You're Dead to Me - Minoan Civilisation (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Greg Jenner is joined in Bronze Age Crete by Dr Stephen Kershaw and comedian Josie Long to learn all about the ancient Minoan civilisation.Many of us know the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur: King Minos of Crete feeds young men and women to the half-human beast in the labyrinth under his palace until the brave Theseus kills the monster. At the end of the 19th century, a Cretan archaeologist discovered a palace that many believed had belonged to Minos himself. Not only that, but experts soon found traces of an entire Bronze Age civilisation on the island. But what was this Minoan society really like?From the palaces of the mighty, through the daily lives of ordinary people and their religious beliefs, this episode explores the Minoans and the archaeological work that has uncovered the truth behind the myths.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Anna McCully Stewart Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts Hello and welcome to You're Dead To Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are sailing all the way back to Bronze Age Crete to learn about the ancient Minoan civilization and to help us mine truth from minotaur myth, we have two very special guests. In History Corner, he's a lecturer at Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education. His research includes classical mythology and history.

He's the author of several books, including Mythologica, a fantastic illustrated children's encyclopedia of Greek myths. It's very lovely. And you'll remember him from our episode all about Atlantis. It's not real. It's Dr Steve Kershaw. Welcome back, Steve. Thank you very much.

I'm delighted to be back. And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, broadcaster, and author. You will know her from Radio 4's Shortcuts, AR10Cats, maybe you've read her books, including the recent short story collection because I don't know what you mean and what you don't. But you'll definitely remember her

from our episode on medieval science. It's Josie Long. Welcome back, Josie. Thank you. Thanks for having me back and cannot tell you how heartbroken I was but just the casual Atlantis didn't exist oh no I know you was famously brainy you're a big book reader but are you a gold star student when it comes to the Bronze Age absolutely not however I feel that I have some little crumbs to cling to. But then I

feel like I learnt last time that those crumbs will not serve me well. Like even as you said, like minor tool myths, I was like, okay, we won't mention that. All of the stuff that was going on around that time, I find very exciting. But I wouldn't say that I, like I'm glad you're here Steve, I think that's the main part. Okay, I'm glad you're here Steve, I think that's the main thing. That's the main thing. I'm glad you're here too. So, what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. I'm guessing you might know the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, set in the huge labyrinth under Minoan Crete.

That's where the word labyrinth comes from. You'll perhaps know the story of Icarus and his dad escaping the island, flying too close to the sun. Very sad. But what's the truth behind the Minos myth? What was life really like back in the Bronze Age on Crete and why might their fashion choices raise a few eyebrows now? Let's find out. Josie, do you know when in history the Minoans were hanging about on Crete? Okay. If I had to guess, I would say it was 6,000 years ago?

Slightly too early. Oh too early? Damn I was going to say 5,000 years ago and then my brain was like push it. Go think. 5,000 years ago. 5,000 I think is the start right Steve? We're getting there, yeah we're getting there. So they first sort of emerge around 3000 BC and they last to about 1450 BC. So they emerge at roughly the same time as dynastic Egypt?

Yes, okay. As a kid, did you ever learn about the Minotaur? Oh, absolutely. Do you want to summarise it for us? Yeah, of course. Oh God, no, okay. Underneath this palace of King Minos Knosos, there's like a labyrinth, and then at the bottom of it, the Minotauraur and the Minotaur is half man half bull and it's this

horrendous beast and the person is able to survive it Yeah, by keeping this red thread and following back out the puzzle. So it's like very much a kind of Hansel and Gretel meets a cow Story Good job, Josie Long. Steve, what did what did Josie miss out? Gretel meets a cow. Yeah. Story. Good job, Josie Long. Steve, what did Josie miss out? Totally excellent.

There's this guy, King Minos, and he's this sort of mythical king of Crete. He's the son of Zeus and Europa. He wanted to be king, but there was a dispute going on, and he prayed to the god Poseidon to support him and said, will you send a bull from the sea? And he did, which is wonderful, but Minos couldn't bring himself to sacrifice the bull after he'd done this, which he really should have done that. So as revenge, Poseidon actually made Minos' wife, who was called Pasiphae, fall in lust with the bull. What you get now is she gave birth to a sort of cute little baby

Minotaur that then grew up into this most obscene beast. And it was at this point that Minos decided that we need to shut this beast away. So he had Daedalus build this labyrinth, which was this underground structure that was so complicated you could get in but you could never get out. Minos had a big sea empire and he had a son who was killed by the Athenians. And so as revenge he wanted compensation. So he demanded the Athenians should send him seven young men and seven young women, either every year or every nine years, it varies.

