Minoan Civilisation (Radio Edit)

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Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today, we are sailing all the way back to Bronze Age Crete to learn about the ancient Minoan civilization.

And to help us mine truth from minors or myth.

We have two very special guests.

In History Corner, he's a lecturer at Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education.

His research includes classical mythology and history.

He's the author of several books, including Mythologica, a fantastic illustrated children's encyclopedia of Greek myths.

It's very lovely.

And you'll remember him from our episode, All About Atlantis.

It's not real.

It's Dr.

Steve Kershaw.

Welcome back, Steve.

Thank you very much.

I'm delighted to be back.

And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, broadcaster, and author.

You will know her from Radio 4's shortcuts, 8 Out of 10 Cats.

Maybe you've read her books, including the recent short story collection, Because I Don't Know What You Mean and What You Don't.

But you'll definitely remember her from my episode on medieval science.

It's Josie Long.

Welcome back, Josie.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me back.

And cannot tell you how heartbroken I was by just the casual Atlantis didn't exist.

Oh, no.

Brutal.

I know you was famously brainy, and you're a big book reader, but are you a gold star student when it comes to the Bronze Age?

Absolutely not.

However, I feel that I have some little crumbs to cling to.

But then I feel like I learnt last time that those crumbs will not serve me well.

Like, even as you said, like, minor 12 missed, I was like, okay, we won't mention that.

All of the stuff that was going on around that time,

I find very exciting.

But I wouldn't say that I like, I'm glad you're here, Steve.

I think that's the main part.

Okay, I'm glad you're here too.

So, what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject.

I'm guessing you might know the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Set in the huge labyrinth under Minoan Crete, that's where the word labyrinth comes from.

You'll perhaps know the story of Icarus and his dad escaping the island, flying too close to the sun, very sad.

But what's the truth behind the Minos myth?

What was life really like back in the Bronze Age on Crete, and why might their fashion choices raise a few eyebrows now?

Let's find out.

Josie, do you know when in history the Minoans were hanging about on Crete?

Okay, if I had to guess, I would say it was 6,000 years ago?

Slightly too early.

Oh, too early.

Damn it, I was going to say 5,000 years ago, and then my brain was like, push it.

I think 5,000 years ago.

5,000, I think, is the start, right, Steve?

That's what we're going to do.

We're getting there.

Yeah, we're getting there.

So they first sort of emerge around 3000 BC, and they last to about 1450 BC.

So they emerge at roughly the same time as dynastic Egypt.

Yes, okay.

As a kid, did you ever learn about the Minotaur?

Oh, absolutely.

Do you want to summarise it for us?

Yeah, of course.

Oh, God.

No.

Okay.

Underneath this palace of King Minos at Knossos, there's like a labyrinth.

And then at the bottom of it, the Minotaur.

And the Minotaur is half man, half bull.

And it's this horrendous beast.

And the person is able to survive it

by keeping this red thread and following back out the puzzle.

So it's like very much a kind of Hansel and Gretel

meets meets a cow

story.

Good job Josie Long.

Steve what did what did Josie miss out?

Totally excellent.

There's this guy King Minos and he's this sort of mythical king of Crete.

He's the son of Zeus and Europa.

He wanted to be king but it was there was a dispute going on and he prayed to the god Poseidon to support him and said, will you send a bull from the sea?

And he did and it was just wonderful.

But Minos couldn't bring himself to sacrifice the bull after he'd done this, which he really should have done that.

So as revenge, Poseidon actually made Minos' wife, who was called Passiphae, fall in lust with the bull.

What you get now is she gave birth to a sort of cute little baby Minotaur that then grew up into this most obscene beast.

And it was at this point that Minos decided that we need to shut this beast away.

So he had Daidalus build this labyrinth, which is this underground structure that was so complicated you could get in, but you could never get out.

Minos kind of, he had a big sea empire, and he had a son who was killed by the Athenians.

And so as revenge, he wanted compensation.

So he demanded the Athenians should send him seven young men and seven young women, either every year or every nine years.

It varies.

The Minotaur was eating Athenian young people on a regular basis until the Athenian prince Theseus volunteered to go and he defeated the Minotaur.

He was helped by Minos's daughter who was called Ariadne and

she's the one who gave him the thread and so that he could get down into the into the labyrinth, he could kill the Minotaur and he could find his way out.

And then that's what people knew about ancient Crete until about the year 1900 or so, isn't it?

