Dan Snow's History Hit - Knossos

Episode Date: May 7, 2023

The legend of the Minotaur and its labyrinth has captivated us for centuries, but is there any evidence of it really existing?In this episode, Tristan visits the Ashmolean museum in Oxford to interview Dr. Andrew Shapland, the curator of a new exhibition exploring the Bronze Age settlement of Knossos in Crete - the home of the mythical King Minos, the Minotaur and the labyrinth.Together they explore ancient artefacts that hint at human sacrifices being carried out, and find out through archaeological evidence if there is any truth behind the myths.The Senior Producer was Elena GuthrieThe Assistant Producer was Annie ColoeMixed & edited by Stuart Beckwith

It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode where we're going to Bronze Age Crete, we're talking all about the extraordinary Minoans and their most famous site, the site of Knossos, the home of the mythical King Minos, the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. But what has the archaeology revealed about Bronze Age Knossos? What might the historical basis be for the well-known Minotaur myth? Well to learn more about this I had the pleasure of heading up to Oxford to the Ashmolean Museum a few weeks ago to interview the curator Dr Andrew Shapland and this was good timing because the Ashmolean they currently have an exhibition ongoing all about

Bronze Age Crete, all about Knossos and exploring this historical basis, how the Minotaur myth becomes so associated with this place, with Bronze Age Knossos. This was a fascinating chat. We cover things varying from the Minotaur myth to depictions of bulls on frescoes and on various pieces of pottery. We look at the depictions of octopuses too. We look at the whole layout of the palace, this great central palace of Bronze Age Knossos, but also the wider settlement too that is often overlooked. This was brilliant and I really do hope you enjoy. So without further ado, to talk all about Bronze Age Knossos, here's Andrew. Andrew, Knossos, as a place, it's so extraordinary, a place where

the archaeology, it's become so intertwined with mythology. Absolutely, but that's no accident because when Sir Arthur Evans excavated the site he was always looking for signs of the Cretan myths as he was digging the site. Let's take a step back, let's set the scene. We mentioned the word Knossos, but where exactly is Knossos? Well Knossos is on the island of Crete and it's about five kilometres south of the modern city of Heracleion. And what about the topography of Knossos? Is this like we see many of these other prehistoric settlements, is it on top of this natural bastion or what's the surrounding layout? Well Knossos is in the

middle of a valley and it's sited between two rivers so it's always been quite a good spot to have a settlement because of the fertile land around and it's on top of a low mound and this is a Neolithic mound which was founded long before the palace and the palace was built on top of this mound so I think it was always an important landmark and so perhaps the palace was on that landmark because it showed that this was a place where people had always lived. You mentioned Neolithic there, but before we delve into this real early part of Knossos' story, talk to me about the discovery of Knossos itself, because it actually seems to have happened quite late in the story of archaeology. Absolutely. Crete was part of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the 20th century.

So it was quite difficult to do archaeological exploration there but there was a local Cretan man Minos Kalikerinos who decided to excavate at Knossos. The place name remained and obviously it was a place which was famous in myth and so he decided to dig on top of this mound where there had been no settlement since and he found this obviously very old building, lots of twisting corridors which people immediately associated with the labyrinth. But this was in 1878 and his peers in Crete forced him to stop his excavations because they were worried that any finds he made would be taken off to the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople, where a new museum had just been found. So he was forced to stop. And then at that

point, a number of foreign archaeologists came along. They were almost competing for the rights to excavate what was clearly an important site. And it was Arthur Evans who won this battle. He persuaded some of the local scholars that he was someone who was fervently anti-Ottoman. He clearly had a lot of money. And so they encouraged him to buy the land on which the site stood. And so when Crete finally became independent in 1898, he lobbied for a law to be passed to enable him to excavate. The law was passed and then in 1900, he began digging. He began digging. And what did he uncover? Well, he uncovered exactly what he

hoped to uncover which was more of this labyrinthine building which he almost immediately associated with the labyrinth of myth and in the first year he uncovered about half of the building the west wing of what he called a palace because very early on in his excavations he came down onto a room which still had a throne in situ against the wall and frescoes of griffins either side and he almost immediately decided that this was the throne of King Minos and he adopted a name for this new Bronze Age civilisation of the Minoans named after King Minos and actually I should say that at first he wasn't quite sure who sat on the throne. In his notebooks he at first, he wasn't quite sure who sat

on the throne. In his notebooks, he at first says, well, maybe this was the throne of Ariadne. But by the end of the season, he decided that it was probably the throne of King Minos, because he said that the throne was too narrow for a woman's hips. So it must be a man who sat on the throne. And this debate has raged ever since about who was in charge at Knossos, and even whether it was a palace. I mean we call it a palace but we don't really know if there was a king and a queen there. And you mentioned Bronze Age there so with the discovery of this massive palace from right from the very start did they know from the very start that this dated to let's say the second millennium

