In today's episode, we'll take a look at the evidence from early Minoan history, beginning with pre-history and working up to the Neo-Palatial period. While the items we'll discuss are beautiful and tell us a lot about the artistic focus of Minoan culture, we'll also try to discern the line between fact and fiction when it comes to theories of a Minoan thalassocracy, or, the so-called Minoan 'empire of the sea.'

Episode Transcript

To be frank as we get underway today, the Minoan Civilization has been, thus far in our narrative, the biggest surprise to me personally. For some reason, in my mind the Minoans had always occupied a place of pseudo-familiarity, especially in comparison to the Harappan people we’ve looked at earlier: their name is familiar and the myths associated with them and King Minos are among the most recognizable in Greek mythology. I may have been a bit off-base in my admittedly ignorant assumptions about the Minoans, and my ignorance about the Harappan Civilization is sadly common in the West as well, though that’s no excuse. As I hope to convey through this episode, for all the name recognition the Minoans may have today, or previously had in my own head anyway, we actually don’t know much detail about the culture and details of the Minoan people or their civilization. 

Concerning that name recognition, the name Minos tends to evoke images of myth and legend, at least, if you’re anything like me it does. The earliest of true civilizations to occupy the island of Crete has come to be known as the Minoan Civilization, after the mythical king Minos. In The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus is asked to tell of his lineage, and the beginning of his responding story is the following:

There is a country, Crete, in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair land and a rich, begirt with water. The people there are many, innumerable indeed, and they have ninety cities. Their speech is mixed; one language joins another. Here are Achaeans, here brave native Cretans, her Cydonians, crested Dorians, and noble Pelasgians. Of all their towns the capital is Knossos, where Minos became king when nine years old–Minos, the friend of mighty Zeus and father of my father, bold Deucalion.

The Odyssey of Homer

The allusion in this passage of The Odyssey, which is more explicitly stated in other places throughout Greek mythology, is that King Minos was a son of Zeus himself. The famous stories affiliated with Minos, for example, the minotaur in the labyrinth that Minos had built beneath his palace at Knossos, in addition to his supposed divine lineage should serve as a red flag that Minos may not have been an actual king. When it comes to Minos, the debate tends to be about whether mythical figures like him were completely real, completely mythical, or somewhere in the middle, the argument that they were rooted in history but elaborate mythology gradually evolved to the point that any distinct line between fact and fiction has been smudged beyond definitive identification. As we now delve into the specifics of what we now know as the Minoan Civilization, I’d like to frame our discussion in terms similar to the debate that surrounds King Minos as a historical figure.

The best person to give one view of the Minoans in history is none other than Thucydides. In describing some background history in his treatment of the Peloponnesian War, he describes Minos and his realm as an ‘empire’ or a ‘thalassocracy,’ something I’ll define further in a minute. Thucydides then says this: “Minos, according to tradition, was the first person to organize a navy. He controlled the greater part of what is now called the Hellenic (or Aegean) Sea; he ruled over the Cyclades. . . . And it is reasonable to suppose that he did his best to put down piracy in order to secure his own revenues.” Thucydides then describes a Minoan Empire that exercised direct control over a large part of the Aegean, a view that proponents of our first interpretation share: a theory positing an actual, historical Minoan thalassocracy that existed in historical fact and that saw Minos rule an empire covering a majority of the Aegean Sea from his palace at Knossos on Crete. 

The second camp comprises a more recent trend in historical interpretation and is made up of those who believe that the numerous islands of the Aegean were politically autonomous from Crete, and that Minoan influence in the greater Aegean was merely economic and cultural, even if there may have been a small measure of diplomatic control from Knossos. What I hope to do in the balance of today’s episode is to not necessarily take one side or the other, although my leanings will probably become apparent. Rather, I will try to give a good overview of the main arguments from each camp, along with the historical framework within which these arguments are framed, leaving you to draw your own conclusions about which camp has a stronger position. Before that, though, let me briefly explain that weird word I’ve used a few times now, “thalassocracy.”

The word is of Greek origin and is rooted in two Greek words: ‘thalassa', meaning “sea,” and ‘kratein’, a verb meaning “to rule.” The two together make up the word ‘thalassocracy’, which literally means “to rule the sea” or “rule of the sea.” It’s now used as a descriptive label for states that are primarily maritime empires or states, like the Phoenician civilization which, I promise, we will get to cover in due time. So now that we’ve seen the two alternative arguments and seen  just what exactly a thalassocracy is, lets get into the history of the Minoan people of Crete and beyond. 