And knew doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

That's some serious storytelling.

Really, right at the end of the 19th century,

in the year 1878, 1879, there's a Cretan archaeologist whose name is Minos.

His first name is Minos.

Destiny.

Minos Kalakarinos, he's called.

And he excavated, he was doing some excavations at the palace, as they called it, at Knossos, which is on the north side of Crete.

And what he found was some what they call pithoi, huge ceramic storage jars.

that

that he then sent out to various museums.

This excited everybody's interest.

And all of a sudden, archaeologists really, really wanted to know more about this palace.

Everybody wants to have a bit of the action.

The most important one, really, is Arthur Evans.

He's the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

He was shown the site by this guy, Kalakarinos, in 1894.

And he put his money where his mouth is.

He bought the site

in 1900.

There'd been a huge war between the Turks and the Cretans as the Cretans won their independence from the Ottomans.

But he bought the site and he started to dig.

Sadly for Kalakarinos, he kind of gets edited out of the story in a way, and Evans takes over as the main character.

So Evans is the guy who really takes over and becomes the man who the story is built around.

So Arthur Evans, why has he put his money where his mouth is?

Initially, his main interest to start with was in ancient writing scripts, actually.

He wasn't necessarily seeking what he found, but what he did find was this kind of, as he saw it, this European high civilization that was something that could rival those great civilizations of Egypt and the Near East.

And it's him, really, who gives the name to these people as well.

He based it on the name of King Minos.

So it raises this fantastic question, I think, that's often asked, is whether Arthur Evans discovered the Minoans or whether he invented them.

We'll call them Minoans for today.

Yeah.

But Josie, if in 4,000 years time archaeologists dig up your house and it's the definitive house that represents the 21st century,

what are they going to call our society?

Well the main thing is for me is that I'm going to really get myself, my body in some silt.

If I'm not lying in some silt, I will have deteriorated.

And I'm not taking that risk.

And then I'll do some things to like mess with them so i'll like steal a helmet from the british museum and i'll hold an ipad so they'll be like who who were these people the josephines were they warriors and that and i'll be preserved so they'll be like oh this woman i know that they'll be mean about me like i know they'll be like oh grandma was at the end of her life you know and i know i'll have to just sort of deal with that if it was my flat particularly they would think that we were a lot messier than we are collectively they'd be like they didn't store clothes they kept them all over the floor, they didn't clean.

So today we're going to try and pin some reality onto the myths.

Sir Arthur Evans was trying to do that, but he had some quite controversial techniques.

Do you know what he did at Canossus that is very...

Well, controversial is the word actually in terms of his archaeological techniques.

No, I don't at all.

Have you ever visited?

Have you ever been?

I have, I think.

I've been to Crete.

So I, yes, I have.

My main memory was that I was far too warm the whole time.

But no, I don't know what he would have done controversially.

I can guess, like, from the era that maybe he stole everything.

Maybe he

didn't know that.

He touched it all, you know, he picked it up, he smashed it.

I don't know.

So, I mean, they needed to preserve it after they dug it.

They wanted to preserve it.

So, they ultimately reconstituted it, as that was his word.

They reconstructed it using reinforced concrete.

So, they did that, and they also reconstructed a lot of the frescoes and figurines that had been found on site as well.

So, fundamentally, he was in a way creating his vision of what Knossos was.

Let's deconstruct the reconstruction.

What did Minos, Kanakarinos, and Arthur Evans find originally?

A lot of the archaeological sites, a number of them anyway, on Crete are what they called palaces.

And Evans saw it kind of as the seat of a dynasty of priest-kings.

It's more likely that you've got groups of elites here who are perhaps in competition with each other, particularly in the early periods.

So, some kind of centralised authority, probably.

But what exactly that looks like and how it's constituted is a bit elusive.

But there were other largish towns, smaller towns, villages, country houses, ports as well, of course, because these people were seafarers.

Great seafarers.

You said Arthur Evans was interested in ancient texts and writing systems.

Yes, he was.

So, was he attracted by writing systems first?

Yeah,

and we have my known writing.

The trouble is that we can't decipher it, we don't know what language it was.

Is that still now?

Still now.

Yeah.

That's a puzzle to solve it.

Somebody was solving it.

It's awesome, but people are trying to solve it all the time.

There's two main scripts that they use.

There's the thing called Cretan hieroglyphics and a script called Linear A.

I've heard of Linear B.

