Home of the Minotaur?

Fresco in Palace of Knossos

I've spent the last few posts describing extremely ancient civilisations so I'll stick with the theme and describe the Minoans. The Minoans were the first major civilisation in what is now Europe. Their culture was based primarily on and around the island of Crete around the years 1900-1400 BC. Like the Indus Valley Civilisation, they left behind an undecipherable script, but unlike the Indus Valley their cities and palaces have been extensively excavated and we know a fair amount about them.

Their culture is named after a mythical Cretan king from Greek mythology called Minos. Minos is said to have had a large fleet and to have demanded human sacrifice from the mainland Greeks, who were sacrificed by being fed to a monster (the Minotaur, the progeny of Minos' wife and a bull) in a labyrinth underneath Minos' palace. This continued until a hero from ancient Athens slew the Minotaur. The classical Greek myth is unclear, but there may be the slightest elements of history lurking around in them. There may be the occasional reference to their culture in Egyptian texts and possibly the Old Testament, but apart from these snatches of myth and minimal reference we have only archaeology to go on.

Fresco from Akrotiri showing a Minoan port

Archaeology shows the Minoans to have been great palace builders. The main palace was at a site called Knossos but there were other palaces at sites such as Phaistos that were significant. These palaces were very large, haphazardly planned, decorated with magnificent frescoes and supplied with luxuries like flushing toilets. The palaces could contain up to a thousand rooms and palace is probably the wrong word to describe them. They were more like miniature cities (but palace is the usual archaeological description). The site at Knossos has been extensively restored and visitors can get a vague idea of what the original sites must have been like.

Minoan Fresco of Bull Leaping

Upon discovery of this remarkable civilisation people were originally struck by how peaceful these people seemed to be. Compared to other cultures of the time, the Minoans did not depict warfare in their art, their cities were unfortified and very few weapons were found. This initial reaction is being revisited and evidence of weaponry has been discovered. The lack of city walls isn't all that significant either. If the later Greek legend has any basis of fact in its description of Cretan sea power, the Minoans may simply have relied upon destroying enemies at sea and not bothered to fortify. As regards the lack of battle scenes in their art, most of the surviving artwork comes from ground floor walls of the palaces. The upper stories do not survive and so to draw a conclusion from a fraction of the material seems unwise.

'Throne Room' in Knossos

The Cretan religion is usually considered to be centred on goddess worship but the bull was very important in their artwork as well. Some of the most famous frescoes and statues show what appear to be ritual games where young athletes would compete to leap and vault over the backs of charging bulls. Perhaps it was their sport, perhaps it was an artistic motif, but it was significant. In other Near-Eastern cultures around that date the horns of a bull were a symbol of power. It even appears that the roofs of all the Cretan palaces were ringed with stylised horns of bulls.

Perhaps the Classical Greeks, who would have seen the collapsed, maze-like remnants of the Cretan palaces and seen the ever-present frescoes of bulls may have used this to come up with the legend of the Minotaur: Or possibly not. The legends of human sacrifice may have had some bearing in reality as well, as some skeletons have been found that bear the signs of possible sacrifice.

If the Minoans (an island civilisation) had control of the sea why did their civilisation disappear? We move from one legend to another.

The bay in the middle of the island is actually a crater

The tale of Atlantis (told by Plato in the early 300's BC) is of an ancient highly developed city whose inhabitants were the favoured people of the sea god. Their city flourished until they behaved wickedly and brought the anger of the gods upon them. The gods allowed them to be defeated by the Athenians and the sea god, after the defeat allowed their island city to sink into the sea.

An island not far north of Crete, called Thera, was one of the most active volcanoes in the Mediterranean. Some time around 1600 BC the inhabitants must have realised something terrible was going to happen because they abandoned the city built on the edge of the island and presumably took to the sea. The volcanic eruption that followed was one of the largest in human history, launching huge amounts of ash into the atmosphere, darkening the sky. Major tsunamis followed that seem to have done serious damage to the Minoan coastal settlements and, if their fleet was at anchor on the north of the island, could have destroyed their fleet and merchant shipping. If any visitors from later times went to see the once powerful city on Thera, they would have seen the island as it now is (see picture). If there is a historical basis for the legend of Atlantis, this is probably it.

Mycenaean Weapons: The Mycenaeans were not peaceful

It seems that the Minoan civilisation survived the catastrophe of the Theran eruption but their civilisation was presumably weakened by the loss of their coastal settlements and fleet. The atmospheric ash after the eruption would have damaged their agriculture for years to come so with reduced farmland and reduced fishing abilities their culture must have tried to weather the continuing crisis. Their culture survives for less than a hundred years after the eruption before there is a change in the archaeological data. The palaces remain but now the artefacts are the same as artefacts from mainland Greece. It is probable that the Minoan civilisation had been conquered by the rising Bronze Age Greeks, better known as the Mycenaean culture. Perhaps the Atlantean reference to conquering Athenians and the Greek legend of Theseus' slaying of the Minotaur are a very confused memory of the mainland Greeks overthrowing their weakened neighbours and overlords. Bear in mind however, that this theory depends upon the dating of the eruption of Thera, which is still debated by scholars.

