The Minoans and Knossos

Much like the Parthenon, I remember seeing pictures of the mural with people jumping over the bull, and the red columns from the site in the textbooks of almost every class in grade school. Math. Science. Reading. Art. History. Art History. All of them.

So we/maybe just me were excited to catch an early bus out of town and be one of the first ones into see the ruins of the Palace of Knossos. It was Sunday, so we were able to get into the site for free, and being so early, and it being off season, we had the place seemingly to ourselves until we were walking to the exit a few hours later.

It’s not the most impressive site in the world, and a lot of it is actually a rebuilding or recreation based on whatever ideas the British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans and his team could come up with 100 years ago. Some of the ideas were down right guesses.

This idea is that Knossos was the palace of the legendary King Minos. For those that don’t remember, Minos had built a giant labyrinth under his temple where he kept his son, the half man/half bull creature called the Minotaur. For some reason, the King of Athens had screwed up real bad and had to send his son Theseus as a sacrifice to Crete, so Minos threw him in the labyrinth.

Ariadne, Minos’ daughter, of course fell in love with Theseus, and gave him a big ball o’ yarn to help him find his way out of the maze after he killed the Minotaur - which naturally he did. They fled Crete, and Theseus was so grateful that he eventually stranded her on some other island, or worse, depending on which version of the myth you prefer.

Was King Minos or the labyrinth real? If so, was this his palace? No one knows. What we do know is that this was in fact the center of the Minoan civilization. (Named after King Minos by Arthur Evans-what they called themselves could have been very different). They didn't find any Minotaur bodies either, but they know that bulls were very important in Minoan society. They even found coins with rudementary labyrinths on them.

The Minoans were the first major civilization and superpower in Europe, dating back to somewhere around 2700 BC. The Minoans were incredibly advanced and had the biggest, badest navy around, and since they controlled the sea, and were isolated on an island, they had no need for walled, fortified cities; so they built all of their major towns on the coast. Eventually they were mysteriously all but wiped out (probably by a major volcanic eruption and ensuing tsunami.) With no more navy to protect them, it is believed the Mycaneans from mainland Greece eventually invaded and took over as the reigning superpower in the area. The site was abandoned some 3,000 years ago.

Its crazy to think that almost nothing besides the Minotaur myth was know about such an incredibly advanced civilization as recent as 1900. Some people even think the ancient people are the basis for the Atlantis myth written by Plato some 1,000 years later. So many things we'll never know.

From Knossos, with love.

-Will + Sara