In Our Time - The Minoan Civilisation

Episode Date: July 7, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Minoan Civilisation.In 1900 the British archaeologist Arthur Evans began excavating some ancient ruins at Knossos on the island of Crete. He uncovered an enormous palace complex which reminded him of the mythical labyrinth of King Minos. Evans had in fact discovered the remnants of a Bronze Age society; in honour of Crete's legendary king he named it the Minoan Civilisation.The Minoans flourished for twelve centuries, and their civilisation was at its height around three and a half thousand years ago, when they built elaborate palaces all over the island. They were sophisticated builders and artists, and appear to have invented one of the world's earliest writing systems. Since Evans's discoveries a hundred years ago, we have learnt much about Minoan society, religion and culture - but much still remains mysterious.With:John BennetProfessor of Aegean Archaeology at Sheffield UniversityEllen AdamsLecturer in Classical Art and Archaeology at King's College LondonYannis HamilakisProfessor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, just over a hundred years ago, a British archaeologist, Arthur Evans, began to excavate a plot of land at Canossus in northern Crete. The discoveries he made there were to revolutionise our understanding of prehistoric Europe.

Over the next 35 years, Evans uncovered a vast complex of buildings which he called the Palace of Minos. It was the centre, he decided, of a previously unknown Bronze Age society, which he dubbed the Minoan civilization. The Minoans flourished for around 2,000 years, long before ancient Greek civilization had begun. They were sophisticated builders and artists

and invented one of the earliest systems of writing. Thanks to Evans and its successors, we even know a little of their religion and customs, but we're still learning more about this fascinating prehistoric society. With me to discuss the Minoan Civilizabethus' society, are John Bennett, Professor of Eugenian archaeology at the University of Sheffield, Ellen Adams, lecturer in classical art and archaeology at King's College London,

and Janis Hamilakis, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. John Bennett, can you give us some detail about who the Minowans were and when did they live? We use the term Minoan to describe the Bronze Age civilisation of the island of Crete. Crete is the southernmost island in the Aegean. It's about 100 kilometres south of the famous island of Santorini, Orthera, about 300 kilometres north of the African coast. There's nothing between Crete and Africa. And the term was coined after the legendary king, Minos, of Greek tradition, to describe specifically the Bronze Age of the island. What rough dates from, isn't it?

The Bronze Age is roughly from about 3,500 BC to about. about 1,100 BC. And the really flourishing period of the Minoans is from about 2000 to about 1,200 BC. And do we know, so they lived at that time. Are they a constant force? Are they replenished from time to time? Do we know about the ethnic groupings? Well, the term itself is our term.

It's a transference from an adjective which simply describes a culture. It's the culture of Bronze Age Crete. We put an S on it to make. it into a name for a people, an ethnonym, and we talk about the Minoans. They were almost certainly not a people that spoke one single language, and that reflects the history of occupation of the island, which goes back at least to 7,000 BC, and likely people came to the island in the period between 7,000 and at the time of the flourishing of the Minoan civilisation, bringing other languages and other aspects of culture as well.

Do we have records from 7,000 BC, 9,000 years ago? We don't have written records, but we have archaeological records on the tell at Knosas, well below the Manon levels going back that far, yeah. Before the Palace of Knozos was excavated, first by two Cretans at the end of the 19th century, and then for 35 years by Arthur Evans. Did we have any idea that such a civilization existed? We do, really.

I mean, the tradition exists. in sort of tangentially really in the Homeric epics. There's references to Minos as a king and lawgiver and there are references to Crete and participation in the Trojan War. Idomeneos and Merionis from Crete participate in their listed. That's much later, isn't it? It's much much later, yes. They're talking about the 8th, 8th century BC there.

The composition of the poems, but many people believe that they are about, if not actually direct memories of things that were happening somewhere around about 1,200, 1,100 BC. And that tradition continued. There's a tradition in Thucydides and Herodotus, the Greek historians about Minos and his control of the seas, the so-called Thalasocracy of Minos.

And the tradition continues in Western humanism. In fact, in the 19th century, there was a book written on Minotan crete by a German scholar from Göttingen called Karl Hook. And in fact, it was probably him who called, coined the term Minoan to describe the culture of that period. And how did the myths play in, the Minotaur, the labyrinth, Theseus, Icarus, Didlas, Ariadne in her thread? Well, in a way, they're difficult to get traction on it.