The Minotaur was eating Athenian young people on a regular basis until the Athenian prince Theseus volunteered to go and he defeated the Minotaur. He was helped by Minos's daughter, who was called Ariadne. And she's the one who gave him the thread. And so that he could get down into the labyrinth, he could kill the Minotaur and he could find his way out. And then that's what people knew about ancient Crete until about the year 1900 or so, isn't

it? And knew they were doing a lot of heavy lifting there, that's some serious storytelling. Really, right at the end of the 19th century, in the year 1878, 1879, there's a Cretan archaeologist whose name is Minos, his first name is Minos. Destiny. Minos Kalakirinos he's called. And he excavated, he was doing some excavations at the the palace as they called it, at Knossos, which is on the north side of Crete. And what he found was some what they call pithoi, huge ceramic storage jars that he then sent out to various museums. It excited everybody's interest. And all of a sudden archaeologists really, really wanted to know more about this palace. Everybody wants to have a bit of the

action. The most important one really is Arthur Evans. He's the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He was shown the site by this guy, Kallikarinos, in 1894. And he put his money where his mouth is. He bought the site in 1900. There'd been a huge war between the Turks and the Cretans, as the Cretans won their independence from the Ottomans but he bought the site and he started to dig. Sadly for Kale Karinos he kind of gets edited out of the

story in a way and Evans takes over as the main character but so Evans is the guy who really takes over and becomes the man who the story is built around. So Arthur Evans, why has he put his money where his mouth is? Initially, his main interest to start with was in ancient writing scripts, actually. He wasn't necessarily seeking what he found, but what he did find was this kind of, as he saw it, this European high civilisation that was something that could rival those great civil civilizations of Egypt and the Near East. And it's him really who gives the name to these people as well. He based it on the name of King Minos. So it raises this fantastic question, I think, that's

often asked is whether Arthur Evans discovered the Minoans or whether he invented them. Ooh. Yep. We'll call them Minoans for today. Yeah. But Josie, if in 4,000 years' time archaeologists dig up your house and it's the definitive house that represents the 21st century, what are they going to call our society? Well, the main thing for me is that I'm going to really get myself, my body in some silt. If I'm not lying in

some silt, I will have deteriorated, you know? I'm not taking that risk. And then I'll do some things to like, mess with them. So I'll like, steal a helmet from the British Museum and I'll hold an iPad. So they were like, who were these people? The Josephines. Were they warriors? And I'll be preserved. So they'll be like, oh, this woman, I know that they'll be mean about me. Like, I know they'll be like, oh, grandma was at the end of her life, you know, and I know I'll have to just sort of deal with that. If it was my flat, particularly, they would think that we were a lot messier

than we are collectively. They'd be like, they didn't store clothes, they kept them all over the floor, they didn't clean. So today we're gonna try and pin some reality onto the myths. Seraphir Evans was trying to do that, but he had some quite controversial techniques. Do you know what he did at Knossos that is very, well, controversial is the word actually in terms of his archeological techniques?

No, I don't at all. Have you ever visited, have you ever been? I have, I think, I've been to Crete, so I, yes I have. My main memory was that I was far too warm the whole time. But no, I don't know what he would have done controversially. I can guess, like from the era that maybe he stole everything, maybe he made some conclusions. It's all in the British Museum now, yes. He touched it all, you know, he picked it up, he smashed it, I don't know.

So they needed to preserve it after they dug it. They wanted to preserve it, so they dug it they really they wanted to preserve it So they ultimately reconstituted it as that was his word. They reconstructed it using reinforced concrete So they did that and they also reconstructed a lot of the frescoes and figurines that had been found on site as well So fundamentally he was in a way creating his vision of what Knossos was. Let's deconstruct the reconstruction. What did Minos, Kallakarinos and Arthur Evans find originally? A lot of the archaeological sites, a number of them anyway, on Crete are what they called palaces. And Evans saw it kind of as the

seat of a dynasty of priest-kings. It's more likely that you've got groups of elites here, who are perhaps in competition with each other, particularly in the early periods. So some kind of centralized authority, probably. But what exactly that looks like and how it's constituted is a bit elusive. But there were other largish towns, smaller towns, villages, country houses, ports as well, of course, because these people were seafarers, great seafarers. You said Arthur Evans was interested in ancient texts and writing systems. Yes. So was he attracted by writing systems first?

