AEGEAN ART
CHAPTER 4
Art of the Cyclades and Crete
Mycenaean Civilization
The Palace at Knossos
Women in the Aegean: The Minoan Snake Goddess
Minoan Civilization
Crete Art with map, images and general information
Dartmouth College: Archaeology of the Aegean Class
The Early Cycladic Period,
Minoan Architecture: The Palaces, Minoan Domestic and Funerary Architecture, Late Minoan Painting, Minoan Religion, Mycenaean Residential Architecture, Mycenaean Public and Funerary Architecture, Mycenaean Pictorial Art and Pottery, Troy VII and the Historicity of the Trojan War,
Crete appears to have been first inhabited during the Neolithic period - that is from the 6th millennium BC. The earliest inhabitants may have come from Asia Minor. Their culture was still relatively primitive, but it had reached the stage of production, involving the cultivation of the soil and the keeping of domesticated animals. They knew how to make fine burnished pottery, frequently decorated with incised geometric motifs, and were capable of building stone houses, though they also still made use of caves for habitation. Metals were as yet unknown and the tools and weapons they needed (hammers, axes, knives etc.) were made of a range of hard stones, and obsidian from the Cycladic Island of Milos. The simple, relatively primitive figurines suggest that they worshipped a female fertility goddess.
The Neolithic was followed by the Bronze Age Civilization which the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated the palace at Knossos, called "Minoan" after Minos, the legendary king of Crete. This civilization lasted over 1500 years, from 2600-1100 BC, and reached the height of its prosperity in the 18th - 16th centuries. Very little was known about Minoan Crete before the great excavations of Greek and foreign archaeologists that began about 1900, and the discovery of the palaces of Knossos and Phaestos, with their astonishing architecture and wonderful finds. Its history had passed into the realm of legend and remained a distant memory in Greek tradition and mythology.
The ancient authors speak mainly of Minos, the king who had his capital at Knossos, and was a wise lawgiver, a fair judge (who therefore judged souls in Hades after his death, along with Rhadamanthys and Aiakos) and a great sea - dominator. Homer calls him "..companion of mighty Zeus..", and Thucydides informs us that he was the first man to hold sway over the Aegean with his fleet, and that he captured and colonized the Cyclades, driving out the Carians, and freeing the seas from piracy.
Crete was the crossroads linking three continents, and the racial elements and cultural strands of Asia, Africa and Europe met and mingled there to produce a new way of life, a new philosophy of the world and an exceptionally fine art that still strikes one today with its freshness, charm, variety, and mobility.
The mixture of racial elements in Crete is demonstrated by the different skull - types discovered in the excavations there.
In general terms, however, the Minoans form part of the so - called "Mediterranean type", they were of medium height and had black curly hair and brown eyes. Their language is not known, for the written texts have not yet been deciphered, but it appears to have belonged to a separate category of the Mediterranean languages. After 1450 BC when the Achaeans had established themselves in Crete, a very archaic form of Greek was used as the official language and gained some dissemination.
The Pre-palace period (2600-1900 BC)
With the arrival of new racial elements in Crete, bronze was used for the first time in the fabrication of tools and weapons. Its use quickly became widespread and continued to the end of the Minoan period. Not enough is known about the pre-palace settlements, but the tombs of the period are very well known. The wealth of finds in these tombs supplies us with information about the art and evolution of the pre-palace Civilization.
The pottery has a variety of main styles. They are imitations of vessels made of straw, wood or hide and have incised, motifs full of movement painted and mottled decoration. Particularly fine examples are the Vassiliki style pots with their striking mottled decoration, produced by the firing, and their sophisticated shapes, like the "teapot" and the tall, beaked pitchers (Kamares Ware Jug). The first polychrome pottery makes its appearance towards the end of the period. In the field of miniature art, the gold ware is outstanding, as are the excellent, early examples of seals tones made of ivory and steatite. The main forms of deity, and the most important cult symbols, had made their appearance in the sphere of religion, figurines of the Mother Goddess being typical.
First Palace period (1900-1700 BC)
At the beginning, power began to be centered in the hands of kings, for some unknown reason, and the first large palace centers which had a wide cultural influence in the vital region around them, came into being. Excavation has revealed four large palaces, at Knossos, Phaestos, Malia and Zakros, but there must have been others. It is clear from the scant remains of them that have been discovered beneath the later palaces that they possessed all the features of the fully developed Minoan architecture, that is the arrangement of the buildings around a central court, the fine facades of closely fitted blocks of porous stone, the large numbers of magazines, the sacred rooms, the different levels and storeys connected by small staircases, and the monumental entrances. Our book shows the Palace complex at Phaestos.
The most decorative style of pottery in the world was created in the palace workshops: the Kamares ware, named after the cave of Kamares where it was first discovered. Its motifs are polychrome and full of movement; they are mainly rosettes, spirals and cross-hatching, painted on a shiny black background, and they are found on a variety of vase shapes, made with an astonishing technical perfection.The specialist workshops of the palaces also produced very fine vases or vessels of stone and faience; seal tones of precious or semi precious stones, with hieroglyphics and dynamic scenes that are often naturalistic; solid elegant weapons and tools; vessels of bronze or silver; jewellery and miniature sculpture.
The Minoan pantheon always has the mother goddess as its main element, and the use of sacred symbols (the sacred horns and the double axe) becomes general. Society was organized hierarchically, there was specialization of labour and contacts with the outside world became more frequent. A terrible disaster, perhaps caused by earthquakes, reduced the first palace centers and the settlements of Crete to ruins, about 1700 BC.