Unlike the Homeric poems, which are very much more narrative and historical about events and so on. Minos and Theseus and Ariadne are, if you like, more mythical than, than legendary in their scope. And in that sense, Evans' work was to create a man-own civilization, not as Schliemann had done in many ways, to put material records to a pre-existing story, as it were. Alan Adams, I mentioned Arthur Evans in my introduction, and his contribution is central to understanding of the manoeuvres,

although opinion against him has hardened. He's been discovered to be wrong on many occasions. but let's talk about him. How did he come to be there in the first place? And why did he decide to excavate this particular spot? Well, After Evans was a child of the Victorian era, and he was keeper at the Ashmorea Museum in Oxford. And while he was there, he acquired these engraved seal stones

and was told they're from Crete. So he decided to go and visit the island in 1894. And at that point, as John just said, connoisse was already known about. and it was already realised, people realised that it was an important site. And he began to look into buying the land in order to excavate there himself. Crete at this point is still part of the Ottoman Empire, and it's not, it's a very volatile period of Crete in history,

and it's not for some years towards the end of the century, that Evans manages to both get the land, buy the land, and also get the permission to excavate there. And it's on March 23rd, 1900, that he starts his big dig. He got an inheritance, didn't he, from his father, was also part-time or a full-time archaeologist, and with it he went and bought a lot of what became connoisseurs, by a purchase, really, and by a civilisation.

Yes, well, his father, John Evans, was a geologist, and a very famous scholar in his own right. And there's some competition between the two. that it's on record. But essentially Evans did buy the land and also fund the excavation, hugely expensive excavation for the most part himself. So yes, he did have the means to do so.

The scent was up, wasn't it? Well, Schleiman wanted to excavate that. He'd come back from Troy. Other archaeologists were after that. They'd seen these seals. Evans, I understand them, saw them in a market somewhere in Greece, and they tracked them back to Crete. they were on the hunt for ancient civilisation, so he had that going for him.

Yes. Schumann wanted to exorate at Knosos, but he wasn't prepared to pay the price that was asked for for the land. And also, Crete at this time when Evans began, was administrated by four great powers, of which Britain was won. And also what helped Evans in terms of the timing is that in 1890, the Cretans themselves passed, than antiquity's law, and that gave them the security, the knowledge that whatever got it excavated wouldn't be taken off the island. And they weren't really very happy about anyone excavating, certainly not a foreigner if there's any danger of the objects being taken away. And Schleeman had been accused of pilfering at Troy and sending gold pieces back to Germany. Yes, yes, he had a record.

And we'll just say once again here that excavations had started in Crete by Creighton archaeologists. Yes. And so Evans had that to go on as well. So he started a dig, and what seems to us nowadays, given the way archaeology proceeds, in a remarkably short period of time, just at the very beginning of his 35 years, he discovered a lot. He did discover a lot, and he did so by... This is a big dig of the kind that we don't have anymore,

and he set up something that he called a wager system, which essentially is a competition between different groups of men to get down to a certain level, and you've got a prize of viewer first. So there's a race to get down, quite literally. The result of this is that much less is known about the Roman town that was above it that might otherwise have been the case. But he did hit the Minone levels very quickly. And then when he got there, he proceeded to excavate and reconstruct the palace that he found.

So let's talk about what he did find. Did that speed, you've mentioned it damaged the Roman layer. Did it damage other things? Was it a damaging speed? It was a damaging speed. feed, yes. It is something that would not be condoned or tolerated in this day and age at all. This is a big dig where he had an agenda and he went to that level as quickly as possible. He got there and can you just tell us what his eureka moment was.

I'm sorry to put it in these other vernacular terms. Well, quite soon in his first season actually he hit the... So in the first year is what we're talking about. Yes, in 1900. Very soon off the beginning, he hit the throne room, which is on the west side of the palace. There's a central court in the palace, and this is on the west side of it.