Yes, Linear B was written on Crete, but it comes in later.

That we can translate and we know all about, and it was Greek.

It was an early form of Greek.

But what the Linear A was, we don't know.

It's all Greek to them.

So it was, yeah, absolutely.

It was all Greek to them, all Greek to the Minoans.

What else are we going on?

So, Josie, you mentioned pots?

They do pots exceptionally well and in quantity.

You know,

so it gives us so much information, I think.

They're wonderful ceramicists.

They make figurines as well out of terracotta and a bit of bronze and clay that are very often sort of

votive offerings that you find in sanctuaries and things like that.

Votive to the gods, presumably.

Yeah, absolutely.

And they also do frescoes.

And boy, do they do a good fresco.

They really do.

Really distinctive colour palette that they use in red and yellow and black and white.

And, you know, it's a difficult technique.

You've got to paint it onto wet plaster and work very quickly.

It's a lot survived, sorry, too.

Yeah, it survives very well, actually, because it's applied to the walls and it sticks and it doesn't degrade.

So when they uncovered it, they uncovered like whole walls and whole walls.

Yes, or actually in bits and fragments and bits and pieces.

Very beautiful world that they portray.

How do you think the Minoan Society treated women?

I'm going to go on a real limb and say badly.

I feel like the evidence for, and I would say the past, and let's be real, the present, you would err on the side of badly.

But I feel like now you're going to be like, surprise, well,

I would say badly.

Without wishing to be the mansplaining dude, well, actually,

this is a good time.

The position of women in Minoan society and their art particularly

certainly invites the idea that they might have been quite powerful and quite well accommodated and treated within society.

They are very prominent in the art.

Women everywhere

in the art.

We have wonderful frescoes showing initiation ceremonies and sort of all-female events

to the point where some scholars have suggested that this society may have been a matriarchy.

It's kind of one of those things that we like to believe.

I think it's hard to make that idea stick, but

I think the...

The more I'm hearing about them, the more I like them.

Yeah,

whether

the prominence

of women in the arts and the ritual and the religion transfers to political and social power is another question of course and those categories might be ours as well they might not have had those same categories there's an awful lot of art which is really lovely and that art can then also tell us about fashion what haute couture outfits would you would you be imagining for you know cretan vogue i would have to guess a lot of weaving a lot of things dyed for the dyed weft of course feathers seabird feathers nice that's what you're getting You're getting things from the mountains, and maybe you're getting kind of a papyrus-style

thing.

I mean, you're really asking the wrong person.

I don't even know what's fashionable now.

I feel like it's a big leap.

Well, let's show you some art from the period, showing you both men and women's fashion.

Oh, hello.

Okay.

What can you see?

Well, I will say,

yeah, people really

absolutely getting their boobs out.

There's no other way to say it.

The dresses are just people,

I suppose,

people thrilled to show their boobs to one another.

The dress is going under the boob.

And you know what?

Maybe they were a happier society for it.

I see people dressed in ways that you think...

What this does suggest is it could be just one historian having a bit of a laugh.

Okay, so we've talked about fashion taste.

Let's talk about actual taste.

What are the Minoans eating back in the Bronze Age?

I mean, actually, I'll ask you, Josie, what's your guess?

You're going to go honey.

That's what I know about Greek islands.

A lot of honey.

Thyme.

Thyme and rosemary on the hillside.

Lovely.

Lovely.

You'd have lambs.

I hear loads about sheep in Greek myths.

I mean, that's enough, isn't it?

You know, what else do you have in Greece if you go, oh, I love

olives?

Yeah.

A bit of salad, a bit of feta.

Tatsiki?

I don't know.

Good time.

Flatbreads.

Yes, it sounds lovely, Steve.

All of the above.

Yeah,

they're eating...

pulses and

loads of veg and as you say olives meat fish not as much fish as you might might

imagine so it seems from the from an island people but they're they're growing grapes and of course they're making wine so you need to preserve your feet

so you make cheese you can preserve your milk so you could you make wine you can preserve your grapes and they drink wine that's flavoured with toasted oak so it's like oaky chardonnays and also they use pine resin oh so it's retsina the retsina they drink on crete now is a direct throwback to my known times it's fantastic And medicinal...

Yeah, medicinal stuff, they grow poppies as well for medicinal purposes and possibly.

Medicinal purposes.

Yes,

and religious

gods.

Opioids and wine.

Sounds like the Minoans are party people.