Yeah, and we have the Minoans writing, you know, the trouble is that we can't decipher it, we don't know what language it was. now still now yeah awesome but people are trying to solve it all the time there's two main scripts that they use there's a thing called Cretan hieroglyphics and a script called linear a I thought of linear B yes linear B was written on Crete, but it comes in later. That we can translate, that we know all about, and it was Greek. It was an early form of Greek. But what the Linear A was, we don't know.

It's all Greek to me. Yeah, absolutely. It was all Greek to them, all Greek to the Minoans. What else are we going on? So Josie mentioned pots. They do pots exceptionally well and in quantity. Gives us so much information. I think they're wonderful ceramicists. They make figurines as well out of terracotta and a bit of bronze and clay that are very often sort of votive offerings that you

find in sanctuaries and things like that. So it's a motive to the gods, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And they also do frescoes. And boy, do they do a good fresco. They really do. Really distinctive color palette that they use in red and yellow and black and white. And, you know, it's a difficult technique. You've got to paint it onto wet plaster

and work very quickly with it. It's a lot of survive, sorry to say. Yeah, it survives very well, actually, because it's applied to the walls and it sticks onto wet plaster and work very quickly with it. It's a lot survived, sorry to say. Yeah, it survives very well actually, because it's applied to the walls and it sticks and it doesn't degrade. So when they uncovered it, they uncovered like whole walls and whole paintings? Yes, or actually in bits and fragments and bits and pieces. Very beautiful world that they portray.

How do you think the Minoan society treated women? I'm gonna go on a real limb and say badly. I feel like the evidence for, and I would say the past, and let's be real, the present, you would err on the side of badly, but I feel like now you're gonna be like, surprise, well, I would say badly. Without wishing to be the mansplaining dude. Well, actually, it's a good time. The position of women in minnow and society and their art particularly, certainly invites the idea that they might have been quite powerful and quite well accommodated and treated within society. They are very prominent in the art. Women everywhere

in the art. We have wonderful frescoes showing initiation ceremonies and sort of all female events, to the point where some scholars have suggested that this society may have been a matriarchy. It's kind of one of the things that we like to believe. I think it's hard to make that idea stick, but I think the... The more I'm hearing about them, the more I like them. Yeah. Whether the prominence of women in the arts and the ritual and the religion transfers to political and social power is another question

of course. And those categories might be ours as well, they might not have had those same categories. There's an awful lot of art which is really lovely and that art can then also tell us about fashion. What haute couture outfits would you be imagining for you know Cretan Vogue? I would have to guess a lot of weaving, a lot of things dyed for the dyed weft, of course. Feathers, seabird feathers. That's what you're getting. You're getting things from the mountains and maybe you're getting kind of a papyrus style thing. I mean, you're really asking the wrong person. I don't even know what's fashionable now. I feel like it's a big leap.

Well let's show you some art from the period showing you both men and women's fashion. Oh hello. Okay. What can you see? Well, I will see. Yeah, people really absolutely getting their boobs out. There's no other way to say it. The dresses are just people, I suppose people thrilled to show their boobs to one another.

The dress is going under the boob and do you know what, maybe they were happier society for it. I see people dressed in ways that you think, what this does suggest is it could be just one historian having a bit of a laugh. Okay, so we've talked about fashion taste, let's talk about actual taste. What are the Minoans eating back in the Bronze Age? I mean, actually, I'll ask you, Josie, what's your guess? You're gonna go honey, that's what I know about Greek islands.

Sure. A lot of honey. Thyme. Yeah. Thyme and rosemary on the hillside. Lovely. Lovely. You'd have lambs.

I hear loads about sheep in Greek myths. I mean, that's enough, isn't it? You know, quite often you have in Greece if you go, oh, a lovely Greek salad. Fish, olives. Yeah. Bit of salad, bit of feta. Tzatziki, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Good time flatbreads. Yes, it sounds lovely, Steve. All of the above. Yeah. Amazing, fab. Yeah, they're eating pulses and loads of veg and as you say, olives, meat, fish. Not as much fish as you might imagine, so it seems, from an island people, but they're growing grapes and of course they're making wine, so you need to preserve your finditude.