Second Palace period (1770-1380 BC)
During this period Minoan Civilization reached its zenith. The new palaces that were built upon the ruins of the old ones were much more magnificent, the cities around them expanded and hummed with life. The new palaces were multi-storeyed and very complex. They had great courtyards, picturesque porticoes, broad easy staircases, processional paths and monumental entrances. The royal living quarters had tiers of doors, thrones and benches, as well as bathrooms and interior light wells, and there were rows of sacred quarters and magazines, crypts, and halls for audiences, banquet and sacred ceremonies. Finally, there were ancillary areas of all kinds, including workshops, and a water-supply and drainage system based on very ingenuous principles. It is not surprising that buildings as large and complicated as this (the palace at Knossos covers 22.000 square meters and had over 1500 rooms) led the Greek imagination to create the myth of the labyrinth. The great palaces had one feature in common with the smaller ones: this was the wonderful fresco painting decorating the walls with fresh, lively scenes in an array of colors, or the dazzling white and veined blocks of gypsum that were used to cover the walls and floors.
The social system was probably feudal and theocratic, and the king of each palace center was also the supreme religious leader. There may have been a hierarchy of these priest-kings, headed by the ruler of Knossos. The art of the second palaces is naturalistic for the most part, and demonstrates the love of the Minoans for eternal, all-powerful and constantly renewed nature, as well as its internal, spiritual counterpart.
A variety of pottery styles developed: the marine style, with its lively motifs derived from the varied and striking world of the deep (octopuses, tritons, star fishes, sea-snails, rocks, seaweed etc.); the floral style, with its fresh plants and open flowers; the decorated style, the basic motif of which is the spiral in a variety of complicated arrangements, though it also has sacred symbols and weapons, and, during the final phase of the period, the "palace" style, with its tectonic forms and decoration arranged in bands. Note the Octopus Flash in your book.
The fresco - a particular feature of the period - was used on a much greater scale than previously to decorate the palaces and wealthy houses. Landscapes were now depicted (royal gardens with exotic animals, such as monkeys, thickets of dense vegetation, birds, wild cats and deer), and there are scenes from cult and from social life: scenes of festival occasions in the palaces and sanctuaries (the miniature frescoes from Knossos), of contests such as bull-leaping, held in honor of the deity, and of ritual, such as the "holy Communion" with the Parisienne. The relief fresco was used to portray majestic figures of princes and high priests (Prince with the Lilies) and sacred or imaginary animals (bulls, sphinxes, griffins etc.).
In the field of plastic art, the figures were more natural and complete, like the figurines with the beautiful hairstyles from Piskokefalo (Sitia), and the plastic rhytons in the shapes of bulls or wild cats. The stone vases and vessels were made of fine veined, colored stone or of rare, hard stones, alabaster, marble, rock crystal, obsidian, porphyry and basalt. They often take the form of sacred animals or animal heads, like the bull's head from Knossos, or celebrations of a good harvest, like on the Harvester Vase from Hagia Triada.
Faience was used for the working of rare, luxury items such as plastic rhytons (Zakros), decorative or votive plaques (the "town mosaic", and votive reliefs from Knossos), and unique figurines like the snake goddesses. There are works of a similar technical perfection in gold and ivory, such as the chrysselephantine bull leaper from Knossos, royal gaming boards, gold rings engraved with miniature scenes of ritual, that afford so much information about Minoan religion, a wide range of jewellery, and vessels either made of gold or silver, or gilded. The handles of the long swords or elegant daggers of this period often have a gold covering and gold nails. In addition to bronze weapons and tools of all kinds, many of which are like those of the present day, there are some very fine bronze vessels with carefully worked and graceful repoussee decoration.The seal stones of the second palace period are made of precious and semiprecious stones, and represent wonderfully natural scenes from the animal world and from the religious cycle.
The main deity is always the Mother Goddess, who is portrayed in her different forms. She is the chthonic "goddess with the snakes" the "Ministress of the Animals" with lions and chamois, and the goddess of the heavens, with birds and stars. The powerful god of fertility was worshipped together with her, apparently in the form of a bull, as were the young couple, boy and girl, who died or were lost in the autumn and came back to the light and life in the spring, thus representing the cycle of nature. Alongside them there existed a whole exotic world of monstrous demons to serve them, and facilitate communications between man and the divinity. The deities were worshipped in sanctuaries in the palaces, houses or countryside, in the peak sanctuaries and in sacred caves. Many of the features of Minoan religion passed into the cycle of Greek mystery religions. Most of the tombs were cut into the soft rock and had a square burial chamber and a sloping dromos. Some were still vaulted tombs with a circular or rectangular chamber. The south royal tomb-sanctuary at Knossos consists of a complete building complex, with a small portico, a crypt with a sacred Pillar, a chamber cut into the rock, and an upper floor for the cult of the dead.
About 1450, all the centers of the second palace period were destroyed by the terrible volcanic eruption of Santorini. Life was resumed only in the palace at Knossos, which was reconstructed and served as the residence of a new Achaean dynasty. The presence of this dynasty is attested both by the very archaic Greek language written in Linear B and by the appearance of the "Palace Style" pottery. Many changes were made in the arrangement of the palaces, and it is to this period that the "throne room" belongs, as does the final form and decoration (with frescoes) of the "Corridor of the Procession", and most of the other surviving frescoes.
The information on this page is taken from books published by D&I Mathioulakis, Athens, Greece.
Updated 9-20-99