They've had a great time.

So opioids and wine is probably why they are playing some quite dangerous games with the local livestock.

Josie's, have you got any ideas what I'm talking about here?

Is it like bullfighting?

Is it like jumping on bulls?

It literally is.

Well done.

Absolutely.

It's jumping over bulls.

It's bull leaping.

And Steve, you can talk us through the bull leaping.

Yeah, it's extraordinary.

It seems to be a really popular kind of entertainment or perhaps again a ritual activity as a sort of initiation thing.

So you've maybe a seasonal thing, you know, with young men netting and subduing bulls and then performing feats of athleticism and jumping over them and possibly sacrificing and eating the bull

when you've done, of course.

yeah but but bull leaping is is is everywhere in their art on again on frescoes and in in ivories and bronzes and whatever they love a bit of bull leaping i mean in terms of jobs on this island then steve i mean we've heard about kind of slightly rural economy but quite large urban centers we must have some linkedin profiles for cattle farmers bull wranglers and fresco painters that much we know what other things we know about the economy or about crafts or you know what are they doing yes so the people are working the obviously they're they're farming and and uh animal husbandry and that kind of thing.

There is an urban population with artisans who are producing all these ceramics and they trade.

They're an island people.

As a Bronze Age society, is there any metal on the island?

Not to speak of.

So they would need to import metal there to make their bronze.

There's no tin, for instance.

There's no gold.

So they're not rich in minerals, but they're rich in agricultural material and what have you.

And as I say, they're great seafarers.

And they're in contact

these other societies within

what's now the Greek islands, but also with Egypt and

the Near East.

And they're not isolated.

No, far from it.

This world is an incredibly interconnected world, I think, much more interconnected than we naturally assume.

Everybody's in touch with everybody else on a very regular basis.

Did people move?

The Minoans colonized, for sure.

The settlement on Kithara is a colony, for instance.

So that's.

And great shipbuilders.

They're wonderful shipbuilders.

Again, the ships appear on

the frescoes, beautifully constructed ships, and

now sort of you know, sort of experimental archaeologists have made Minoan ships and they sail them around the harbour at Khanya.

But they could have been lying.

They could have just been like, yeah, just do a really good shit.

Yeah, we did that.

That could have been aspirational for them.

Like, one day someone will jump jump on a bull.

Maybe I'll say

that.

Famously, archaeologists, we're often finding trash and we're often finding dead people.

So what do we know about Minoan funerary practices?

Do they cremate?

Do they bury?

Yeah, they bury.

I mean, they...

Some of the earlier burials are sort of circular stone constructions.

They call it a pholos, a round building.

It's called a tholos or tholoi in plural.

And they build these circular stone foloi that generally sort of face away from from the settlements there.

You don't want the dead coming back.

You know, that's not what we need.

I love the idea of the dead come back, but they don't know which way to look.

Absolutely.

They're like, oh, I guess I'll go back to being dead there.

That's right.

So, and it looks like many of these chambers are used and reused.

They get looted, of course, which is a problem for the archaeology.

So it's hard to reconstruct the practices exactly.

But it seems like they would lay the dead on the floor with their possessions and some food.

Perhaps after the body is decomposed, then the bones could be transferred to an ossuary.

It may be that you're worshipping your ancestors.

A wide range of ritual activity, I think, often marking

life stage transitions.

So, you know, so birth.

puberty, marriage, parenthood, death.

So there's also the double axe symbol that shows up a lot, isn't it?

That's right.

There's lots and lots and lots of these double axes.

It's called a labrus.

And named for labrus in the religion.

Elite labyrinth.

You find lots of them, tiny little gold ones, huge great bronze ones,

far too big to use.

It's kind of a symbol.

Yeah, symbol and very often associated with the sort of Minoan priestesses as well.

They look to the sky and they look to the earth.

So they have what they call peak sanctuaries on mountain tops, which are where they have clay figurines as offerings and and tablets and jewellery and that kind of thing and then they have sorry they have cave sanctuaries as well so you have up into the sky and then you have down into the earth where there may be sort of feasting and and drinking rituals what was their belief system what do we know because to my mind obviously because crete is now part of greece it's tied in a bit with it but was it always very separate like how does it work pretty much so the one may have kind of evolved into into the other but there's a very prominent, if you like, female deity.

You get a lot of these sort of epiphany scenes of a female deity sort of coming down and perhaps being summoned down, who they think is perhaps the great goddess.