And we have photographs of what was discovered at this point. And it's very well preserved, actually, for archaeology of this age. You've got walls that are kind of shoulder height, and you've even got plaster remaining on the walls, which is a real treat for an archaeologist. and the photographs we have it's all been swept clean, it's all they neat and tidy, but if you go there

today, you see something really rather different. What you see is Evans' reconstruction. He not only put the ceiling back on this room, which could be defensible because that would protect the site from the elements, but there's another

entire story as well, which is Evans. And this is the problem people have, because when you go to Canosos, you can't really tell, what he found and what he recreated. But in your notes, many of you say he was imaginative and intelligent in his reconstructions

as well as being he was probably wrong in a lot of them. He seems to be in harness. Can I move across to Janice now, please? Janis, do you know where the Minowans came from originally? Let's ferret around with that a bit. Where did they get the skills which we see in the tremendous engineering skills at that time, the art skills, the skills of pottery,

an enormous number of skills already there is, anyway, up to you. Well, we have to start by saying that. Crete, at the beginning of the Bronze Age, it was a very diverse social landscape. First of all, with the people who were there to start with, the Neolithic occupation of Crete. The Cnosos, for example, was an extremely large, very impressive settlement, even from Neolithic times,

before what we now call the Mainons, before the Bronze Age. So there were people there developing their own life, cultivating the land, producing arts and crafts. And then in the Bronze Age, there were a series of movements into Crete from other parts outside the island. For example, we have more certainly people coming from Anatolia.

But also, we have a number of settlements in the Bronze Age, in the early Bronze Age, that morphologically, they look very much like psychics. Gladic in terms of their material culture. That is, they look like some of the settlements and also some of the burials of the people who used to live in the Sicilades, the islands north of grade.

So, one of the problems with the term mine own is that it assumes some sort of homogeneity, some sort of isomorphic link between an ethnic group and its material culture. We know for sure that, as the journal was saying before, people who were talking different languages, people who were expressing themselves in different ways. Material culture was not that

identical, similar across the island. So we are talking about a diverse social escape. So starting with that, we are seeing that there were a series of innovations to do with architecture, to do with production of crafts and production of artifacts, that were

a combination of local ingenuity, but also a combination of ideas that came from elsewhere. So it was a mixture of things that they were import into the island and ideas that they were developed locally. When one thinks of 3,000 BC and 2000 BC you drift

across to Egypt, which wasn't very far away, is there any sort of trade links, cultural links between the two? Oh yes, they were links. They were links not only with Egypt, there were links also with the broader world of the Eastern Mediterranean. One thing that we need also

to emphasize is that Evans was very keen to construct the minorce, what they called the minoros as a European civilization. His agenda from the bikini was to discover the first civilization in European soil. In fact, when he first discovered that room that Ellen was talking about, he telegraphed the King of Grace and said to him, come and sit on the first throne of Europe. Now, you have to imagine the time and the period. This is in 1900s.

This is when Crete was nominally still under Ottoman. Empire and of course an autonomous polity under the protection of foreign Western powers. So to proclaim a Bronze Age find in the island that it was part of a broader world within the Ottoman Empire

the first European civilization was a statement that was explicitly powerful but also explicitly influential on how now see what we call the mine ones. It was an agenda really, wasn't it? There was an agenda.

And he did set the agenda and he wanted that agenda. He wanted that he may have been right, but I mean that was his agenda. Absolutely. And he pushed in a big way through his own discoveries through his own writing, through his own naming of what he found, by adopting

names that they came from his own time, of course, from Britain, especially. Also, he produced through his own synthetic world, what we now call the Palace of Minos, a series of volumes that is

not so much a kind of a report. of the excavation as his own narrative of what a civilization was. Can I just ask you briefly, the importance of burials is already very strong there. Can you tell us about them? Yes, of course, especially for the Bronze Age, what we call the burial arena, was an extremely important social milieu. It was an area where social interaction was taking place, both between the dead and the living, but also.

more broadly. It was an arena where people used not just to go and bury their dead, but also meet, meet other people, engage in ceremonies of eating and drinking, engage in social interactions of other kind, engaging in exchange of artifacts, engaging in circulations of objects of material culture. So for the early Bronze Age, we have very few settlements, but we have many burial places, many tombs that have been excavated extensively, and we can now reconstruct. that kind of interaction in those burial places. So it was not quite places for the dead. It was arenas for the living primarily.

John Bennett, about 2000 BC, the man oren started to build water-called palace-type structures. Now, this has been questioned whether there were palaces. A lot of evidence has been questioned, although we must keep emphasizing, as you all have done,

and you know, it's how, what massive work he did, what an intelligent man he was, and he was a man of his day in one way. But still, Now could you describe this palace and whether it is a palace and so on? Can we just go for that word? Right.