So you make cheese, you can preserve your milk, so you make wine, you can preserve your grapes. And they drink wine that's flavoured with toasted oak, so it's like oaky chardonnays. And also they use pine resin. So it's like oaky chardonnay and also they use pine resin. Oh, so it's retzina The retzina they drink on Crete now is a direct throwback to Minoan times Fantastic and medicinal yeah medicinal stuff. They they grow poppies. Yes well for medicinal purposes and possibly medicinal Religious

Wine yeah sounds like the Minoans are party people. They're having a great time! So opioids and wine is probably why they are playing some quite dangerous games with the local livestock. Josie, have you got any ideas what I'm talking about here? Is it like bullfighting? Is it like jumping on bulls and blowing on bulls? It literally is, well done, absolutely. It's not, it's jumping over bulls. It's bull leaping. And Steve, you can talk us through the ball leaping. Yeah, it's extraordinary. It seems to be a really popular kind of entertainment or perhaps again a ritual activity as a sort of initiation thing.

So you maybe a seasonal thing, you know, with young men netting and subduing bulls and then performing feats of athleticism and jumping over them and possibly sacrificing and eating the bull when you've done, of course. Yeah. But bull leaping is everywhere in their art, again, on frescoes and in ivories and bronzes and whatever, they love a bit of bull leaping. I mean, in terms of jobs on this island then, Steve, I mean, we've heard about kind of a slightly rural economy, but a quite large urban centres.

We must have some LinkedIn profiles for cattle farmers, bull wranglers and fresco painters, that much we know. What other things do we know about the economy or about crafts or what are they doing? Yes, so the people are working, obviously they're farming and animal husbandry and that kind of thing. There is an urban population with artisans who are producing all these ceramics and they trade.

They're an island people. This is a Bronze Age society. Is there any metal on the island? Not to speak of. Right, so they're importing. We need to import metal there to make their bronze. There's no tin, for instance. There's no gulk.

So they're not rich in minerals, but they're rich in agricultural material and what have you. And as I say, they're great seafarers and they're in contact with these other societies within the, what's now the Greek islands, but also with Egypt and the Near East. And they're not isolated? No, far from it. This world is an incredibly interconnected world, I think much more interconnected than we naturally assume. Everybody's in touch with everybody else on a very regular basis. Do people move? The Minoans colonised, for sure, the settlement on Kithira is a colony, instance so that that's and great

shipbuilders so they're wonderful shipbuilders again the ships appear on the on the frescoes beautifully constructed ships and and and now sort of you know it's a bit experimental archaeologists have made Minoan ships and they they sail them around the harbor at Chania. They could have been lying, they could have just been like, yeah, just do a really good shit, yeah, we did that. That could have been aspirational for them, like one day someone will jump on a bull. Aim high. Famously archaeologists, we're often finding trash and we're often finding dead people.

So what do we know about Minoan funerary practices? Do they cremate? Do they bury?? Do they bury? Yeah they bury. I mean they some of the the earlier burials are sort of circular stone constructions. They call it a tholos, a round building it's called a tholos and a tholoi in plural, and they build these circular stone tholoi that generally sort of face away from the settlements there. You don't want the dead coming back. You know, that's not what we need.

I love the idea of the dead come back but they don't know which way to look. Absolutely. They're like, oh, I guess I'll go back to being dead then. Yeah, just zombies wandering off. Yeah, just trying to find the town. That's right. So, and it looks like many of these chambers

are used and reused. They get looted, of course, which is a problem for the archaeology, so it's hard to reconstruct the practices exactly. But it seems like they would lay the dead on the floor with their possessions and some food. Perhaps after the body is decomposed, then the bones could be transferred to a sort of like an ossuary. It may be that you're worshipping your ancestors. A wide range of ritual activity, I think, often marking, you know, life stage transitions. So, you know, so birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, death.

There's also the double axe symbol that shows up a lot, doesn't it? That's right. Lots and lots and lots of these double axes. It's called the labrus. Oh, named after the labyrinth. Important the religion. They like labyrinth. Yeah You find lots of them tiny little gold ones huge great bronze ones far far too big to to use It's kind of a symbol. Yeah similar and very often associated with the sort of minoan priestesses as well They look to the sky and they look to the earth. They have what they call peak sanctuaries on mountaintops, where they have clay figurines as offerings and tablets and jewellery and that kind of thing. And then they have cave sanctuaries

as well. So you have up into the sky and then you have down into the earth where there may be sort of feasting and drinking rituals. What was their belief system? What do we know? Because to my mind obviously because Crete is now part of Greece it's tied in a bit with it, but was it always very separate? Like how does it work? How much so? The one may have kind of evolved into the other but there's a very prominent if you like female deity you get a lot of these sort very prominent, if you like, female deity. You get a lot of these epiphany scenes of a female deity coming down and perhaps being summoned down, who they think is perhaps the great goddess. And she repeatedly appears in the

art. So she may be kind of a mother goddess or a mistress of the animals or a sort of guardian of the cities. Wow. That kind of thing. Whether she is one goddess or she has multiple aspects and there's a whole pantheon of these is difficult. Evans wanted it to be one deity because he wanted them to be monotheistic. We need to talk about the end of the Minoans because they very often get folded

into our previous episode, Atlantis. They do. So often people are like, people on the internet love to tell me the Minoan civilization was wiped out by the Atlantis flood. What do we know? Yeah, I mean, they will like to tell you that, but it's much more nuanced than that, really.

