24.1 The Minoans
This story appears in the Library, a Greek collection of stories from the second century BC.67 Behind the fog of this myth, we may be able to achieve a glimpse of a civilization which has left no other stories behind it.
Minos may well have been the name not just of one legendary ruler, but a line of kings who governed in Knossos and lent their name to Crete’s earliest civilization. The story of the Minotaur, with its exchange of cargo between cities, reflects the ongoing international sea trade carried on by the Minoan people. So do the remains of Second Palace goods found around the ancient world. An alabaster jar lid uncovered at Knossos is marked with the name of the third Hyksos king, and the Hyksos palace at Avaris has on its walls the remains of a fresco painted in the Minoan style. Contact with the eastern coast of the Mediterranean was regular; possibly the Minoans even traded as far over as Mesopotamia. Some of the pictorial representations (most notably on seals) of Gilgamesh and his fight with the Bull of Heaven—a story which begins to appear on clay tablets between 1800 and 1500 BC, right at the height of Minoan civilization—show Gilgamesh grappling with a partly human bull who wears a kind of wrestling belt. The monster has a bull’s body and man’s head, which is a reversal of the Minotaur’s deformity, but the resemblance between the two monsters suggests that Minoan and Mesopotamian sailors swapped stories in port.5
Although the organized Greek civilization from which Minos was theoretically compelling this yearly tribute is an anachronism (there were only scattered settlements on the peninsula this early), Minos’s ability to demand payment from abroad reflects the military power of Crete during the Second Palace Period. The Library says that Minos was “the first to obtain the dominion of the sea; he extended his rule over almost all the islands.” Minoan towns have been uncovered on a number of the nearby islands, including Melos, Kea, and the small unstable Thera. The towns served not only as trading stops, but as naval bases. The Greek historian Thucydides writes that Minos was the first ancient king to have a navy. “He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic Sea,” Thucydides says, “and ruled over the Cyclades [the Aegean islands to the north], into most of which he sent the first colonies, expelling the Carians [settlers from southwest Asia Minor] and appointing his own sons governors; and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure revenues for his own use.”6 According to Herodotus, the Carians remained on the islands but became Minos’s subjects, a pool of experienced sea-hands who would “man ships for him on demand.”7 The Minoan empire was built on water.
Around 1680 or so it reached the full extent of its power. Pirates had always been a problem in the Mediterranean—Thucydides explains that Knossos was originally built inland, away from the sea, “on account of the great prevalence of piracy”—but Minos’s navy put an end to piracy, at least in the sea around Crete. This new peace meant that the peoples on the islands and coast were able to “apply themselves more closely to the acquisition of wealth, and their life became more settled.”8 Trade flourished, new buildings went up, painting and sculpture reached a new level of sophistication.
But there is a lingering threat in the story of King Minos: the bull-monster beneath the palace. That malicious presence, just out of sight, is the visible sign of Poseidon’s ill will. It threatens not just the peoples who pay tribute to Minos, but Minos himself. It is an untamed and hungry power that literally undermines the foundation of his palace and demands constant sacrifice.
24.1. Bull-dancer. A Minoan bronze of an acrobat, leaping over the back of a bull. British Museum, London. Photo credit HIP/Art Resource, NY
The palace at Knossos was ornamented with frescoes: wall paintings created by laying bright colors made from carbon, yellow ochre, iron ore, and other minerals directly onto a damp layer of lime plaster. In these frescoes, sacred bulls lower their horns in threat while worshippers vault over the horns onto the bull’s back, and from there spring to the ground. The most famous bronze sculpture from the Knossos ruins preserves the same bull-dance, frozen at its most dangerous moment.
Presumably the worshippers who took part in this ritual were young, athletic, and ready to die. The story of the Minotaur may well preserve a very old form of human sacrifice in which the dedicated victims were not laid on an altar, but set loose in front of the bull. Excavation of the so-called Bull Courts, the central courts at Knossos where the bull-dancing apparently took place, show an entire network of doors, stairs, and corridors opening onto the courts from the surrounding buildings: a veritable labyrinth.9 There is another connection between the Minotaur story and the religious practices of Crete. The fourteen victims are eaten by the Minotaur; the sacrificial site uncovered at Knossos indicates some sort of ritual feasting on the dead.
What sort of divine anger required this kind of sacrifice?
In the later Greek version of the Minotaur story, Poseidon, the god of the sea, is also called Earthshaker, and the bull is his sacred animal. The island of Crete and the sea around it were constantly shaken by earthquakes and the destructive waves that followed. Only constant pleading to Earthshaker could stave off the threat that came from the sea.