Well, the term essentially has two meanings. It has a architectural meaning, a descriptive meaning, with a particular architectural form, which I'll discuss in just a second. But the other meaning is, as Janice was indicating, is a social meaning, an implication of a social system behind the material remains. And that social system is very much the same sort of thing

that we think of as going on earlier in Mesopotamia and the Levantine coasts and so on. So it's a type of organisation which is common across the ancient Near East. The architectural term describes broadly, and we often think of these in plan terms. We often think of wonderful aerial photographs, for example, that appear in glossy publications of Manoan archaeology or in the rather drier black and white plans. But to think of them in plan, you have the core of these buildings is a central court, around which there are large structures. Open air court.

Open air court. And that has led to an alternative term for these as court-centered compounds or court-centered structures because of this very characteristic feature. The buildings around about contain many, many rooms. Possibly this is the origin of the myth of the labyrinth, this labyrinthine movement through these rooms. The functions of these rooms, we would assume comprised ritual activities, comprised probably residential, although that's disputed, and certainly comprised large storage areas, particularly in the case of Knosos and Festos, the one in the south central part of the island, long magazines which had large storage vessels in which grain and oil and other stuff, as well as valuable materials, were stored. In fact, it was one of these that the early excavator in 1878, Minos-Kellekeri-Nos, the predecessor of Evans, had actually opened up.

And then beyond that, as it were, in the plan, there's an open Western court over which the palace dominates. And we know that that Western court had raised walkways, which seemed to have guided movement across it. It was paved, at least in the later phases, and it was probably a site of ritual and so on. Alan Adams, what are the most striking artefacts that have been found at Canossus? Well, probably what represents or illustrates the Minoan culture best are the snake goddesses. And they come from the temple repositories, which are stone-line pits bound in the west wing of the central court in a ritual area. This is a kind of pored. It's a deposit that's been deliberately placed. and then covered over.

So we don't have them sort of trapped, frozen in time in the middle of the activity they were used for. We don't know exactly what they were used for, but they're incredibly fine craftsmanship. They are, I'll just describe one. It's about 30 centimetres high. It's made of feints. And this is a female figure who's bare-breasted,

and she wears a sleeved corset, which with a very elaborate belt and then a flounce skirt, down to the floor. And she's got her arms upraised and she's holding a snake in each hand. And again, it's a very elaborate, very

well-crafted piece and we assume it's something ritual because we're not quite sure what this meant to the Minowans. Apart from being an extraordinary piece is extraordinary reference to the snake in the Old Testament, isn't there? And even the snake there.

I mean, anyway, Doesn't matter. So that's one of the more striking things. And what does it tell you that piece? It tells me that women are very important in the Minoan world, which is something that we're probably come back to later. It tells me, well, this deposit dates to, it's debated, but an early part of the neopalacial period,

that at some point, sometimes you get deposits being put away or put in the ground. It's a bit like grave goods and it's conspicuous consumption. This is where you are putting something out of circulation as a means of demonstrating your power. It sounds quite paradoxical, but you're demonstrating that you can put something away and display power in that way.

Janis, Malakis, can we just prod away at the possible function of these palaces? What do you think, when John's given... John Bennett's given us a very good survey, but I'd just like to push away at it. Have you anything to add there? Yes, I mean, there's, as you know, a big discussion amongst archaeologists about the function of these buildings.

First of all, the Term Palace, as John and Ellen indicated, does not mean that we are dealing with a society that was based on kinship. Today, the term palace implies more or less a kind of hierarchical social organization. Wouldn't it be unusual at the time for that sort of building not to have a central figure, as

slightly indeed could have been a woman. Come back back to, are you dismissing it because there isn't enough evidence for king? Well, there isn't enough evidence to start with. That is, I mean, people have looked very hard to actually find evidence for a figure, either male or female figure.

The throw room is something that people normally assume that indicates the seat of an authority, but in fact, we know now that it was more less like a ritual room as opposed to a center. A ritual room. A ritual room. supposed to be a center for a king or a queen. They try to look for iconography of kings or queens.

And in many cultures that they have such a figure, we know that there is iconography of a very prominent person with all their galley of power. That is also missing in the world of the Bronze Age of Crete. And in general, there is no also organization of space to imply some sort of hierarchical developments with the seat of power and then different orders. of settlements and different orders of people.

