The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  South of the Cyclades lay a hazardous expanse of open sea before the ancient seafarer, an island-hopper by preference, reached Greece’s most southerly land mass. Traditionally, it is here, on the island of Crete, that archaeologists have begun their story of Europe’s first ‘states’, that is, organized political communities under a centralized authority wielding power over a complex society no longer based solely on kinship and clan.

  The ancient Greeks had many legends about Crete’s former greatness. These centred on a king called Minos who lived at a place called Knossos:

  Minos is the first to whom tradition ascribes the possession of a navy. He made himself master of a great part of what is now termed the Hellenic sea; he conquered the Cyclades, and was the first colonizer of most of them, expelling the Carians and appointing his own sons to govern in them.

  These are the words of an Athenian historian, Thucydides, who set down his account of Greek history at the end of the 400s BC. To the educated elites of nineteenth-century Britain, this mention of an ancient empire based on sea-power and colonization had a familiar ring. Thucydides helped to inspire a British amateur archaeologist to go out to Crete and dig for evidence of Minos.

  The British Museum’s display of artefacts from prehistoric Crete includes a number of objects captioned as gifts from Sir Arthur Evans. This diminutive Victorian, a product of Harrow School and Oxford University, came from a family grown rich on the manufacture of paper. In 1900, in middle age, he used this money to buy the land and to start excavations at a site which earlier travellers had already identified as ancient Knossos.

  He found remains of buildings one on top the other from a period of nearly six hundred years, from around 1900 to perhaps 1370 BC. They belonged to a huge multi-storey structure of the middle and late Bronze Age centred on a great courtyard and equipped with an elaborate drainage system of clay pipes and stone channels. The maze-like complex was subject to partial ruination and repeated rebuilding over its long life. Archaeologists lay much of the blame for this cycle of destruction and renewal on seismic activity, for which Crete and its neighbourhood are well known: there were forty-five earthquakes on Crete in 2014 alone – an average of almost one a week.

  Evans found evidence for writing, as well as many refined artworks. These include wall paintings preserving glimpses of a courtly world of elegantly costumed, bare-breasted women. One painting shows athletic young men in mini-kilts jumping a bull. This hazardous sport recalls today’s young toreros in the Gers region of south-west France who display their prowess by somersaulting off the backs of charging cows. The bull imagery of ancient Knossos hints at one possible source of local wealth: the management of cattle.

  Evans combined the ancient Greek stories and assumptions based on the international politics of his own day to interpret his finds. He identified the large complex as a palace, seat of the political power of Minos and his dynasty. Inside he had found objects and features which he saw as evidence of goddess worship and of shrines. So he made Minos a ruler combining secular with religious authority: a priest king. He called these lost people ‘Minoans’. He had no hesitation in labelling their way of life a ‘civilization’ – as he saw it, the earliest in Europe to merit this label. Mingling images of the Roman and British empires, he saw the Minoans in their unfortified centres like Knossos as benevolent seaborne imperialists presiding over a ‘Pax Minoica’, or ‘Minoan peace’.

  The Minoans raise basic questions of who they were and where they came from. Evans found earlier remains beneath the ‘palaces’. These go as far back in time as the Neolithic farmers of this part of Crete in the 6000s BC. So Minoan civilization may have been home-grown, based on earlier developments. For instance, archaeologists have found offcuts of olive trees used as firewood on Crete some 300 years before the earliest ‘palace’. This find points to olive-oil manufacture on Crete by this date, since the offcuts probably reflect the pruning of cultivated olive trees.

  The stimuli prompting human culture on prehistoric Crete to give rise to Minoan civilization certainly included overseas contacts. At Knossos, the earlier levels produced a fragment of hippopotamus tooth. This ancient alternative to elephant ivory may have originated in Egypt’s River Nile.

  Even without the later traditions of the ancient Greeks regarding Minoan sea-power, it is probably significant that Crete in the early Bronze Age saw major developments in seafaring during the two or three centuries before Evans’s first ‘palace’ at Knossos. Until then the hazardous business of paddling canoes over long distances must have sharply limited the range and frequency of Aegean Sea voyages. Late in the 2000s BC came a step change. Communities on Crete became familiar with the sailing ship.