And she repeatedly appears in the art.

So she may be kind of a mother goddess or a mistress of the animals or a sort of guardian of the cities.

That kind of thing.

Whether she is one goddess or she has multiple aspects and there's a whole pantheon of these

is difficult.

Evans wanted it to be one deity because he wanted them to be monotheistic.

We need to talk about the end of the Minoans because they very often get folded into our previous episode, Atlantis.

So often people are like,

people on the internet love to tell me the Minoan civilization was wiped out by the Atlantis flood.

What do we know?

Yeah, I mean, they will like to tell you that, but

it's much more nuanced than that, really.

So roughly i mean that we can bicker about dates but roughly 1450 bc

you see at the end of the neo-palatial period buildings being destroyed by fire and not being rebuilt and cultural changes coming in on the the island what they call warrior burials and the introduction of this linear b script which is a form of greek And there's various possibilities, one of which could be this natural catastrophe.

So the great eruption on Santorini.

But the dates are problematical.

That's probably around 1625 BC.

So it's a long time before.

It's like saying that the eruption of Krakatoa is causing something to happen now.

It may be that we have internal unrest, rebellion on the island against the central power.

Maybe to do with the natural disaster as well,

but that's a possibility.

And then there is a possibility of takeover and invasion by Mycenaeans from the mainland.

So those are the three theories and possibilities.

Maybe you could combine all three.

That pretty much is what brings the Minoans to an end.

It's more of a process than an instantaneous.

It's not an overnight tsunami, is it?

Yeah, no, it's not.

In your face, Atlanteans.

Oh, no, sorry.

They had a good run.

They had a good run.

They did.

Yeah, 1,600 acres.

They had a good run, considering it's a relatively relatively small island, you know?

Absolutely.

To build what they built and to sort of have such a distinctive, unusual vibe.

Yeah.

And to have two myths that persist 5,000 years later.

You've got a handle trip.

It's not bad.

Everyone knows who Icarus is.

It's great.

The nuance window!

Okay, it's time now for the nuance window.

This is the part of the show where Josie and I recline in our palace and sip our pine-flavoured ritzina for two minutes while Dr.

Steve takes to the floor to tell us something that we need to know about the Minoans.

Dr.

Steve, take it away.

There have been stories told about the people we call the Minoans as far back as we can trace.

As Odysseus even says in the Odyssey, out in the wine dark sea there lies a land called Crete, a rich and lovely land boasting 90 cities, one of which is called Knossos, where King Minos ruled.

And when Arthur Evans made his startling discoveries at Knoss, he bought into that narrative.

He wanted the Minoan mythical tales to mirror his Minoan historical reality.

The palace traditionally built for Minos has proved to be no baseless fabric of the imagination, he said.

But imagination is everything here.

And with those Bronze Age artifacts that he unearthed, he created another 20th century artifact of his own and reconstituted it in reinforced concrete.

It was a palace for, as he saw them, a happy, peace-loving people whose arts, freedom, humanism, and dynamism showed that Crete was the cradle of a European civilization that was as ancient and sophisticated as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but also distinct from them.

Now archaeologists often create the past in their own image.

All of those stones and those bones that they excavate can't really speak for themselves.

You know, they need an archaeological interpreter.

So as well as trying to uncover the truth about the past, there's always an element of creativity.

But just like Evans, I think we read and we understand and we reconstitute the past in our cultural present, which often tells us just as much about ourselves as it does about the Minoans.

And that's why history and archaeology are so beautiful.

Thank you, Steve.

Josie, any follow-up follow-up thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think it is very interesting thinking about the fact that

we are telling on ourselves when we think we're talking about them.

You know, we can't escape our own cultural context and we can't escape our own hopes and dreams for what we're looking at.

And I love how mysterious it is, but I also can't bear how mysterious it is because I want to know.

the answers about these things which are so hidden and what a thrill you know i've had a lovely time thank you both all that's left for for me to do is say a big thank you to our guests in History Corner.

We had the sensational Dr.

Steve Kershaw from Oxford University.

Thank you, Steve.

An absolute pleasure, Greg.

Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you.

And in Comedy Corner, we had the lovely Josie Long.

Thank you, Josie.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's been so informative.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we discover, not invent, another legendary historical civilization.

But for now, I'm off to go and challenge Greg James to a bull-leaping contest to see who is the greatest BBC Greg.

It's obviously him, but I've got to try.

Bye!

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