So however hard we actually looked, it seems really difficult to accept the notion of a central authority, although there must be other sorts of hierarchical kind of relationships, but not necessarily kinship, as we mean, especially today. Can we take this on, John Bennett? We know, or I've learned from what you all have written, that it was very, very outstandingly well administered,

but what about being governed to take? on what Janice has said. What's your assumptions on the evidence you have? Well, I think the surprise, as Janice mentioned for us, is that there is no picture of a pharaoh, as we have in Egypt, in contemporary Egypt. There's no large-scale sculpture of anyone, let alone rulers. But for me, the fact that that is completely absent is not necessarily proof that the institution was absent, if you like. And one of the things that I find helpful is to think about this happening very much in the moment, in performance, and very much in the sort of oral manner,

rather than the administration, which seems to have been about recording commodities and so on, the actual power was performed in situ. So the throne room, if it was a throne room, would have been about someone seated on that actual throne performing their power. And without them, it simply wouldn't work as a powerful space. I think just to add here that we've talked about connoisse and will continue to talk about connoisse

because it's so electrified. But even recently, more and more palaces in inverted commas have been discovered. So they used to be thought to be one, massive one, then two or three. Now there are a great number. What does that say to you? Well, the first three were discovered very quickly. Yes, that's what I mean. But in the last few, very recently, a lot more are being discovered.

It's given us a problem with the term because these other forms, other sites have appeared which have this same form. What I think is that the other sites that have appeared, such as Petras in the eastern part of the island, is roughly contemporary just a little bit later than Canossas. That seems to be, as it were, a pristine palace. But others that have appeared, the palatial form is acquired through the history of the settlement.

And what that says to me is that they're actually taking that particular form, taking, if you like, the power of the early palaces and enacting them on the insituers, as it well. Alan, you wanted to come in. Well, I did want to mention that Evans also describe these complexes as palace temples, which is really, I think, quite useful because immediately you've got some doubt as to what they are actually for. And it also highlights that in the Minoan world,

this distinction between secular and religion is very hard to see. And that's the problem with the term palace. It's a secular institution. And probably what we're dealing with is a mixture. Where I do slightly perhaps disagree is that the palace at Knos is by far the biggest complex at the site. And if you take the next biggest building, which is the little palace, you could fit that in the central court of the palace at Knosos. And that, to my mind, indicates that some people have access to building larger complexes than other.

So I think there's still very clear evidence for social differentiation, but the nature of that elite power is very difficult to. Let's say something like that. We used to think of policies as centers of political authorities, centers of administration, centers of production, centers of innovation and agency for the whole society. Now, through recent work, we're now realizing more and more that their primary function was that of,

performance, elaboration, social gatherings, allowing, as Ellen was saying, a space, very elaborate space for social interaction of many different kinds. Even some of the most elaborate pottery types of the early palace period, what we call the Camaris where with their polychromy, we find that Gnosos in fact come from elsewhere. So we now know that in fact these palaces were investing more on that kind of elaborate performances and rituals of commensational. and less so on producing, unless so on actual administering things, apart from, of course, the levery end of the Bronze Age with the so-called Mycenaean phase.

Briefly, Alan, Mes, how sophisticated are the wall paintings that we find there? Well, extremely sophisticated. Janis has just mentioned some large-scale ceremonies, and they're not a figment of archaeologist's imagination. We have wall paintings that depict huge gatherings. of people, crowd scenes of... The war paintings are incredibly fragmented.

These have been extensively reconstructed. But nonetheless, there is good iconographical evidence for gatherings of people coming together, including one which depicts women dancing in a court-like structure that John described earlier with the causeways, the raised causeways. So we have good evidence, I think, for community festivals being important

and we imagine that they were quite ritual in nature. And in terms of other wall paintings in iconography, the bull is very important. And I think that links back to what John was saying right at the beginning with Greek myths. The figure of the bull is very strong in Greek myths. We have Zeus bringing Europa over while he's a bull. We have the Minotaur, so on and so forth.

This seems to be one of the echoes of the Minoan world that filtered. And a lot of the things are bull leaping, these boy, young men, leaping over the ball. Can you describe that? Because that's very commonplace and very striking. There are many images of this. And this is actually a rather dangerous sport where you face the ball and you sort of approach it, grab it by its horns, quite literally, and then do a somersault over its back. And then if you're lucky, you land on the ground behind it and make your escape.

there. And we've got sort of images of various phases of this activity which is clearly a dangerous one. John Bennett, the Minone's had three separate writing systems which might suggest three different sorts of people.