  The evidence comes from images of such vessels which now appear as designs on the small stones that Cretan craftsmen shaped into seals for their owners to wear as ornaments and to use for sealing. These early images of deep-hulled sailboats reflect a major gearing up of sea-craft. Cretans and their neighbours could now make faster sea journeys over longer distances, more often and carrying more cargo. The households or groups in island society who controlled this quickening pace of exchange with the outside world would also have gained in wealth and power.

  Since the pioneering work of Evans, archaeologists have uncovered Minoan ‘palaces’, towns, ‘villas’, mountain sanctuaries and tombs all over Crete. Beyond Crete, on the Cycladic island of Santorini, they found a settlement buried, Pompeii-style, beneath the ash and pumice from a violent eruption of the island’s volcano. The finds include Minoan-style houses and large numbers of a distinctive type of clay container made on Minoan Crete for the transport and storage of Cretan olive oil and wine. Minoan prosperity was also based on agriculture and the exploitation of a surplus.

  In 1990, the Austrians unearthed thousands of fragments of wall paintings in the Minoan style at an archaeological site in northern Egypt. Long before this last discovery, archaeologists had identified the ‘Keftiu’ of Egyptian texts and art as Minoans. These were men with Minoan kilts and hairstyles who brought gifts to the pharaohs Hatshepsut (reigned about 1473–1458 BC) and her co-ruler Thutmose III. So the Minoans and their way of life in their heyday made an impression on much of the eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt, at this time the great power of the region.

  Perhaps the most obvious sign that these Minoans were a relatively ‘advanced’ society is their use of writing. On display in the British Museum is a fine bronze axe-head with the hole for the haft flanked by two linguistic signs. This script is unique in the ancient world. Evans dubbed it Linear A because the signs – as here – are made up of conjoined lines rather than the stylized pictures of objects in, say, the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians. From human contacts made by vessels sailing between east and west, the Minoans had encountered writing, an older invention in the Near East. Someone saw the potential for Minoan Crete, and a transformation took place, with the Minoan side adapting foreign ideas to suit themselves.

  Despite continuing efforts, experts have yet to decipher Linear A, let alone identify the underlying language. With more confidence archaeologists can comment on how the Minoans used this script. Incised on clay ‘pages’, the longest documents include numbers and lists and seem to be accounts, transaction records and so on. There are special signs for ‘olive’ and ‘wine’. These products were stored in bulk in some Minoan ‘palaces’. At Knossos, Evans found a series of 18 oblong magazines holding 150 or so massive clay storage jars, each roughly the height of an adult human.

  One of the great riddles about Minoan Crete concerns the ‘palaces’ themselves. Today, many archaeologists question Evans’s interpretation of Knossos as the seat of a monarchy. Among experts, ‘palace’ is going out of fashion in favour of ‘court building’. This term gives proper prominence to the paved courtyards at the heart of these complexes, at Knossos and elsewhere on Crete.

  The absence in Minoan art of depictions of a ruler does not support the notion of Minoan ‘palaces’. In contem
porary monarchies further east, craftsmen of major artworks mainly served the gods and the monarch. At Egypt’s Deir el-Bahri in western Thebes, the great temple built by Queen Hatshepsut is full of statues with but one subject, the queen. At Knossos, Evans dubbed one space a ‘Throne Room’ because against a wall he found an elaborate seat with a high, carved back made of the alabaster-like mineral known as gypsum. Nowadays archaeologists reason that this room was used for religious ritual. Perhaps a Minoan priestess or priest sat on the ‘throne’.

  Clues to one important purpose of the palace at Knossos are displayed in the British Museum in the form of shelves of Minoan pots. Many are drinking cups. The finest cups have thin, delicate walls and are prettily decorated with a black slip on top of which the potter has added designs in red or white. These are examples of so-called Kamares ware, the superior product of a new invention on Crete, the potter’s wheel, and mainly made for drinking. Such vessels were stored in the court buildings in large quantities. In one spot at Knossos, archaeologists found over 150 cups toppled to the ground. Some vessels were much grander than others.