BC to the Bronze Age or was that learned later? I think they had a sense of how old it was because the walls were built of very large blocks, which were called cyclopean in this period, meaning built by the cyclopes, the giants. So it was clearly a very old building. And actually Arthur Evans, he started to buy antiquities which were associated from the site. And he recognised that these were probably dating to the Bronze Age because he could see parallels with other things which he had seen in Athens. So early on they had a sense that this was certainly pre-Greek but when they started to excavate they found pottery of a type which had already been found in Egypt and so this gave them a date for what they were finding because in that period the Egyptian chronology was already very well known. And so it was known that this type of pottery, if you found it in Egypt,

you could then link it back to Crete and you could date the levels in which it was found. So early on, they had a sense that it was early second millennium BC. And as they started uncovering more of this great palace, what were these things, these decorations that they found, they discovered on so many of the walls of this massive Bronze Age building? This is a watercolour of a fresco, the original remains in Heracleion, although this was actually painted by the man, Émile Gilliron, who restored the fresco. And we call them frescoes because they are in the true fresco technique. So you cover a wall in plaster and then

you paint it while the plaster is still wet so the image becomes embedded. And these really, I think, bring the palace to life because they show the sort of activities which were associated with the palace on a day-to-day basis. But I don't think that they were leaping over balls every day in the palace. So in a way what these frescoes do show what the palace is associated with even when those activities aren't happening. So they're almost a form of propaganda to show what the palace is doing. So what sorts of scenes alongside this bull leaping fresco, what sorts of scenes are depicted in other frescoes found in this palace? Well one of the frescoes which they found early on in the excavation

along the doorway coming into the palace is a procession scene. So you have these men carrying vessels and so on. And that again, I think, shows you what you should be doing as you enter the palace. You should be bringing gifts or bringing your taxes to whoever is in charge there. And some of the other frescoes, this is a flat fresco, but some of them are three-dimensional. So you have bulls again, but also people, which are almost coming out of the wall. So I think these are experiments in art, if you like. They're trying to experiment with ways to bring bulls and people to life. They're life-size.

They're really impressive things when you see them. And women are also depicted on some of these frescoes too. They are. And the interesting thing about women depicted on these frescoes is that they're often very elaborately dressed. So there's a fresco called the Grandstand fresco, which shows a sea of faces. And then clearly the very important people in this fresco, because they are more individually shown and they're wearing elaborate dresses are women, whereas the men are just shown in the background. And you often see this at Knossos. Men aren't very often shown in frescoes, but women are in very prominent positions. So this has always ignited a debate about who was in charge. Was it men or women at Knossos? So we've got this throne room that they discover, we've got all of these frescoes.

What did archaeologists like Sir Arthur Evans and other early archaeologists, what did they think was the function of this massive building? Well, Arthur Evans, partly because of the myths, thought it was the palace associated in some way with King Minos. And he also thought that this was a religious building, so he sometimes called it a palace sanctuary. And indeed, various religious figures were found in the palace, sometimes these female figures with their arms raised in the air, including the famous snake goddesses, which Evans found in an underground chamber later on in the excavations. So I think there was a religious function to the

palace as well but it was also a place where there were a lot of jars used for storage so a lot of the labyrinthine corridors are actually storage magazines as Evans called them with these huge ceramic jars called pithoi which were used to store olive oil or perhaps grain or some agricultural product. And then in the middle of the palace, you have the central court, which was clearly a place for gatherings. You have a lot of ceramics used for drinking, I found there. So archaeologists really still debate over what the palace was and indeed whether it was a palace at all, or whether it was really a place for making things and then trading them into the Eastern Mediterranean. So more like a warehouse than a palace, perhaps.

Well, one other thing I'd love to talk about when looking at the layout of this massive building is what was underneath. Because let's put the labyrinth to one side. If they didn't really find the labyrinth as a such, or they will get back to that. Talk to me about this impressive prehistoric drainage sewer system that they also found at Canarsis. Well indeed, so when they excavated the east wing of the palace, they found that it had been cut into the hillside. So there was about a seven metre deep cutting. So you can imagine that water would have accumulated in the middle of the palace and it needed somewhere to go. And the solution to this in the Bronze Age was to build a system of drainage so you even have these

water pipes which make sure that the water doesn't accumulate in the central court but drains out into the side of the hillside. But even better than that Arthur Evans found in one part of the palace a place where the drainage system had been opened up and there was a cubicle on top of it. So this seemed to be Europe's first flushing toilet found in the domestic quarter of the palace. The first flushing toilets, well how about that indeed. I must also ask, it seems as if Arthur Evans and other archaeologists at the time, they uncovered a Knossos of its golden age almost, in the Bronze Age, with these incredible colourful decorations, all of these artefacts, a massive building. Do we know when this golden age of Bronze Age Crete really began? And I guess also, do we know what preceded it? Well, we know quite well that the

palace was built in around 1900 BC. What preceded it was a very long period of occupation because the mound on which the palace sits is a Neolithic tell, which starts much earlier in around 7000 BC. So it had already been an important place for 5,000 years by the time the palace was built. And actually the palace is quite short-lived. It lasts for about 600 years before it's destroyed by fire in around 1350 BC. And indeed along the way it's destroyed by earthquakes a couple of times and rebuilt. So each time it's rebuilt it becomes grander and grander. But then one of the fascinating things about the palace is once it's destroyed in 1350 BC it's never really reoccupied. It's left almost perhaps as a religious site or a sanctuary. And so from within the palace there's also been uncovered this great wealth of artefacts too, haven't there?