SOMETIME AROUND 1628, the earthquakes around nearby Thera grew more frequent.68 The island was an active volcano, and more than one eruption had already taken place. But for some years, the island had been quiet enough for Thera’s only large town, Akrotiri, to grow large and prosperous.10
When the earthquakes first intensified, the inhabitants of Akrotiri rebuilt the walls that the earthquakes knocked down. As the tremors grew more severe, they began to flee. Excavations of the ruins have revealed no skeletons, and the city seems to have been emptied of precious items such as jewelry and silver.11
24.2 Thera Before and After
Shortly afterwards, the volcano at the center of the island began to spew out pumice. The pumice that coats the ruins appears to have crusted over, meaning that it was exposed to the air (before being coated by the ash of the final eruption) for some time—any amount of time from two months to as much as two years. The rumblings at Thera went on a long time while the nearby islands listened in trepidation. Two years is a long time to wait for a looming catastrophe; long enough to sacrifice in hopes that the disaster will go away.
And then the volcano literally turned the island inside out, hurling fifteen feet of ash over the city. Enormous boulders flew from the depths of the volcano and rained down with the ash like gargantuan hail.12 A gash opened in the side of the island, allowing the sea to pour into the crater left by the volcano. When the eruption finally succeeded, Thera was no longer a round island with a volcano at its center; it was a ring of land around a central inland sea, an enormous caldera.
This was the end of the Minoan town of Akrotiri, which would remain preserved under ash until it was excavated, beginning in the 1960s. It’s less clear how much damage this gigantic eruption had on the Minoans of Crete. For a little while after Thera’s explosion, the Minoan civilization continued as usual. Eventually, though, the population began to shrink; the houses grew shabby; trade trickled to a halt.
The decline may well have been related to the volcanic eruption.69 Indications on Thera itself suggest that the volcano erupted in late June or early July, just before the harvest.13 Ash fall, blown by the wind, missed the western end of Crete, but certainly reached the eastern half of the island, perhaps destroying a season’s worth of food. Traces of ash on the shores around Thera suggest that the eruption caused a tsunami that submerged nearby islands, and that may still have been over thirty feet high when it crashed against the shores of Crete, twenty-five minutes after the eruption.14 The huge cloud probably blocked the sun for some time. Electrical storms, heavy and violent thunderstorms, and sinking temperatures followed. For months, the sunsets would have been a deep blood red.
Even if the volcano were not directly responsible for the Minoan decline, all of these weird manifestations were likely to have had much the same effe
ct as the dropping of the Nile down in Egypt. Such portents showed that Poseidon was angry. The royal house was no longer pleasing the gods. Very likely the catastrophe had been merely the forerunner of more extreme divine displeasure, looming on the horizon. The Earthshaker was not to be trifled with; and he always lurked in the depths, ready to bring an end to fragile prosperity. It was best to get away from such fury as quickly as possible.70
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Harappan Disintegration
In India, from 1750 to 1575 BC, the Harappan cities crumble and northern nomads settle in the ruins
FAR EAST OF THE MEDITERRANEAN, the obsessively uniform Harappan cities faced a calamity of their own.
Sometime between 1750 and 1700, the people of Mohenjo-Daro began to flee their homes. Not all of them escaped. Excavation has revealed skeletons lying unburied in streets, an entire family trapped and killed in their home, their bodies left uninterred. Here and there, a house caught on fire and collapsed. Escaping inhabitants dropped their treasured items (tools for carrying on a livelihood, jewelry and silver) so that they could flee faster.1 North at Harappa, much the same scene unfolded. The evidence from the smaller Harappan sites is not clear, but without a doubt the Harappan civilization ceased to exist.
The Harappans were not brought down by hostile invasion. The ruins show no dropped weapons, no bodies wearing armor, no systematic destruction of buildings, and no signs of struggle around the citadel (which, after all, had been built for just such an occasion).2
The collapse of various buildings, along with the fires (which may have started when kitchen-fires were overturned), could have been caused by earthquake or flood. If by flood, the waters must have been sudden and unusually violent. Silt layers show that the Indus, like other rivers that ran through major ancient civilizations, flooded regularly and left fertile soil behind in a predictable pattern.3 The baked bricks of the citadels probably served as protection against unusually high waters. Only a wall-high wave could have caused the destruction found at the Harappan cities.
Hydrologist R. L. Raikes has suggested that a silt dam formed upstream from Harappa, stopped the flooding altogether for some time (thus reducing the fertility of the fields and possibly throwing the city into a minor famine), and then broke under the accumulated weight of water, sending enormous floods rushing down into the city. In fact, something like this happened in 1818, when a silt dam stopped up the Indus for almost two years, forming a block fifty miles long and fifty feet high.4 But silt traces at the two largest Harappan cities don’t prove a flood, one way or the other. In any case, even if a flood destroyed buildings throughout the cities, why weren’t they rebuilt?
We have to assume that some kind of natural disaster descended on a civilization that was already suffering from internal rot. Many of the skeletons show evidence of illness, the most common being severe anemia, probably caused by malnutrition.5 The banks of the Indus were not prone to salinization, but no field is immune to exhaustion; the growing populations undoubtedly required a greater and greater yield of grain. Those mud-brick buildings required plenty of small wood to use as fuel in the baking ovens. As the cities grew, the builders must have deforested larger and larger areas. Possibly the floods were simply a coup de grace given to an urban civilization already overextended. And once the cities had begun to disintegrate, the Harappan system was unable to turn the decay around. Perhaps that obsessive uniformity had so removed flexibility that, once driven out of their neat cities with the uniform bricks and familiar tools, they simply could not reorganize themselves from the ground up.