  One particularly lavish type takes the form of a bull’s head carved in stone. Craftsmen hollowed out the head, then sealed the neck with a separately attached stone ‘plate’. To heighten the impact, they might add eyes of rock crystal, or pick out nostrils with gold leaf. These heads were not just made to dazzle. They have holes at the top and bottom for holding and pouring liquids. What is more, they are only found in fragments, and the muzzle is usually missing. Archaeologists surmise that they were deliberately smashed after use with a blow to the nose.

  The reader might be forgiven for thinking of the fading custom in today’s Greece of smashing plates and glasses during celebrations. Archaeologists now imagine the central courts of the ‘palaces’ as spectacular settings for, among other things, great communal feasts. Here, they suggest, a social stratum of top people in Minoan society would periodically gather to bond over food and drink. The bull’s head containers hint at rituals and ceremonial interactions. The mass banquets of London’s livery companies, with their loving cups, speeches, music and processions, seem to offer a pale modern parallel for this ritualized style of commensality.

  All this merrymaking may suggest a Minoan leadership in need of social glue to reduce the danger of inter-communal conflict. Since studying Minoan weaponry, archaeologists have largely ditched Evans’s utopia of ‘peaceful’ Minoans. The quantity of Minoan bronze daggers, swords, arrowheads and so on seems too high if Minoans carried weapons only for ceremony or status, never to threaten, or enact, violence.

  Another great riddle concerns the demise of Knossos as the centre of a prehistoric state. Around 1450 BC the buildings suffered damage at a time when other Minoan court buildings on the island were destroyed and never rebuilt. Yet Knossos continued to serve as a political hub. Archaeologists are uncertain when the end came – perhaps three generations later, around 1370 BC. Knossos suffered a final destruction. This time there was no rebuilding.

  The wheels of power at Knossos turned to the very last moment. This is known because the destruction involved fire, which baked a last generation of over two thousand administrative tablets with linear script. But Evans, who found these tablets, saw that their script was different from, and later than, the linear script discussed above. He dubbed these scripts respectively Linear Class A and B. The second, unlike the first, has been deciphered.

  In 1952 a former wartime pilot and keen linguist, the architect Michael Ventris, a Briton, dropped a bombshell. He established that the language of Linear B was a form – the earliest attested – of Ancient Greek. At a stroke it turned out that the earlier Minoans who used Linear A were not Greek-speakers, but the users of Linear B were. By Ventris’s time, archaeologists had also found – and continue to find – Linear B tablets on Bronze Age sites in Greece proper. It followed that Knossos in its final phase was much closer to the mainland than previously, culturally and perhaps politically too.

  As for what the mainland was like in the Bronze Age, the ancient Greeks of historical times told many stories about two feuding dynasties ruling in their remote past – the time leading up to the Trojan War. Surviving works of the imagination by Greek poets and playwrights have ensured immortality for King Oedipus of Thebes in central Greece, who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, or Agamemnon of Mycenae in the Peloponnese, who led the Greeks to victory at Troy, only to be murdered on his return home by his wife as he was taking a bath.

  These tales inspired another pioneering archaeologist, a rich German businessman called Heinrich Schliemann. In 1876, when he was in his mid-fifties, Schliemann began excavations in the north-east Peloponnese at ancient Mycenae. His finds were so sensational that when he published them in a book, William Gladstone himself, the four-times British prime minister, wrote the preface. Schliemann found astonishing treasures dating from around 1550 BC, the same period as the heyday of Minoan Knossos.

  These finds, now the highlight of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, include the gold mask of a moustachioed male which Schliemann over-excitedly claimed as the ‘death mask of Agamemnon’. Like Evans at Knossos some twenty years later, he had discovered a new Bronze Age civilization. Since then archaeologists have shown that ‘Mycenaean’ civilization lasted for some four centuries, much longer than Schliemann realized.