Absolutely. When Evans excavated it, it became clear that it had never really been ransacked in the past. It had been left almost untouched at the time of its destruction. And so he really did find a treasure trove of amazing objects in the palace. Well, come on, you've got so many in the Ashmolean Museum. Let's go and have a look at a few of them. So Andrew, we've just walked into this room behind the scenes and we've got this amazing array of artefacts in front of us. These artefacts, they were all discovered in Knossos, were they? Well that's right, well at least these are genuine artefacts, whereas these are replicas of the objects which Arthur Evans wasn't allowed to remove from Crete, so he had plaster replicas made of them.

Well, let's have a look at these artefacts now. But first, actually, let's have a look at this map, this plan in front of us. So what is this? This looks incredibly detailed, but what building is this depicted? Well, this is one of the plans from the archive here at the Ashmolean.

And this is a plan of the Palace of Minos, as Evans called it, the palace which he excavated at Knossos on Crete. And it just looks so detailed, Andrew. There are so many different rooms. And this was created about a century ago, was it? That's right. So this is the plan in around 1904, when Evans and his team finished uncovering this building that they called the palace. And you're right, it has hundreds of different rooms in it. So it has this almost labyrinthine plan. And if you look closely at it, you can see how Arthur Evans wanted to name some of these rooms.

So here, for instance, you have the Hall of the Colonnades or even the Queen's Megaron here, which is where he thought that the Queen and her courtesans hung out. I had no idea just how complex, how detailed. It's not just three or four rooms. These are hundreds of different rooms. It takes you aback at first, doesn't it? Yes. I don't think people expect a three and a half thousand year old building to be quite so modern in appearance with all these hundreds of rooms. And actually, I do wonder if it was such an amazing building in its time that this is why you then have a memory of it in myth, perhaps becoming the origin of the labyrinth.

Well, let's go on to have a look at some of these artefacts that you've got in front of us too. If we focus on those artefacts we've got just in front of you, Andrew, it looks like we've got this array of different types of pottery. That's right. and these were all found in the palace and a lot of the pottery found in the palace is to do with this ceremonial eating and particularly drinking in the case of these. So this is a type of pottery called Camarasware named after the Camaras cave in southern Crete and you can see it's slipped black and then it has this white decoration on it,

often in these sort of geometric looking patterns. And this one dates to around 1900 BC, the time when the palace is first built. And one of the things I find interesting about Minoan pottery is if you look at the pottery made in Greece a thousand years later, actually this is where it all starts. You have this idea of slipping pottery and then adding extra decoration onto it in white. Or in the case of this black slip, what you're doing is the clay slip that they're using has iron within it and so you fire it in a certain way and it goes black in the kiln. That's really interesting when you put those two pieces of pottery next to each other. So they date to roughly the same time in the early second millennium BC. But whereas one looks almost like, I'd say, a shot glass or something

like that, that sort of size, the other one, that's a pouring jug. So you do therefore get this great diverse range of pottery, even from this very early period of the Knossos Palace. You do indeed. And I think that, as you say, this is about the size of a shot glass. So I think this tells you something about the person who uses it. They're clearly able to go into the palace and have a drink, but they're not allowed that much alcohol. And I think these cups are about establishing status. So you do get larger cups in the palace,

perhaps for people who are more important. And then you can see this is quite a large pouring vessel. It looks a bit like a teapot, as you can see. And I think there's something in that about there is probably a ritual of pouring out the liquid, which shows perhaps the person who's in power, they get to dispense the liquid and everyone else gets these tiny little tumblers and they're able to have a small drink, but not too much. Is it fascinating for yourself as an archaeologist when you have artefacts like this where you don't have almost the written record surviving so you have to try and piece together how these items may have been used in what sort of context in a grand palace

like this well some 4,000 years ago? Well that's right Knossos is a prehistoric society in this period later on you do have written texts but they haven't been deciphered until the texts which were written at the very end of the lifespan of the palace and so before that you do have to use your imagination and also sometimes compare with contemporary civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean or other societies which have existed in history and to think how they used drinking cups or maybe how they used gatherings like this as a way to develop hierarchy say. So certainly you can use your imagination but also draw in these other examples to perhaps put the people back behind this story

which you get from the objects. Alongside these early drinking vessels, Andrew also brought out a small clay-coloured cup, likewise found at Knossos but crafted several centuries later, in around 1600 BC. But what's so fascinating about this cup is that it has a strange double-axe symbol painted on it. Yes, so throughout Knossos, Arthur Evans found this symbol which looked like an axe, but as you can see on this orchard here, it has these curved blades and then incurving sides. So it's a very distinctive axe shape and it's a double axe because it has a blade on each side and then a shaft down the middle. And when Arthur Evans kept finding these, he looked at words which might have been used to describe the double axe in antiquity. And he came across this word labrys, which is actually not used in Crete, but it's used in Anatolia in the classical period, so a lot later.