The origin of the Minoan people is shrouded in the mists of pre-history. Archaeological evidence has shown evidence of settlement on Mediterranean islands in neolithic times and this should really come as no surprise to us. The geographic reality of the Mediterranean is that of many small but scattered islands that are often-times close enough to one another that they can be seen with the naked eye. It takes little imagination to picture the earliest of mankind venturing onto the water in a log boat, or even simply floating on some appropriate vessel and paddling his way toward an in-view piece of land, ultimately resulting in the pre-historic presence of man on numerous Mediterranean outposts. The island of Crete became the site of comparatively concentrated settlement in neolithic times, likely due to its location off the western coast of Anatolia and at the southern end of the Aegean Sea and the Cyclades. That same location, though, can also be seen as a bit less accessible than most of the smaller islands of the Cyclades or the island of Cyprus, a point made by Fernand Braudel in his brilliantly written history, Memory and the Mediterranean. 

It’s not really within our scope to focus on the neolithic origins of the Minoans, but Braudel paints an image of a burgeoning civilization in the Aegean even before the Bronze Age. He refers to it as a ‘quasi-Aegean civilization’ consisting of the Cyclades, the mythical yet historically provable city of Troy, Crete, and the Hellespont. This civilization, claims Braudel, was “dramatically snuffed out by the Indo-European invasions around the 24th century BCE,” which saw the ancestors of the Mycenaeans in Greece and the Hittites and Louwites of Anatolia overrun the quasi-Aegean civilization and effectively erase the early economic and cultural levels that they had reached. According to Braudel, it was Crete alone that survived this downfall and remained intact enough to have an edge once the Bronze Age began.

The long and short of any human activity paleolithic activity on Crete for us is that there was some. Since Crete is an island, we know that a fair amount of activity there and any trade or commerce that took place with other civilizations had to have done so via a water route at some point. The Bronze Age in Crete is generally placed as starting somewhere around 2700 to 2600 BCE, but the period wherein the Minoans begin building the imposing palaces for which they are now remembered, places like Phaistos and Knossos, didn’t begin until at least 1900 BCE. As I’ve said, though, for centuries before the Minoans began constructing their palaces they were constantly traversing the Mediterranean in boats. Surprisingly, for all that activity we have yet to find a shipwreck or even a visual depiction of a boat from early Bronze Age Minoan Crete. What we do have, however, are a few clay ship models, two specifically: one from Palaikastro, a village on the eastern end of Crete, and the other from Mochlos, a small island that sits off the coast of Crete within the confines of the Gulf of Mirabello. 

Both of these models are roughly dated to the mid-to-late 2000s BCE, so they represent Minoan boats prior to the Palatial Period.  The Palaikastro model is fairly unique as far as the shape goes, especially in comparison to the early boats of the other cultures that we’ve seen thus far. One end has a sharp raised point to it, while the other end has a flat, step-like projection sticking off near the bottom of the boat. It’s surmised that the tall, pointed end was the stern of the boat, while the flat projecting piece has been called a ‘fore-foot,’ and has been interpreted as either being useful for beaching the boat or for use as a step upon reentering the boat once it’s pushed off from shore. Either way, the profile of the boat model bears a distinctly fish-like shape, perhaps just the visual effect that its Minoan creators were seeking. The Machlos boat model also has relatively high ends, though this model is symmetrical, similar in that fact to some of the boats we saw from Mesopotamia and Harappa. In any event, both of these models seem to be representations of small boats that would not have been used for long-distance transport on the Mediterranean, and were almost assuredly used for local transport and travel among the islands of the Cyclades.

The earliest iconic depictions of boats or ships from this time period are slightly younger than the Minoan boat models, though precise dating is difficult. They are also not strictly tied to the Minoan Civilization specifically and the best example was discovered on the small island of Syros in the Cyclades. Similar examples have been found on the Greek mainland and even in Anatolia, so although the ships depicted may not have been in use by the Minoans, they just as well could have been and they were at least used by peoples that had close association with Crete in the early Bronze Age. The objects themselves are commonly called ‘frying pans’ for their resemblance to our modern idea of a frying pan, but we actually don’t know what these ceramic objects were used for originally. They’ve commonly been found in graves, and their high levels of decoration and imagery suggest that they were items possessed by the wealthy class. 