  In the 1950s a joint team of Americans and Greeks resumed excavations at a Mycenaean site discovered before the Second World War at ancient Pylos in the south-west Peloponnese. This showcases the culminating phase of Mycenaean culture in the 1200s BC. Under a protective roof of corrugated iron, today’s visitor sees a somewhat unprepossessing complex of rooms and outbuildings delineated by stubs of walls. At the centre is a rectangular suite of porch, vestibule and hall with a huge circular hearth where people gathered to consume wine, judging from finds of drinking cups. On the other side of the Peloponnese, visitors to Mycenae and nearby Tiryns encounter less well-preserved examples of a central suite of identical plan. This striking display of Mycenaean cultural uniformity might seem to hint at central planning. Most archaeologists see these elite buildings as the palaces of Mycenaean rulers in the 1300s and 1200s BC.

  Unlike the court buildings of the Minoan heyday, these later Mycenaean palaces have left written records which linguists can read. As at Knossos, at Pylos a final conflagration roasted an archive of Linear B tablets, over a thousand of them. Ventris’s decipherment of Linear B has unlocked the content of these documents in Mycenaean Greek. The work of palace scribes, they mainly detail day-to-day economic oversight, the commanding and redistributing of goods, and the management of manpower in the service of the palace. In so doing, the tablets reveal the Pylos establishment as the political centre of this south-western quadrant of the Peloponnese.

  They also mention a supreme official called the wa-na-ka. This is an archaic form of the Ancient Greek word anax, meaning a lord or master. So it turns out that king-like figures in Greece’s remote past had a historical reality outside the stories of classical Greek writers. More tantalizing is whether there was more than one wa-na-ka, each ruling his own territory, or a single wa-na-ka presiding over all the palace-centres of a Mycenaean super-state, as hinted at five centuries later in Homer’s poem, the Iliad. This presents Agamemnon of Mycenae as supreme leader of the Greeks, ‘master [anax] of men’.

  Some Mycenaean scribe seems to have created Linear B by adapting the linear script of Minoan Crete to his own language. Many of the signs are very similar. Archaeologists have found many other witnesses to close cultural contact between the Mycenaean mainland and Crete. A bird in the ‘Orpheus’ fresco from Pylos could easily have flown off a Minoan wall painting. There must have been a lively criss-crossing of the Aegean Sea.

  A startling discovery in Turkey now provides a glimpse of the risky journeys underpinning the Mycenaean way of life. In 1993, lecturing on a cruise along Turkey’s south-western coast, I passed a diving supp
ort vessel bobbing on deceptively placid seas near the tip of Cape Uluburun, 5 miles east of the holiday town of Kaş. This was the last-but-one season of a ten-year campaign by underwater archaeologists. They were laboriously exploring the wreck of an ancient trader that met a violent end while trying to round the headland sometime in the very early 1300s BC.

  The main cargo was bulk copper – a staggering 10 tons’ worth of ingots tidily arranged in rows across the hold. There was also a ton or so of tin, the other essential ingredient for bronze-making. Tests show that the copper almost certainly came from Cyprus – by then the main source of this metal in the eastern Mediterranean. A much longer journey must be envisaged for the tin, perhaps brought to the Mediterranean by donkey trains from remote Afghanistan.

  Other discoveries suggest a home port for the vessel in what is now southern Lebanon and Israel. Here archaeologists place a society of merchant seafarers whom they call ‘Syro-Canaanites’ and see as the Bronze-Age ancestors of the later Phoenicians. Finds of seemingly personal items of Mycenaean pottery and weapons indicate that Mycenaean Greeks were also on board the doomed ship – mercenaries, maybe, or emissaries. Luxury objects such as ostrich eggs, ivory and a golden scarab inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphics with the name of the beautiful Egyptian queen, Nefertiti (about 1340 BC), hint that this was no ordinary assortment of goods, but rather a gift from one ruler to another.

  Not that these were peaceful times. The world of the Mycenaean palaces grew out of an earlier society of warriors in Bronze Age Greece. In 2015 archaeologists at Pylos found the near-intact tomb of one of these fighters, a well-to-do male in his early thirties buried with a splendid bronze sword – the hilt was made of gilded ivory – and with a mirror and combs, accoutrements of a warring coxcomb, proud of his appearance.