But he thought, well, labrys, that sounds a bit like labyrinth. And he came up with this idea that labyrinth meant something like house of the double axe. and he came up with this idea that labyrinth meant something like house of the double axe and so when he found double axes at Knossos he said well this proves that this place is the labyrinth because the double axe shows that the people who lived there or who partied there called it the house of the double axe. And is that still a credible theory to this day? Do we still think that Labry Ross might therefore have that link to that? Well to be honest it wasn't a credible theory when Evans first proposed it. There are problems with it because the etymology doesn't seem to quite work. Labyrinth seems to be a pre-Greek word, which is actually attested on the Linear B tablets

from Knossos, whereas labris is a much later word from a different part of the Eastern Mediterranean. So the idea that it's somehow connected, I think people always found a little bit speculative. That's not to say it's not true, it's just I think this theory has always been doubted. But what I think it shows is how Arthur Evans was very interested in connecting what he found in terms of this Bronze Age building with the mythology that went with Knossos. So he was always looking for ways to connect the palace with the myths. It's that constant stream, isn't it? And looking for ways to connect the palace with the myths. It's that constant stream, isn't it? And we'll definitely get back into it with the artefacts that we've still got to talk about. But that constant link between the archaeology at Knossos and that attempt to try and link it to mythology, you see it throughout again and again

on so many different artefacts, that attempt to try and find the link. and again on so many different artifacts that attempt to try and find a link. Absolutely. But I think you have to remember that in 1900, Arthur Evans was excavating at Knossos. It was a very expensive enterprise. And so almost immediately, he starts writing to the Times to announce his discoveries. But in order to make them sensational, he wants to allow people to understand them. And so rather than say, oh, I found this amazing ancient building, he says, I found the labyrinth or I found the home of the minotaur. And he's doing this in order to attract public attention, I think. So Andrew, one more question on the labyrinth before we move on, because it is such a

fascinating symbol, that double-faced axe with a very curved faces to it too. But do we have any idea as to what its function was? Well, this has been a subject of debate among Minoan archaeologists. You do get more substantial looking double axes in Crete, which aren't quite the same shape with the curved sides. And they've been associated with animal sacrifice. And also they were tools as well. And the idea is that as you use them more and more, maybe the sides start to curve. Because very early on in this palatial period, you also get these very flimsy looking double axes, which clearly were too thin to be used to cut off the head of an animal, but they were deposited as ritual objects.

And so maybe these votive objects are somehow recalling the origin of the double axe in animal sacrifice. Just before then, Andrew, you did mention Linear B and the tablets that we have. And you do, if I'm not mistaken, you have also right in front of you there an example of this Linear B. So just explain to us what exactly Linear B was. What was this writing system? Well, that's right. So we have a Linear B tablet here, and you can see that it doesn't look like much. It looks like a burnt lump of clay, and that's kind of exactly what it is. Because in the palace, you had administrators keeping records. And what they did was they wrote in a syllabic script on these bars of clay,

details of the things that they were in charge of. So this tablet actually records a shepherd and a number of sheep. And Arthur Evans, when he found these, he was always interested in finding prehistoric scripts. He was really hoping that these would be the lost poems of Homer or something like that. And he spent his whole lifetime trying to decipher these tablets and failed, I should say. They were only deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952 after Evans's death. And he realised that in Knossos, around the time that the palace was destroyed, around 1350 BC, they were using a syllabic script which actually represented an early form of Greek. And so what do the Linear B tablets discovered at Knossos, what sorts of topics do they talk about? Well actually the majority of Linear B tablets discovered at Knossos, what sorts of topics do they talk about?

Well actually the majority of Linear B tablets at Knossos talk about sheep and also the shepherds who are grazing them on the island and the female textile workers who are responsible for taking the lease from these sheep, spinning it into thread and then turning it into textiles and this is no accident really because I think that one of the major export products of Knossos in the Bronze Age was dyed textiles. On Crete, there are very few metals, things like copper, tin, silver, and gold. And so they're looking for commodities to trade with the Eastern Mediterranean in order to get these things that they want. And one thing you can do on Crete is graze lots of sheep. And so this is exactly what they're doing. And then one of the things which they're doing to these textiles is

actually dyeing them. So they're using the yellow from crocuses, which grow wild on Crete, and also the purple from seashells, which you find around the coast of Crete. They're using these to dye the textiles in bright colours. And then this is why they're so desirable in the Eastern Mediterranean, because you don't have anything like that in Egypt, say, at that time. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