The cities were not entirely deserted. Some people remained, or returned, or wandered in from the countryside. The sketchy occupation above the Harappan layers shows crude pottery, little organization, and no attempt to rebuild or use the complicated drainage and sewer systems of the cities; far less sophistication than the Harappan. Archaeologists call this the post-Harappan, or Jhukar, culture,6 after a village where the crude pottery was first made. But there is no organized culture about it. The “Jhukar culture” is, more accurately, the people who lived in the Harappan remains once the Harappan civilization had ended.
INVADERS DID COME down into India from the north, but they did not arrive until sometime between 1575 and 1500. They were nomads who had been wandering east of Elam and north of the mountains on India’s western corner (now called the Hindu Kush Mountains). Eventually they made their way through the passes, down into the valleys formed by the upper branches of the Indus. Their own literature—not written down until a thousand years later—calls their earliest home in India the “Land of the Seven Rivers,” which probably means that they first lived in the Punjab: the upper branches of the Indus, where it divided into six branches flowing into the one main river (in the millennia since, one of these branches, the Sarasvati, has dried up).7
25.1 Newcomers to India
Their civilization was, at first, barely a civilization at all. They were accustomed to living in roving bands headed up by warleaders. So they did not build; they did not write; they had, so far as we know, no art; their language had no agricultural words such as “plough” or “threshing floor.”
What they could do was fight. They are most distinguished by their weapons: not only horses, but also chariots with spoked wheels, bronze axes, and longbows with range unlike anything the Harappan people had used.8 As with the Hyksos of Egypt, who also came from desert plains, these battle innovations had helped them plow a path through enemies before them.
However, they did not immediately set out to conquer the Indus valley. They lived among the Seven Rivers for at least a century before moving farther south and east. By the time they made their way down to the Harappan cities, the Harappan civilization had already tottered and fallen. Although they probably drove out the occasional band of squatters, this was the extent of their conquest. They took advantage of deserted buildings that they found, since they had none of their own (their language also lacked any word for “mortar”), and settled in. The sophisticated and highly organized Harappan civilization had been replaced by roving tribes with less culture, less technology, and no experience in running a city—but infinitely more experience in adapting to strange surroundings.
Later, the descendants of these invaders referred to themselves as arya, an adjective which has been given at least seven different English translations, ranging from “respectable” to the more ominous “pure.”719 At its beginning, the Aryan civilization was anything but pure. Even though the citizens of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro had lost the bureaucratic structure that held the Harappan state together, they were hardly removed en masse from northern India, like a massive alien abduction. They were scattered, but they survived. They mingled with the arriving Aryans, lent them the words for “plough” and “threshing floor” and “mortar,” and presumably taught the ex-nomads how to use these civilized tools. The Aryan culture that spread across the north was woven through with threads from the world of the disappeared Harappans.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Rise of the Hittites
Between 1790 and 1560 BC, the Hittites build an empire in Asia Minor, while Kassites take over in Babylon
BY THE TIME SAMSUILUNA DIED, around 1712, the Babylonian empire of his father Hammurabi (“Old Babylonia”) had lost most of its holdings to the south and east. Elam had revolted. The ancient power centers of Sumer had mostly been destroyed and lay almost deserted. The land was desolate and infertile; an upstart line of kings about which absolutely nothing is known, the so-called Sealand Dynasty, claimed to rule the wasteland. The king seated at Babylon could still wield his power over land to the north and to the west, but only as far over as Mari. Past Mari, the king of Aleppo kept his independence.
After Samsuiluna, a succession of unremarkable kings claimed the throne of Babylon. Very little is known of them. The most detailed document to survive from the Babylonian court, in the hundred years after Samsuiluna, is an account of the exact behavio
r of the planet Venus as it rose and set.
The decline of one power coincided with the strengthening of another. Back in the days when Semites were wandering down into Mesopotamia and over into Canaan, another people with a different kind of language lived farther north, between the Caspian and Black Seas. Some of these northern peoples made their way east and became the ancestors of those Aryans who eventually travelled down into India. But others had gone west, into Asia Minor, and settled in a series of villages along the coast.
By around 2300, this particular Indo-European tribe had spread up through the entire western side of the peninsula and along the Halys river.72 They carried on a healthy trade with islands to the west and also with the peoples to the east, especially with the city of Assur; for this reason the merchants of Assur built their trading posts here.
While Hammurabi was storming through Mesopotamia, uniting it by force, the villages of the Indo-Europeans in Asia Minor were coalescing into small kingdoms under various warleaders. We don’t know who any of them were, so it’s impossible to be any more vivid about this process. All we know is that the Egyptians had heard of these kingdoms, and knew them to be a single people. The Egyptians called them Ht, a designation taken from the peoples’ own name for their homeland: Hatti, the territory of the Hittites.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 20