Thankfully for us, an image or scene that was commonly depicted on these frying pan, disk thingies is that of a ship in water. Thirteen separate depictions of ships have been found on these pans, and by and large they all depict similar styles of water vessels, a boat or ship with a horizontal hull with one end sharply raised and the other either not raised at all or, if it is raised, only slightly. Generally, then, they seem to resemble the boat model found a Palaikastro. I don’t believe I mentioned this earlier, but the shape and the single, extreme raised end in these depictions would suggest boats of either a wood, planked construction, though they could also possibly represent long longboats with decorative fittings. The frying pan depictions also contain short, angular lines above and below the hull, generally accepted as representing oars or paddles, though they are very unlikely to be to scale and thus representative of the number of paddles or size of the ship. The image of a frying pan ship that I’m going to post on the website also shows how the Cycladic artists would depict waves as being spirals that surround the ship, an effect results in a piece of striking beauty.

These few items together give us a decent picture of the fact that the Pre-palatial Minoans were quite busy on the waters of the Mediterranean. It makes sense that a concentration of Minoan artifacts would be found close to Crete, and north of Crete in the Cyclades, since the sailing between those islands would have been easier than venturing out south or east from Crete. As the clocks (which didn’t exist yet actually) shifted past 2000 BCE, Minoan Crete seems to have started expanding rapidly. It probably helped, as was mentioned above, that they survived relatively unscathed Aegean upheaval in the early Bronze Age. One theory to explain the rapid expansion on Crete at the turn of the 20th century BCE focuses on the idea that there could have been an influx of migrants from the coast of the Levant, as it was around the same time that Lugalzaggisi, the Mesopotamian ruler of the third dynasty of Ur, opened the way “to the upper sea of the setting sun,” though this theory has taken some heat in recent years and may be invalid. Regardless of what spurred the growth, the Minoans built off of their preexisting culture on Crete, and while Minoan seals show us continued evidence of sailing and maritime activity in the early 2nd millennium BCE, it is evidence from other locations in the ancient world that give us a closer glimpse at just how far Minoan culture began to reach.

The dawn of the 20th century BCE in Crete is also seen as the beginning of the Palatial period, with the old period, the Proto-Palatial period spanning from around 2000 BCE up to 1700, and the new period, the Neo-Palatial period then spanning from 1700 to 1400 BCE. Essentially, then, the 20th century BCE saw Minoan Crete visibly expand their reach and their culture. They’d always had some measure of contact in and around the Mediterranean, but the Proto-Palatial period shows signs of increasing wealth in Crete, while we simultaneously see signs of their artistic culture being spread as far away as Egypt, but more frequently to the Levant coast and Anatolia. For instance, a hallmark of Minoan Crete’s culture is the exquisite pottery that was made on Crete. One such example, dated to around 1850 BCE, was discovered in the tomb of a man who is thought to have been a prince at Byblos, a city on the Levant coast, the very Byblos that later became the center of the Phoenician empire, another place we’ll discuss further in due time.

The item from this period that is perhaps the perfect microcosm of my point is something called the ‘Tod treasure,’ a treasure that is currently divided between the Egyptian Museum and the Louvre. I briefly alluded to this treasure in Episode 008 - Middle Kingdom Mariners, though I don’t think I referred to the treasure by name. Anyway, the treasure was unearthed in Egypt, where it was buried in the foundation sand beneath the floor of the temple of Senusret I. The treasure was contained in four copper chests inscribed with the name of Senusret's son, Amenemhat II, a 12th Dynasty pharaoh of Egypt. This father/son pair of Egyptian kings ruled over a span of years between 1934 BCE and 1890 BCE. Thus, the Tod treasure must have arrived in Egypt and been buried at some point before or during the life of one of the two pharaohs with which it is associated, which dates the treasure to the early 2nd millennium BCE, the very time the Minoan Crete is beginning to expand. It’s the content of these Egyptian treasure chests that really illuminates the interwoven nature of the Bronze Age world, however. 

I’ve taken the following description of the treasure from the Louvre’s page, where you can see some fine images of the treasure itself.

The copper chests were found to contain lapis lazuli, silver ingots, chains, and 153 vases, along with some gold items. These pieces of silver and gold ware were clearly not Egyptian and were different from anything found before. It was possible to identify the lapis lazuli pieces, however. The cylinder seals came from an area stretching from Anatolia to the eastern borders of Iran and were produced throughout the 3rd and into the early 2nd millenniums. The beads and amulets mostly came from Mesopotamia and were made in the latter half of the 3rd millennium. Most of the fragments were too small to be re-used; the treasure was a gift to the god Monthu, "sacrificed" forever, and intended to remain buried.