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to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So these small tablets preserved today, originally made of clay, they are highlighting how this palace at Knossos was the centre almost for exporting goods, a large process of getting the wool, then dyeing and so on, and then sending these goods across the Mediterranean. This is a great export centre almost, administration centre. Absolutely and I think this is one of the realisations that was made once Linear B was deciphered, just how important Knossos was as an industrial centre rather than a palisade or a

religious sanctuary which is how Evans presented it and I'm not saying that it wasn't those things but I think it's the industry which really explains its existence and perhaps explains some of the layout with these places for storing things and also places for making things as well. Go on then, I must ask as a slight tangent, if they talk so much about sheep, do we get any depictions of sheep in pottery or any artifacts that have been discovered from Knossos? Well, this is the fascinating thing, that there are only one or two depictions of sheep at Knossos and none on the frescoes. What you get on the frescoes is a different animal, you get bulls. Well therefore you mentioned bulls so you get them on the frescoes, those beautiful amazing looking depictions, paintings more than 3,000 years old. But I

also see right in front of me here and I think you've got one over there too, you have these smaller round objects about the size of a 1p coin today. What are these objects? Because they also depict bulls. Well, these are seal stones. So in Bronze Age Crete, you would have worn one of those around your wrist. And when you came to the palace and say you delivered your sheep, you would have stamped this seal stone into clay in order to make your signature. So what sorts of depictions of bulls do we have on these seal stones, these stamps of authority and legitimacy almost? Well, the one that you have in your hand is a very interesting depiction because it shows a bull and it shows someone jumping over it. Talk to me a bit more

therefore about this depiction of a man jumping over a bull. What do we think is the story behind this? Well, I see bull leaping as rather similar to the American rodeo, because if you imagine in the American West, you allow your cattle to have free range, they're out grazing the hillsides, and then you need to round them up. And in the American West, they had horses, which you don't have people riding horses in Crete. And so they were probably going to round them up by hand and from this activity they were probably rounding up bringing them to Knossos for slaughter and so on. From this activity I think you have skills emerging which people want to

show off and so I see this activity of people jumping over bulls as very like the American rodeo of showing off your skills in jumping over these animals once you've restrained them. So how does this bull leaping evidently seem to be important to Minoan society? Does this whole story of bull leaping in Minoan times, does it seem to evolve over time too? That's certainly possible because the other seal stone that you have, this is the print of the seal stone you've been holding. So you can see more clearly that this is the man jumping over a bull. And then this seal stone here, this is slightly later, it's a bit more stylised,

and perhaps you can see better from the modern impression that you have there. But what you have is a compressed version of bull leaping. So what they've done is they've shown the legs of a man, but they've shown the head of a bull with the bull's horns. And Arthur Evans argued that when people would have found these later on, maybe a thousand years later, when they found these depictions of a bull's head with human legs, then perhaps this is where the story of the Minotaur comes from. Because certainly Knossos becomes a Greek and a Roman city long after the palace is destroyed, but they start to make coins with

labyrinth designs and also designs of the minotaur on. And Arthur Evans's argument was that these minotaurs actually derived directly from these seal stones that people would have found as they ploughed their fields. So the historical basis for the myth of the minotaur could be this evolution almost of seal stones that we see across ancient history. I think it's certainly possible and I also think that bull leaping was clearly an important activity in the palace. So you can imagine how there were stories told about bull leaping as this really dangerous activity and you can almost imagine them evolving into stories perhaps of human sacrifice or a monstrous bull-headed monster. So you can imagine how

stories evolve in the telling and you can imagine perhaps how bull leaping turned into something like the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Andrew, it's also really interesting just looking at the whole design of these seal stones that we've got here in the how the bull is depicted in the kind of crescent shaped almost in the seal stone to kind of match with the whole design of the seal stone its circular nature and of course with the other one you have someone filling the other space of jumping on top but it's quite interesting with the ball is that the regular kind of way that we see the balls depicted in Minoan art whether it's a small seal stone or a big fresco that almost u-shape depiction of a bull. Well that's right, the

Minoans invented something called the flying gallop, which was to show animals in motion. And so I think that some of these depictions are really very early experiments in art, rather than the more static depictions of bulls, say, which you get in Egypt at this time. The Minoans want to show these flying bulls, and so they come up with a way of depicting them to show this. And you're completely right, when they have a circular space to work with, often these craftspeople are trying to fill it in a way which doesn't look contrived. It still feels quite a natural way to fill the space.