Linear A writing of the Minoan Culture

It is frustrating that we cannot read the Minoan writing (known as Linear A). If they could speak to us directly we could know them better. But through the selective reading of myth and through the much more reliable method of archaeology we can get perhaps a glimpse of who the people who comprised this first European civilisation were. 

Protagoras of Abdera

Protagoras was a Greek Sophist who came from the city of Abdera (on northern coast of the Aegean Sea) and who lived between the years of 490-420 BC. I thought that I would write a short piece about his work because, even though I disagree with most of it, it is very seldom given the credit it deserves.

Protagoras had the misfortune of not having his works preserved so all that we know about him comes from some extremely loose collections of stories collected six or seven hundred years after his death or from the writings of those who vaguely knew him, but disagreed with him (Diogenes Laertius was the story collector and Plato was the opponent). So we have only hearsay and bias to work with. According to what can be gleaned from Diogenes' "Lives of the Philosophers" and Plato's Dialogues, Protagoras was the first Sophist.

Many Greek cities at the time were democracies (of sorts). These democracies had no parliaments. Anyone and everyone could stand up in the assemblies and shout a speech to the assembled voters. If they liked your speech they could vote on your proposal. Someone who had the confidence and delivery (and lung power) to make good speeches continually could effectively rule a city as large as Athens! Even in oligarchies, the ability to speak well was highly valued, as aristocratic councils could still be swayed by speeches. So, the ability to speak well gave power and was valued above almost anything else.

Protagoras claimed that for a large sum of money he would teach the young people to speak well. He would teach them ways of delivering a speech effectively while demolishing the arguments of their opponents. Few people believed his claims so, upon entering a city, Protagoras would stand in a public place and deliver a ridiculous speech, proving that black was white or some such, awing the locals with his verbal abilities and immediately landing contracts to be taught to speak like him. Those who claimed to teach this power of perfect speech became known as Sophists.

Naturally, this claim annoyed a lot of people. The traditional ruling families of cities saw their ancestral positions of status threatened. Defenders of traditional morality became very worried that these thinkers, who laughed at the old ways of doing things, would corrupt the youth and lastly, those who were convinced that things like "Truth" and "Courage" had specific meanings were deeply disturbed when someone claimed sufficient verbal ability to argue both sides of an argument and win. Central to the Sophist ideal (according to their enemies) was that there was no true answer to a question but that whatever position the speaker chose could be defended to the last.

Protagoras himself had two famous quotes, which are presented as follows taken from Diogenes Laertius' work Lives of the Philosophers, IX 50-56:

"Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not."

"Concerning the gods, I am not in a position to know either that they exist or that they do not exist; for there are many obstacles in the way of such knowledge, notably the intrinsic obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life."

It's hard to know if these were actually beliefs of Protagoras or if these were the catchy sentences that he would start his show arguments with. One of the later Sophists (Gorgias of Leontini) once stated that Being is impossible, that even if something existed that we could have no Knowledge of it and that even if we could know Being, we could never communicate this knowledge to anyone. You have to suspect he was showing off, so Protagoras may have been doing the same here. We are fairly sure that he was one of the first thinkers to study the structure of language for the purposes of argument, which must have made him formidable indeed.

In the year 399 BC an Athenian by the name of Socrates was put to death by the state on the of "corrupting the youth", while at his trial he was allegedly accused of "making the weaker argument appear the stronger". Socrates was put to death for doing the things that Protagoras started. But one of Socrates' students, a young man by the name of Plato, was convinced that his teacher had not been a Sophist but had tried to find truth, real truth, not the mere conventions of Athens, by challenging the Sophists at their own game. Maybe Plato was deluded about Socrates, we'll never truly know, but he wrote a series of books where Socrates is a heroic debater, struggling to understand reality and truth. Those who debate him are sometimes the arrogant and foolish city leaders who think they know the meanings of Courage or Piety, only to be shown up by the questioning of Socrates. But the serious debates that Plato describes are against thinkers like Critias or Gorgias or the leader of the Sophists Protagoras, where Socrates argues for a system where words have a fixed relation to reality and can truly be known by people, as opposed to the shifting, fluid belief systems of the Sophists.

Plato's anti-Sophistic quest led him to found the first Academy where the brightest minds of his day gathered and produced such thinkers as Aristotle (who invented the disciplines of Logic and Biology and wrote on every subject then known to man). It's hard to know what exactly Protagoras really believed; perhaps he was only trying to make money. But the unintended reaction to his ideas helped start the Greek Enlightenment, which continues to influence us today.

I will leave you with the following tale (almost certainly legendary, as the same story is told of Corax and Tisias) about Protagoras. The story goes that a poor pupil came to him and told him that he was desperate to learn rhetoric but could not afford the fees. Protagoras took pity on the young Euathlus and promised to teach him on the understanding that Euathlus would repay him once he had won his first lawsuit. Euathlus proved a brilliant pupil, but upon completing the training, Euathlus not only refused to pay but refused to plead cases before the courts. Protagoras did what every good teacher should do and took him to court. He reasoned that he couldn't lose his fee because "… if I win the case, I should get the fee because I have won it; If you win the case, I should get the fee because you have won it!"