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Minoan Thalassocracy

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Minoan Thalassocracy Episode 012 Minoan Thalassocracy To be frank as we get underway today, the Minoan Civilization has been, thus far in our narrative, the biggest surprise to me personally. For some reason, in my mind the Minoans had always occupied a place of pseudo-familiarity, especially in comparison to the Harappan people we’ve looked at earlier: their name is familiar and the myths associated with them and King Minos are among the most recognizable in Greek mythology. I may have been a bit off-base in my admittedly ignorant assumptions about the Minoans, and my ignorance about the Harappan Civilization is sadly common in the West as well, though that’s no excuse. As I hope to convey through this episode, for all the name recognition the Minoans may have today, or previously had in my own head anyway, we actually don’t know much detail about the culture and details of the Minoan people or their civilization. Concerning that name recognition, the name Minos tends to evoke images of myth and legend, at least, if you’re anything like me it does. The earliest of true civilizations to occupy the island of Crete has come to be known as the Minoan Civilization, after the mythical king Minos. In The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus is asked to tell of his lineage, and the beginning of his responding story is the following: “There is a country, Crete, in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair land and a rich, begirt with water. The people there are many, innumerable indeed, and they have ninety cities. Their speech is mixed; one language joins another. Here are Achaeans, here brave native Cretans, her Cydonians, crested Dorians, and noble Pelasgians. Of all their towns the capital is Knossos, where Minos became king when nine years old–Minos, the friend of mighty Zeus and father of my father, bold Deucalion.” Episode 012 1 The allusion in this passage of ‘The Odyssey’, which is more explicitly stated in other places throughout Greek mythology, is that King Minos was a son of Zeus himself. The famous stories affiliated with Minos, for example, the minotaur in the labyrinth that Minos had built beneath his palace at Knossos, in addition to his supposed divine lineage should serve as a red flag that Minos may not have been an actual king. When it comes to Minos, the debate tends to be about whether mythical figures like him were completely real, completely mythical, or somewhere in the middle, the argument that they were rooted in history but elaborate mythology gradually evolved to the point that any distinct line between fact and fiction has been smudged beyond definitive identification. As we now delve into the specifics of what we now know as the Minoan Civilization, I’d like to frame our discussion in terms similar to the debate that surrounds King Minos as a historical figure. The best person to give one view of the Minoans in history is none other than Thucydides. In describing some background history in his treatment of the Peloponnesian War, he describes Minos and his realm as an ‘empire’ or a ‘thalassocracy,’ something I’ll define further in a minute. Thucydides then says this: “Minos, according to tradition, was the first person to organize a navy. He controlled the greater part of what is now called the Hellenic (or Aegean) Sea; he ruled over the Cyclades. And it is reasonable to suppose that he did his best to put down piracy in order to secure his own revenues.” Thucydides then describes a Minoan Empire that exercised direct control over a large part of the Aegean, a view that proponents of our first interpretation share: a theory positing an actual, historical Minoan thalassocracy that existed in historical fact and that saw Minos rule an empire covering a majority of the Aegean Sea from his palace at Knossos on Crete. The second camp comprises a more recent trend in historical interpretation and is made up of those who believe that the numerous islands of the Aegean were politically autonomous from Crete, and that Minoan influence in the greater Aegean was merely economic and cultural, even if there may have been a small measure of diplomatic control from Knossos. What I hope to do in the balance of today’s episode is to not necessarily take one side or the other, although my leanings will probably become apparent. Rather, I will try to give a good overview of the main arguments from each camp, along with the historical framework within which these arguments are framed, leaving you to draw your own conclusions about which camp has a stronger position. Before that, though, let me briefly explain that weird word I’ve used a few times now, “thalassocracy.” Episode 012 2 The word is of Greek origin and is rooted in two Greek words: ‘thalassa', meaning “sea,” and ‘kratein’, a verb meaning “to rule.” The two together make up the word ‘thalassocracy’, which literally means “to rule the sea” or “rule of the sea.” It’s now used as a descriptive label for states that are primarily maritime empires or states, like the Phoenician civilization which, I promise, we will get to cover in due time. So now that we’ve seen the two alternative arguments and seen just what exactly a thalassocracy is, lets get into the history of the Minoan people of Crete and beyond. The origin of the Minoan people is shrouded in the mists of pre-history. Archaeological evidence has shown evidence of settlement on Mediterranean islands in neolithic times and this should really come as no surprise to us. The geographic reality of the Mediterranean is that of many small but scattered islands that are often-times close enough to one another that they can be seen with the naked eye. It takes little imagination to picture the earliest of mankind venturing onto the water in a log boat, or even simply floating on some appropriate vessel and paddling his way toward an in-view piece of land, ultimately resulting in the pre-historic presence of man on numerous Mediterranean outposts. The island of Crete became the site of comparatively concentrated settlement in neolithic times, likely due to its location off the western coast of Anatolia and at the southern end of the Aegean Sea and the Cyclades. That same location, though, can also be seen as a bit less accessible than most of the smaller islands of the Cyclades or the island of Cyprus, a point made by Fernand Braudel in his brilliantly written history, ‘Memory and the Mediterranean’. It’s not really within our scope to focus on the neolithic origins of the Minoans, but Braudel paints an image of a burgeoning civilization in the Aegean even before the Bronze Age. He refers to it as a ‘quasi-Aegean civilization’ consisting of the Cyclades, the mythical yet historically provable city of Troy, Crete, and the Hellespont. This civilization, claims Braudel, was “dramatically snuffed out by the Indo-European invasions around the 24th century BCE,” which saw the ancestors of the Mycenaeans in Greece and the Hittites and Louwites of Anatolia overrun the quasi-Aegean civilization and effectively erase the early economic and cultural levels that they had reached. According to Braudel, it was Crete alone that survived this downfall and remained intact enough to have an edge once the Bronze Age began. Episode 012 3 The long and short of any human activity paleolithic activity on Crete for us is that there was some. Since Crete is an island, we know that a fair amount of activity there and any trade or commerce that took place with other civilizations had to have done so via a water route at some point. The Bronze Age in Crete is generally placed as starting somewhere around 2700 to 2600 BCE, but the period wherein the Minoans begin building the imposing palaces for which they are now remembered, places like Phaistos and Knossos, didn’t begin until at least 1900 BCE. As I’ve said, though, for centuries before the Minoans began constructing their palaces they were constantly traversing the Mediterranean in boats. Surprisingly, for all that activity we have yet to find a shipwreck or even a visual depiction of a boat from early Bronze Age Minoan Crete. What we do have, however, are a few clay ship models, two specifically: one from Palaikastro, a village on the eastern end of Crete, and the other from Mochlos, a small island that sits off the coast of Crete within the confines of the Gulf of Mirabello. Both of these models are roughly dated to the mid-to-late 2000s BCE, so they represent Minoan boats prior to the Palatial Period. The Palaikastro model is fairly unique as far as the shape goes, especially in comparison to the early boats of the other cultures that we’ve seen thus far. One end has a sharp raised point to it, while the other end has a flat, step-like projection sticking off near the bottom of the boat. It’s surmised that the tall, pointed end was the stern of the boat, while the flat projecting piece has been called a ‘fore-foot,’ and has been interpreted as either being useful for beaching the boat or for use as a step upon reentering the boat once it’s pushed off from shore. Either way, the profile of the boat model bears a distinctly fish-like shape, perhaps just the visual effect that its Minoan creators were seeking. The Machlos boat model also has relatively high ends, though this model is symmetrical, similar in that fact to some of the boats we saw from Mesopotamia and Harappa.
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