We seem to know about one of them, two British translators in the 50s translated one of them. We don't seem to know anything much at all about the other two. Can you go into that? Although they are the first syllable systems in Europe. Can you just talk a bit about that? Yeah, I mean it was writing, as Ellen

alluded at the beginning, that Drew Evans to Crete in the first instance. He'd found evidence of the first of these three writing systems, the so-called Cretan hieroglyphic, and he deduced it was hieroglyphic from its form. It's not, it's a syllabary. We know that much about it. Can you just tell this as what a syllabary is? Sorry, a cilibri is a script which will have something like 80 signs in it, and each sign will have a value like ma, da, par, etc, rather than single letters as we think of in the alphabet or more complex logographic systems where each symbol

stands for a single word like a Chinese generally. That was there from the very beginning. In fact, it probably existed right before the construction of the palaces. It was related to a second script which Evans called Linear A, which was also syllabic, but was written less often on stone but mostly on clay. and the third script was the script called Linear B

and that's the one that was deciphered and it records an early form of Greek. Many of the signs between Linear A and Linear B are the same and most people believe that the linear B derive from linear A so we may actually be able to read the sounds of Linear A but it doesn't make any sense. It's curious, isn't it? Because nowadays we expect

that we can understand everything, having translated Cuneiform, having translated Linear B and the hieroglyphists oh, a long time ago. And now there are two of the three languages which seem in effect impenetrable. Most of the languages you refer to, of course, were translated by virtue of bilinguals by having two parallel. The Rosetta Stern is the most famous one, of course.

And Linear B was deciphered by very, very careful cryptographic systems, which is a wonderful account by John Chadwick, of how that happened. But there's not very much material in Linear A, and even less than creak and hieroglyphic. So they're there to be uncovered by someone sometime. Janis Hamilakis,

How much do we know about their religion? I mean, just let's go back to, if we can go back a bit. We are talking about a very, very sophisticated agriculture society, extremely sophisticated artefacts, paintings, objects, buildings. So they're up and running in quite a big way. But we know that a lot of these societies, religion was central. Religion and the political life and the kingly life. We're all queenly life.

So how much do we know? Well, the problem is, as with much of the discussion so far, is that the concept of religion, as we mean it, is not necessarily applicable to the case of the Bronze Age Crete, in the sense that we do not, we cannot talk of an organized system with theological structures, with very, very discreet and very prominent temples. For example, if compared the people of Ponce Age Crete with other cultural societies of that same time in the Eastern Mediterranean, we see that visualization, a process of rituals, was a diffuse process that you can actually see in many different spaces and locales in the Bronze Age of Crete. So you don't have temples as discrete

localities in the Bronze Age, although you do have some spaces of people called shrines or spaces of very distinctive ritual function. But we know for sure that people who are performing a series of practices. So we have much evidence for a series of ritualized practices, some of them in very discreet localities.

Can you tell us about what they are? In some cases, these were out in the countryside, in some of the natural features. For example, we have the so-called big sanctuaries, which are localities on the top of some hills or some small mountains, where people used to gather and deposit artifacts. In some cases, votive objects,

some cases, parts of the human body, representations of parts of the human body, like arms and legs and things like that, and also a number of human figurines. And they were performing ceremonies in that countryside, but also in places like caves. Caves is another... What are they doing?

Do they think there are gods out there? What is the object of this transaction, this venture, this movement? It's hard to tell at the moment where they actually believed, especially for the early part, of the Bronze Age in the existence of distinctive community.

But it's hard to believe that they're doing it for no reason at all. Of course. Of course. There were social rituals, the rituals of social interaction. So you're just, you're talking about social rituals. You're not, you haven't got enough evidence to know whether they had a religious dimension. In the sense that we mean it's probably not.

But in the later, in the last part, in the later part of the Bronze Age, of course there are reference to distinctive deities, especially in the linear B evidence that John was talking about. Now, for the earlier periods, as I said, we have to go on the on the archaeological evidence alone, and we know of these very distinctive rituals of deposition, of dedication of some figurines. And we don't have, for example, very distinctive status of goats

in the sense we're having the later classical period or in contemporary cultures. John Ewan, you would come in. I'm just going to say, I mean, I think we know quite a lot about what they did in a religious dimension. We know less about what it meant. as Janus said there are references in the Linear B now these are Greek documents in the Greek language

but some of the deities that have mentioned there are not recognisable in later Greek and they're probably holdovers from the Minoan period so we do know that there was probably a plurality of deities to which they were offering I think a good analogy might be to try and reconstruct the New Testament for example simply from images of Christ on the cross

and things like that though we have the images we don't have the text behind them. Alan Adams, women, as you mentioned earlier, figure very prominently in images found on these sites. Do you think that that indicates that they played a big part in society? Are these women as women or women as representing goddesses? How far have you got investigating that?