So roughly, I mean, we can bicker about dates, but roughly 1450 BC, you see at the end of the Neopalatial period buildings being destroyed by fire and not being rebuilt and cultural changes coming in on the the island, what they call warrior burials, and the introduction of this linear B script which is a a form of Greek and there's various possibilities One of which could be this natural catastrophe. So the the great eruption on Santorini, but the dates are problematical That's probably around 1625 BC. So it's a long time before it's like saying that the Eruption of Krakatoa.a is causing something to happen now. It may be that we have

internal unrest, rebellion on the island against the central power, maybe to do with a natural disaster as well, but that's a possibility. And then there is a possibility of takeover, an invasion by Mycenaeans from the mainland. So those are the three theories and possibilities. Maybe you could combine all three. That pretty much is what brings the Minoans to an end. It's more of a process than an instantaneous event. It's not an overnight tsunami, is it? Yeah, no, it's not. In your face,anteans! Oh, sorry, yeah. They had a good run. They had a good run.

They did. Yeah, 1600 years. They had a good run, considering it's a relatively small island, you know? Absolutely. To build what they built and to sort of have such a distinctive, unusual vibe. And to have two myths that persist 5000 years later. You've got to hand it to him. It's not bad, everyone knows who Icarus is.

They do, yeah. It's great. The Nuance Window! Okay, it's time now for The Nuance Window. This is the part of the show where Josie and I recline in our palace and sip our pine-flavoured retina for two minutes while Dr Steve takes to the floor to tell us something that we need to know about the Minoans. Dr Steve, take it away. There have been stories told about the people we call the Minoans as far back as we can

trace. As Odysseus even says in the Odyssey, out in the wine-dark sea there lies a land called Crete, a rich and lovely land boasting 90 cities, one of which is called Knossos, where King Minos ruled. And when Arthur Evans made his startling discoveries at Knossos, he bought into that narrative. He wanted the Minoan mythical tales to mirror his Minoan historical reality. The palace traditionally built for Minos has proved to be no baseless fabric of the imagination, he said. But imagination is everything here. And with those Bronze Age artefacts that he unearthed, he created another 20th century artefact of his own, and reconstituted it in reinforced concrete. It was a palace for, as he saw them, a happy,

peace-loving people whose arts, freedom, humanism and dynamism showed that Crete was the cradle of a European civilization that was as ancient and sophisticated as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but also distinct from them. Now, archaeologists often create the past in their own image. All of those stones and those bones that they excavate can't really speak for themselves. They need an archaeological interpreter. So as well as trying to uncover the truth about the past, there's always an element of creativity. But just like Evans, I think, we read and we understand and we

reconstitute the past in our cultural present, which often tells us just as much about ourselves as it does about the Minoans. And that's why history and archaeology are so beautiful. Thank you, Steve. Josie, any follow up thoughts on that? Yeah, I think it is very interesting thinking about the fact that we are telling on ourselves when we think we're talking about them. You know, we can't escape our own cultural context and we can't escape our own hopes and dreams for what we're looking at. And I love how mysterious it is, but I also can't bear how mysterious it is because I want to know the answers about these things which are so hidden

and what a thrill you know I've had a lovely time thank you both all that's left for me to do is say a big thank you to our guests in History Corner we had the sensational Dr Steve Kershaw from Oxford University thank you Steve An absolute pleasure Greg thank you very much for having me Thank you and in Comedy Corner we had the lovely Josie Long thank you Josie Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. And in Comedy Corner, we have the lovely Josie Long. Thank you, Josie. Thank you so much for having me. It's been so informative. And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we discover, not invent,

another legendary historical civilization. But for now, I'm off to go and challenge Greg James to a ball leaping contest to see who is the greatest BBC Greg. It's obviously him, but I've got to try. Bye! Hello, Russell Kane here. I used to love British history, be proud of it. Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians, obviously, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor. That has become much more challenging,

for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius. Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed. But if like me, you quite enjoy it, have a little search. Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Kane. Go to BBC Sound and have

your world destroyed.