily mean that it had the same meaning in a Minoan context. In Homer, for example, the term

Speaker 10 Wanaka has already changed meaning. And the top dogs in the Iliad and the Odyssey are usually called basileus.

Speaker 10 And that is again the term that it's normally translated as king.

Speaker 10 The term basileus already appears in Linear B, but it does not indicate the top dog. It's just minor local ruler somehow associated with metalwork.

Speaker 10 So already between, say, the Linear B tablets and Homer, 700 years difference, let's say,

Speaker 10 the term basileus has changed meaning. So who knows? I believe that probably

Speaker 10 both terms, Wanaka, Basileus, originate from Minoan Crete because they're not Indo-European terms, words. They don't seem to have an Indo-European origin.

Speaker 10 So it's a language that seems different from Greek. But what was their actual meaning in Minoan Crete? We just don't know.

Speaker 14 So it seems like there's a lot of mystery regarding the hierarchy early on in the story of the Minoans, especially before you get the arrival of Linea B and the function of the palaces and so on.

Speaker 14 Very briefly, before we go on to connections, what are the main cities, do we think, are the main settlements in Minoan Crete? Let's say in the second millennium BC?

Speaker 14 We've got Kenossos already, but should we be imagining if there are quite a few palaces around, almost like little independent polities on the large island of Crete?

Speaker 10 Yes, whether they're independent polities all the time, again, it's another vexed question.

Speaker 10 But let's say in the first half of the second millennium, we have palaces, important palaces, not just at Closons, but also Festos, Malia, for example. And then some of these palaces are destroyed.

Speaker 10 Some of these palaces and also other settlements seem to be destroyed and some of the destructions are due to earthquakes, some are seem to be due to fire, and so on. And then they are built anew.

Speaker 10 And at some point, some people think that Knossos probably starts getting the upper hand. When exactly this happens, again, is a matter of speculation and not everybody agrees.

Speaker 10 Then we also have palaces, you know, in the mid-second millennium. We also have the constructions of small palaces.
We have big, big palaces with central court, Etmalia, Festos, Knossos, Zakro,

Speaker 10 but also we have smaller palaces even in places that are only an hour drive from Knossos. There is one at a place called Galatas, a mini palace.

Speaker 10 One of the big mysteries is that we have a really big settlement in East Crete.

Speaker 10 near a palace on the far east of the island, beautiful place, wonderful place to go swimming to, by the way, is Catosacro. And very near it, there is a huge settlement called Palecastro.

Speaker 10 And this is really large settlement. And people have been digging there since 1902, but it doesn't seem to have a palace.

Speaker 10 So either people have been digging in the wrong place, or this was a mega site that didn't have a palace.

Speaker 14 So do we know much then, Nico, about about the Minoans and their wider connections with the Mediterranean world?

Speaker 14 If the people are first of all venturing to Crete, you know, thousands of years ago, they must surely have quite wide-ranging connections by the time of the Minoans in the Bronze Age.

Speaker 10 Absolutely, absolutely. I mentioned their contacts with the Egyptians.
You know, we have finds of Egyptian things on Crete starting already in the third millennium, and vice versa.

Speaker 10 We have things from Minoan Crete in Egypt. Ditto for other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, from Syria,

Speaker 10 the regions that we now called the Levant, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus. Again, we have objects from this area that were found on Crete and vice versa.

Speaker 10 We even have for certain periods frescoes produced in Minoan style found in Egypt, in Syria, in what is modern-day Israel. Isn't that amazing?

Speaker 10 So, were they people exchanging not just goods, but also perhaps craftsmen, as people did in the Renaissance?

Speaker 10 You know, sometimes people in various courts of Renaissance Europe exchanged really good craftsmen, or really good craftsmen sought the patronage of different

Speaker 10 people around the different courts of Europe.

Speaker 14 It does seem that there's quite a bit of movement, isn't there, you know, of people.

Speaker 14 So these trade routes, these connections that the Minoan Cretans had in the third, second millenniums BC, it allowed the exchanging of goods, importing, exporting, but also of ideas too.

Speaker 10 Ideas,

Speaker 10 people.

Speaker 10 We only have proxies.

Speaker 10 They must have exchanged things like foodstuff. They must have exchanged things that doesn't survive, but we have the containers, the clay containers that were exchanged.

Speaker 10 Yes, they exchanged ideas because, for example, we know that there are certain Egyptian divinities, you know, the Minoan artisans, they start changing them to suit more local tastes.

Speaker 10 So absolutely, change of ideas and let's not forget ideas don't have legs. Ideas are exchanged through people traveling around.

Speaker 10 And we should never think that because we are talking of 5,000 years ago, that people were not moving around.

Speaker 14 We've largely covered in our episode today the story of the early Minoans, their origins, their rise. And we haven't really covered the end.

Speaker 14 And I feel that will all be in another episode, writing religion and so on. I think the last thing that I'd like to ask before we wrap up is keeping on that trade thing a bit more.

Speaker 14 Purple dye, I mean, how important is like the maritime world and things like purple dye to the Minoans? I want to ask this as the last question before we finish.

Speaker 10 Well, it was certainly important because you find remains of purple dye productions at many archaeological sites on Crete.

Speaker 10 I can't think off the top of my head, to be 100% honest, if they have already found evidence for purple dye production

Speaker 10 as early as the third millennium, but certainly in the second millennium, there is plenty of evidence, and sometimes linked to small islands also around the island of Crete.

Speaker 10 Some American colleagues have excavated one of these areas where they, you know, a little settlement on a small island off the coast of South Crete that seemed to have been a settlement used exclusively for this purpose, for extracting purple dye.

Speaker 10 The last time I worked on an excavation on Crete was at the site of Palae Castro and there too we found a pile, a huge pile of shells because purple comes from this poor animal that lives inside the shell.

Speaker 14 So these are the murek shells, so that's good to clarify, isn't it? The purple dye is extracted from this shelled...

Speaker 10 From the animal.

Speaker 14 Yes, on seashores.

Speaker 10 You don't want to be near purple shell production. It really stinks.

Speaker 10 A colleague of mine decided to do some experimental archaeology and extracted a number of these poor animals from their shells and let them macerate. And the stink.
I don't think I've ever felt...

Speaker 10 smell anything as bad as that.

Speaker 14 Nico, this has been really interesting.

Speaker 14 As mentioned, I know we've only really covered the earlier story of the Minoans, but it is interesting, isn't it, how with the third millennium, with the second millennium BC, before the arrival of the Mycenaeans, you know, with the archaeology that you have, there's still so much more to piece together.

Speaker 14 As mentioned at the start, it's still very mysterious, and it feels like

Speaker 14 there's a lot more to talk about and a lot more to speculate about, but we've made a start.

Speaker 10 And people always think that although people have excavated at Knossos since 1900, they found everything. It's just the tip of the iceberg.

Speaker 10 There is so much more that can be excavated anywhere on Crete.

Speaker 14 There we go. Nico, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today.

Speaker 10 No problem. Lovely to talk to you as usual.
Thank you.

Speaker 14 Well, there you go. There was Professor Nicoletta Momicoliano giving you an introduction to the Minoans and how they rose to prominence more than 3,500 years ago.

Speaker 14 As mentioned right at the beginning, we realised quickly when doing this episode that we needed more than one episode to do the Minoans justice, to cover their entire story.

Speaker 14 So don't you worry, we'll be doing more Minoan episodes in the future where we explore more of the marvels and mysteries of the Minoans. Stay tuned for those.

Speaker 14 Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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