So they're coming up with these different poses of animals in order to fill the space of the sealstone. Do we see balls being depicted on other artifacts alongside small sealstones or on frescoes? Yes so one of the objects which you see at Knossos is this vessel in the shape of a bull's head and that would have been filled with wine and you would have had wine pouring out of the spout to fill people's cups as they engaged in these drinking ceremonies and I do wonder if that goes back to certainly slaughtering bulls. I do think that the heads of bulls were probably put on display as people were sitting there probably

eating beef at Knossos and so these drinking vessels are a way to almost capture that moment of the bulls being beheaded. So alongside bulls being depicted on these serving vessels we also have other types of animals depicted too in Minoan times. That's right. So this is a replica of an absolutely fabulous object which Arthur Evans found at Knossos. And you can see here that this is a lioness. It's a lion head's right arm. And if you look into the muzzle here, you can see the hole where the wine would have poured out as it was being used. So the wine would have literally poured out of the nose of the lion? Yes, almost bringing this animal to life. I think the wine almost animates them. And then in the top, you have a hole where this would have been filled. But you can just imagine a drinking ceremony where someone brings this out. It would have been a very theatrical

event. And have many of these sorts of serving vessels, these Ritons, have many of these been discovered at Knossos? Yes, there's a handful of them. This is one of the finest examples. But I think there are fragments of these vessels around the place. So maybe there are 20 or 30 known in existence. It's absolutely striking. If we have lions alongside bulls for these Ritons, do you think there's potentially a desire by these Minoans who lived in one of these palatial complexes to show they're almost associating themselves with these big animals, you know, these wild, these ferocious animals of the Mediterranean world at that time. Well, absolutely. And I think the thing to remember is that in this period, you did have lions roaming around mainland Greece, probably never in Crete

unless they were brought as a kind of zoo animal, which has been suggested. But I think that maybe the Minoans were going off to Greece and hunting lions and then almost perhaps bringing back the skins and possibly the heads as a trophy. And what you have here is an attempt to preserve this moment, I think, because this is an era before taxidermy. So it's difficult, as more recent hunters do, to stuff the animals that they've hunted. Whereas what they're doing here is they're recreating these hunted animals in stone. And one of the things I should say about

this is that although the eyes of this one haven't been preserved, there are other examples where you have red jasper rims and then rock crystal lenses. So these are absolutely fabulous objects which really did look like real animals, particularly if you can imagine them being used maybe in a dark space lit artificially. Would you really be able to tell this wasn't a lion's head? I don't know. For some reason I always keep thinking back, my mind is always keeping going back to let's say the Mithraeum of ancient Rome and the mystery the cult of Mithras and how you had to rise through the different orders and sometimes you're like the raven and these various animals bronze age creed as well thinking of quite a dark space and

he's being served as you say bringing those stone depictions of animals to life which are absolutely fascinating but we've talked about these great animals of the land, but Andrew, before the last artifact that we've got in front of us, we've got to talk about this striking animal at the sea too, because octopuses. You see them again and again on Canossan archaeology, don't you? You do, yes. And one of the interesting things about these octopuses is the way you have their tentacles swirling. Sometimes they have the eyes open. So these are octopuses being seen underwater. And so why do we think there is such an affiliation? Why is there such a connection between the Bronze Age people who dwelled at Knossos and the octopus?

Well, actually, I think it goes back to textiles, because in order to make purple dye, you need to collect a number of seashells, which you find on the rocky shores around Crete. These are the Murex seashells. They're a type of sea snail. And then you crush them and you let the bodies ferment, and you end up with this blue or purple dye, which became an incredibly precious commodity. And after all, it's exactly the same dye as the Roman emperors then used in order to dye their clothes purple. So I think this is something which is probably invented in Crete around the time that the palaces start, the start of the second millennium BC.

And over time, the palaces become dependent on this commodity from sea snails, this purple dye. And I wonder if these octopuses are actually a claim over the sea. The palaces are saying well we own the sea and everything within it and octopuses become almost emblematic of diving under the water and collecting these sea snails and I do think they were hunting octopuses as well in order to eat them but somehow I think that whereas eating octopuses perhaps doesn't quite have that same importance as purple dye. I think this is where you perhaps have this additional significance to the octopus

as an emblem of the underwater world, which the palace is trying to control. The detail that they put into these octopuses, for instance, on that example we got in front of you there, Andrew, the spiral tentacles, was there a real effort to try and depict the octopuses as stylistically as possible, almost these kings of the underwater world? I think so. And I also think that what you see again and again in Minoan art is this attempt to bring animals to life. So we saw the depictions of bulls in the flying gallop or the flying leap.

And with these octopuses, what you have is an attempt to show them alive underwater rather than the sort of rather dead looking octopus which you would see if you caught it and brought it to the shore. So this really is an attempt to bring the viewer underwater at a time when if you can imagine you don't have scuba gear, you don't have underwater cameras. We in our society have nature documentaries so the underwater world is completely familiar to us but I think in the Bronze Age this was a far more unknown place and this was an attempt to bring the underwater world back into the palace. And so Andrew if seal stones designs like this might actually be an indicator of how the minotaur myth evolved over antiquity I must ask about the labyrinth. Underneath here, was there any archaeological evidence potentially for a labyrinth? Underneath the palace, perhaps not. I mean, archaeologists