The origin of the silver cups is an ongoing mystery. They look like ceramics from the Cretan Minoan civilization, which may have imitated metal forms never found outside Tod. Metal was indeed melted down with every generation to meet new tastes and requirements. The Egyptian soil may have preserved metal models that were destroyed elsewhere. Some archaeologists have suggested the mining region of Anatolia or northern Syria-an area of magnificent craftsmanship, where fine tableware held an important place in commercial and diplomatic exchanges during the 2nd millennium, on the evidence of archives found in the palace of Mari. Craftsmen might copy foreign styles, such as that of Minoan art. If the treasure was gathered in northern Syria, it could be a reflection of several styles. Indeed, Egypt's relations with the Levantine coast (especially Byblos) were intense during this period.

-Description of the Tod Treasure

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Essentially then, the Tod treasure is the perfect picture of how different cultures converged at different places throughout the ancient world, especially at the turn of the 2nd millennium. Buried in a palace in Egypt we find goods from Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, and possibly even Minoan Crete. There’s enough evidence for Minoan goods and trade throughout the ancient world continuing later into the 2nd millennium BCE that I could never hope to cover it here. Some have doubted that Crete was even capable of sailing to Egypt or Syria at this point in their history, however, the presence of inter-cultural trade would suggest that they were at least capable and probably did so frequently. 

In the Odyssey, we see a description of the Mediterranean winds that made travel between Crete and Egypt a fairly easy affair. Odysseus, on arriving home in Ithaca disguised as a Cretan merchant, was described by Homer as saying: “My heart impelled me to make a voyage to Egypt with gallant comrades and with ships well fitted. Nine ships I fitted and my force was soon gathered. For six days afterwards my trusty comrades feasted. Embarking on the seventh, we sailed from lowland Crete, the north wind fresh and fair, and moved off easily as if down stream. No ship met harm; but safe and sound we sat, while wind and helmsmen kept us steady. In five days we arrived at Egypt’s flowing stream, and in the Egyptian river I anchored my curved ships.” As Odysseus knew, and as the Minoan Cretans would also have been aware, the Mediterranean wind makes the southward journey from Egypt to Crete a simple affair to the knowledgeable sailor. The important point in all of this though is that as Minoan culture expanded, so did their trade contacts. We’ll soon see that their commercial interests would be important to their survival as a society.

This idea circles back to the debate on whether Minoan Crete possessed a ‘thalassocracy’ or not. There’s evidence of their cultural reach all across the Aegean. From their stately palaces on Crete to the similar palaces in the Cyclades and Minoan trading outposts in the Levant and Anatolia, we know that Crete had a far-reaching presence. Further, the far-flung places to which their pottery, artwork, and other wares reached tells us that they must have been quite active in the Mediterranean. The problem is that we don’t have any physical shipwrecks or remains of Minoan vessels themselves to know whether any of their activity was of a military nature, nor do we have any evidence to give us an idea about how tight their control was of Cretan-style palaces outside of Crete itself. Those who propose the thalassocracy theory rightly claim that any culture with a commercial network as wide as that of Minoan Crete would have been faced with the task of securing the network, and I tend to agree with them. I won’t delve into it today,  but pirates have always been attracted to material wealth, something that Crete possessed in decent measure. I don’t remember if Captain Craig Buddy discusses Aegean piracy quite this far back into history on his History of Pirates podcast, but no matter what, at the end of the day it’s highly likely that the Minoans had to deal with piracy on some level. Again, the problem is that we don’t know much about it based on archaeological evidence.

Beyond that, proponents of the thalassocracy theory also claim that the existence of palaces around the Aegan is a sign that Crete exercised direct political control over an ‘empire of the sea,’ and at first glance it may seem like they have a point. After all, isn’t one sign of an empire that there is a somewhat consistent style of cultural unity throughout that empire? An empire like Rome, for instance. This question presents a somewhat more difficult puzzle, but again, there’s not enough evidence there to weigh in presumption of a Minoan empire. Yes, there were palaces after the style of Knossos on Crete, but does that necessarily mean that Crete also exercised control over such palaces? I personally think that a Cretan thalassocracy doesn’t quite add up, and that their influence was certainly artistic and cultural, but that these palaces could easily have been imitation wrought by close relation culturally and geographically, and that we just don’t have enough evidence to support a view of Minoan empire centered on military control. 