Well, this is a key question. And, I mean, normally when you're doing an overview of a culture, you would have a chapter on women. And you can't do that in this particular context, It's not because of lack of evidence, but because the evidence is so overwhelming. And it's difficult to emphasise enough that this is completely different

from what you see in the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean. It's not just that there's lots of women, but there are women in positions of authority. They are, just to describe one of the ceilings, is an impression from a seal. You have a bare-breasted woman again with flanks skirt, and she's holding a staff, and below her, there's a young man

doing the Minoan salute, gesturing sort of worship to her. And this is extraordinary. And what we tend to do is to call her a goddess because the idea of her actually having any political power is just too difficult to believe. And in fact, I find that hard to believe myself. So the debate normally is whether this represents one goddess or there's a series of goddesses.

but even that in itself is very striking for this time. To have a single female prominent goddess is very unusual. But can you use the emphasis a little more how widespread this is and how unusual this is? Because you've given us one image, but there are very many, aren't there? There are many images. I've described the snake goddess of before. Also, when I was talking about the wall painting showing an audience

looking at some kind of activity on that, and it's very poorly preserved, but you have figures of men, and then you have a central band of seated larger women who are sort of given pride of place, if you like, observing this ritual. So they are given special treatment. John Men, do you come to any conclusions about that? I think we have to be careful because the representations are the way that people, and the society chose how to represent themselves. They clearly did not represent male rulers regularly in positions of power. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that there weren't male rulers

behind it. The same thing is true of the Mycenaeans on the mainland, for example, who very rarely represent them, but we know from the text that there was a male ruler who was called a one-ax at each of the palace is there. Equally, in terms of mine own representations, the representations are primarily pacific, there are scenes of ritual, there are scenes of nature and so on, there's no scenes of warfare in Minoan representations, but that doesn't mean to say they couldn't hold their own on the geopolitical stage at the time

and go to war if they had to. At some point at the height of the Minoan civilization, there was one of the world's great volcanic interruption, one of the world's great volcanic eruptions on Santorini is now, is that right? That's right, yes. Which is about 90 miles away from Greece? 90 kilometres. 90 kilometres.

So we've got it right. It's Santorini. It's an eruption. And how did this affect the Minoan civilization? I mean, was it the cause that it eventually disappeared? Was it the principal cause in that? It can't be linked directly. It must have been a massive and traumatic event throughout the entire region.

I mean, you would not know about it. You wouldn't have to watch it on the TV. It was there. in front of you, as it were. The material culture preserved by the eruption on the island of Santorini is at the very minimum 50 years or perhaps even 100 years, possibly even a little bit longer, than the point at which there are massive destructions on the island of Crete.

So they cannot be directly linked. But many have seen this as being a disturbing event within the overall relationships within the Aegean. And some people see this as an opportunity for the mainland Misenian civilization to emerge and become more powerful on the scene. So in that sense, there may be indirect links towards the collapse or the beginnings of the collapse of the collapse of Minoan civilisation.

And finally, Alan, can you tell us something about the way in which Arthur Evans' views, briefly, I'm afraid, have been dented over the last half century? Well, Arthur Evans created a picture, a view of the Minoan world, one that was a golden age, It was, he called it continuous and homogeneous. He stressed that this was a unified, unchanging entity.

And it's interesting that he employed both Ottomans and Christian Greeks to excavate at the site. It's almost as if he was trying to create a united pass for this very fragmented society to rebuild. Since then, we now realised that it's much more dynamic and varied across the landscape than Evans ever imagined. And to be fair, we know this because of the ceramic chronological framework, which he himself instigated. It is incredibly dynamic and you have very different practices occurring across the island. There is a distinct Minoan identity, I think, but the social strategies within this are incredibly different. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to John Bennett, Alan Adams and Janice Hamilakis. That's it for this series of In Our Time.

We'll be back in the middle of September with a program about the Hippocratic Oath. Thanks for listening. We're out early this morning. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.