dig down to the very bottom of the mound on which the palace sat and found a Neolithic settlement from 9,000 years ago. But amazingly, Arthur Evans did find some evidence for the labyrinth at Knossos, and one of the most tantalising finds was actually this piece of floor fresco, which had a labyrinth pattern on it, and we have a fragment of that in the exhibition. And that does make you wonder, as Arthur Evans did, whether perhaps later on people would have visited the palace and maybe a fragment of this labyrinth fresco was eroding out of the hillside. But even if you don't buy that, on the Linear B tablets there is a place named which is spelt out syllabically and it's spelt out da purita and some Linear B scholars think that this is labyrinth. And intriguingly, this can't be at Knossos,

because Knossos is also mentioned on the Linear B tablets. So perhaps this is a sanctuary nearby, and you also have this deity called the Mistress of the Labyrinth, to whom people are offering oil and things like that. That's some of the evidence for the Labyrinth. And then there's another Bronze Age palace, Pylylos on the mainland of Greece. And someone on the back of a Linear B tablet doodled a labyrinth pattern. And clearly they were just sort of whiling away the hours. But that shows that the labyrinth design,

which you see on later coins, is already in circulation in the Bronze Age. Whether it had been associated with the mine at all by then, well, we don't know that. But we certainly know that, but we certainly know that the labyrinth design was in circulation in the Bronze Age. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions,

and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Now, so far, we've been focusing on the art and architecture discovered at the palace at Knossos. But it's important to stress that Knossos was much more than just a palace. It was an ancient city, and some striking Bronze Age artefacts have also been uncovered from the surrounding area, including a massive bowl, infamously named the Blood Bucket. This isn't actually part of the Ashmolean collection. This is a loan from Greece.

And it was excavated in 1979 in a building which had been destroyed by an earthquake. And then obviously people had just left it alone. They'd never gone back to retrieve the contents. So where in Knossos was this found? This wasn't in the palace? It wasn't. It's a site called Anemospelia, which is a couple of kilometres to the south of the palace.

And so what is the story behind this great bowl here? Well, the story is that this is some of the best evidence we have that human sacrifice was practiced in Bronze Age Crete. Because when archaeologists excavated this building, they found a skeleton on a platform, perhaps some sort of altar. And he seemed to have been tied up. Near him was this bronze blade. And in the room with him were two other figures, a man and a woman. They were wearing these sealstone and this iron ring. And there was just in the doorway, there was this bucket in fragments that's been put back together. But the archaeologist suggested that this was the bucket for the blood of the victim, because there are similar images of

cattle being sacrificed with vessels like this to collect the blood after their throat has been slit. And perhaps this was the fate of the young man on the altar. Well, it's absolutely gruesome. It's very interesting that you have a bull depicted once again on this bucket called the blood bucket. And I guess it's also really interesting because it was sometimes thought that the Minoans were a peaceful society, especially throughout the 20th century. But with discoveries like this, gruesome discoveries, is that really kind of shattering that idea? Absolutely. I think it really exploded the idea after Arthur Evans' idea of the Minoans that they were somehow a peaceful civilization. I don't think that they went around sacrificing people

all the time. I think that when you get warning tremors in Crete, sometimes you wonder if a big earthquake is on the way. And maybe in these extreme circumstances, that was when human sacrifice was practiced. Is this artifact here also a good example of how, let's say in our chat today, we've been focusing quite a lot on the palace itself, right at the heart of Bronze Age Knossos. But there was a settlement outside of a palace. There were people living in those kilometres surrounding that great centre. Indeed, there were. I've been involved in a survey around Knossos, picking up bits of pottery from the surface. And in its heyday, say around 1600 BC, we can tell that the settlement of Knossos was about a kilometre square,

so maybe 20,000, 30,000 people were living there. So it really was an important city in the Bronze Age and carried on being an important city into the later periods. So you can imagine that this really was the capital city of Crete in the Bronze Age, probably controlling much of the island. Do we know much about residential life in this area of Knossos, outside of the palace? What life was like? We're only starting to find that out because Arthur Evans in particular was interested in the palace and some very grand buildings which surrounded that, which could be houses but they also could be more to do with whatever it was that was happening in the palace. So it's only more recently that archaeologists have gone out to try to find the houses that everyday people lived in around Crete. And what they're doing is they're also

using new techniques to look at what they ate. So looking at the seeds and the bones that have been left behind, even looking at things like isotopes to find where the animals that they were eating came from. So although it's a shame that really all the focus has been on the palace for the last hundred years or so, actually we're now excavating these Minoan houses at a time when we can really find out more about them. And is it also something to highlight how Knossos, with its palace right at the centre, when someone mentions Minoan Crete, our mind will immediately go to Knossos. But this palatial centre, it was one of several on the island. It was. You have other palaces, Festos to the south, Malia to the east. But at a certain