An interesting recent theory is that Thucydides’ characterization of King Minos as a naval leader was not historically accurate and was instead an exaggeration made to bolster and reflect his fellow Athenian’s concerns about piracy, trade, and similar issues in 5th century BC Athens, a place that could legitimately look to Crete for inspiration. It’s all a bit messy trying to figure out what motivated historians of Thucydides’ era when they wrote about cultures over a thousand years removed from their own time, but try we must. In the end, perhaps we could call Minoan Crete a cultural empire, if such a thing exists, but that idea is perhaps a bit too abstract to hold water.

Anyway, as the clock wound forward through the 2nd millennium, Minoan Crete continued to trade with the cultures and people of the near east. My personal favorite item of Minoan origin is the intricately decorated pottery that has been discovered in numerous locations around the Mediterranean and near east. This style of pottery decoration happened after what has been called the Great Earthquake, an event that devastated some of the early Minoan palaces around 1700 BCE. The palaces were rebuilt, and trade continued as it had before. To a degree, the rebuilding efforts corresponded with a revitalization in trade, and it was during this period that the famous Minoan decorated pottery was ubiquitous. 

There’s one specific potted vase that I’ll discuss in a moment, but bears mention that Crete’s strong commercial ties with other civilizations around the Mediterranean probably went a long way in helping Crete rebuild from the earthquake as it did. I’ll post some pictures of Minoan pottery that I find fascinating with the relevant origin info for each, but one specific vase found at Kolonna on the island of Aegina bears images of ships that are related to the point at hand. The vase is dated to a period between 1750 to 1650 BCE, so it could have been made either before or after the earthquake. Either way, however, the ships depicted on the vase bear a striking resemblance to ships that were depicted on Egyptian artwork from a similar time period, something that’s not altogether surprising, considering the connections we’ve made between the two civilizations. The main difference for us is that Egypt gave us physical ship remains to examine and learn from, while Minoan Crete has not been quite so kind to history yet.

There are so many pictorial remains related to Minoan maritime history that I could go through them in dull fashion for hours, but I’ll spare you the, well, pleasure isn’t the right word, but I’ll spare you nonetheless. The most fascinatingly detailed and enlightening of Minoan maritime artifacts is one that I’ll leave for our next episode, but I’ll at least tell you what it is today. It’s none other than a set of wall paintings found in the town of Akrotiri on the Cycladic island of Thera, about seventy miles north of Crete. The wall paintings are marvelous and tell us a lot about Minoan maritime history, so I plan to discuss them in depth. The island of Thera, though, is important for another reason that I also plan to build our next episode around. The dates aren’t agreed upon by all scholars: some say it happened in 1628 BCE and some say nearer to 1500. 

In the end, though, Thera was the site of a massive volcanic explosion that essentially destroyed the island and wrought a fair amount of damage to Crete and some of the other Cycladic islands. Minoan power had been waning prior to the Thera eruption, and perhaps due in part to the effects of the eruption, Minoan power seems to have drastically declined in the same period. So for the bulk of our next episode I want to look at the eruption, what we know about it, and then indulge my curiosity a bit and explore the possibility that the Thera eruption may have been the real-life event which formed the basis for the famous legend of Atlantis, most well associated with Plato’s reference to a great island that was home to a powerful civilization which vanished under the sea “in a day and a night.” The theory is by no means new, but I didn’t know much about it until recently and it makes for some intriguing possibilities, so I hope you all don’t mind.

Sources

• Barber, Robin L.N., Chapter 9, Cyclades, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean, (2012).
• Bonn-Muller, Eti, First Minoan Shipwreck, Archaeology, Vol. 63 (Jan./Feb. 2010).
• Braudel, Fernand, Memory and the Mediterranean (2001).
• Dow, Sterling, The Minoan Thalassocracy, Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. 79, pp. 3–32 (1967).
• Fagan, Brian, Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean (2012).
• Hankey, Vronwy, A Middle Minoan Cup from the Kharji Cemetery, Beirut, Nat'l Museum News (Spring 1996).
• Homer, The Odyssey.
• McGrail, Seán, Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times (2009).
• Niemeier, Wolf-Dietrich, When Minos ruled the waves: Knossian power overseas, British School at Athens Studies, Vol. 12, KNOSSOS: PALACE, CITY, STATE, pp. 393–398 (2004).
• Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
• Starr, Chester G., The Myth of the Minoan Thalassocracy, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 3, H. 3, pp. 282-291 (1955).
• The Tod Treasure, Louvre.
• Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War.