point, I think they were all connected. They seemed to be doing similar things. You can see that in the artefacts that you find there. And even the fact that you have palaces in different places in Crete themselves, which all look pretty much the same in terms of the ground plan, show that this was a society which was spread over a number of different settlements. And so it begs the question, what do we think ultimately happened to Bronze Age Knossos? Well, it's a very interesting question and no one really has the answer. We know that Knossos was destroyed by fire. One of the explanations could be that the people who lived around Knossos were fed up of being taxed by the palace and so burnt the palace down themselves. But also this is a period when you start to see disruptions in trade perhaps and the palace was very reliant on trade

so it could be that it ceased to function when it could no longer trade the textiles and the perfumed oil it was making for the things that it really needed. I should say that one thing it's not is the eruption of Thera. Sometimes people connect these two things directly, but the eruption of the volcano Thera was clearly a traumatic event, but it happened 300 years before the palace at Knossos was finally destroyed. So I think it must have had some sort of effect. Perhaps it weakened the palace and its relations with the population. And perhaps at that point, the mainlanders came in, the Mycenaeans, and started to occupy Crete and Knossos.

But sometimes people try to create this story where Thera erupts and Knossos and the Minoans disappear. And it's more complicated than that. And let's talk to our staff also. Were earthquakes and tsunamis, were they potential threats to Bronze Age Knossos at all? Absolutely. The palace at Knossos is destroyed several times by earthquakes, but each time they build it back, often better and more elaborate than before.

So the question with the destruction of Knossos is not really why it was destroyed, but why they never built it back again. And I think this shows that it was already quite a weakened place by then. The Linear B tablets, which were preserved in the fire, the Linear B tablets show that the palace was in control of 100,000 sheep scattered across the island for the textile industry. But you can almost imagine that the mainlanders came in and perhaps were using this palace, Knossos, to extract as much as they could out of Crete and maybe it became unsustainable and perhaps the people who lived on Crete became fed up and this is why I quite like the idea that there was some sort of internal revolt because after all

once the palace is destroyed people go back to the hillside, they go up to the hills, they found their own settlements, It becomes a smaller scale society, but perhaps it's a more sustainable society after the palace is destroyed. Maybe the palace was always an anomaly. It was always trying to extract too much from the landscape of Crete. And in the end, it was always destined to fail. Well, Andrew, this has been absolutely brilliant, especially with all of these artefacts here today to help tell the story of Knossos. Talk to me a bit more about this exhibition and how long it's on and what it's all about. Well, the exhibition is on until July. That's when all of these amazing loans from Greece have to go back to the museums and storerooms where they came. But really in the exhibition,

we didn't just want to tell the story of Sir Arthur Evans and his excavation of Knossos. we didn't just want to tell the story of Sir Arthur Evans and his excavation of Knossos. We wanted to tell the story of the labyrinth, the myth of the labyrinth, how in Greek and Roman Knossos the myth is elaborated but then how Knossos dwindles down into a small village, it almost disappears and then when people come to Crete in the early modern period they ask where the labyrinth is and sometimes they go to Knossos, sometimes they go to Gorton in the south where you have this cave in the hillside. And this really sets the scene for the discovery of Knossos by Minos Kalikerinos in 1878. So we tell that story which sets the scene for Arthur Evans. And then the room we're standing in now, what we want to do is show how archaeology doesn't just stop when Sir Arthur

Evans dies in 1941, it carries on. You have Greek archaeologists who carry on excavating up to the present day. So some of the finds in this exhibition were still in the ground 10 years ago. We're really showing how Knossos is still an important archaeological site and there are still new things coming out of the ground. So we really did want to show that as well in the exhibition. It certainly sounds like there is still so much more to do to uncover perhaps there will be more miners or labyrinth related archaeology coming out of the ground of Knossos in the coming years ahead. Well who knows that's the excitement of archaeology isn't it you never know what's going to come out of the ground. Well Andrew this has been brilliant and it just goes to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on History Hit today. Well thanks Tristan.

Well there you go there was Dr Andrew Shapland explaining all about the archaeology of Bronze Age Knossos. I hope you enjoyed this very special episode. I must mention that their exhibition all about the labyrinth, the minotaur and Knossos's archaeology is currently ongoing at the Ashmolean Museum it's brilliantly laid out do go and check it out if you do get the chance I'm also going to mention that we do have a video version of this podcast that will either be released or has just been released on the history hit YouTube channel so if you want to see some of the objects that Andrew and I were talking about, whether it's the octopus depiction or the bull leaping frescoes or

the pottery, well, you can head over there to the History Hit YouTube channel. Either it's up now or it will be up very, very soon. So stay tuned for that. Last things from me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you have enjoyed the episode and you want to help us out, well, you know what you can do. You can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It greatly helps us as we continue to grow the podcast, as we continue to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. And it also helps us to give the spotlight to incredible experts like Andrew who have dedicated years of their lives to researching particular areas of the distant past that they find fascinating.

Well, your support really helps us give them the best spotlight that we can for explaining these stories to as wide an audience as possible. But that's enough rambling on from me, and I will see you in the next episode. you