Cretan art confirms this impression. It is certainly the most original in the eastern Mediterranean, and the one that speaks to us most directly in its fantasy, its appetite for life, its pursuit of happiness, and the liberties it takes with form and colour in the interests of expressiveness. During the great age of Cretan art – the second palace period – before the Mycenaean age which froze all this free expression, naturalism triumphed. Plants and animals were painted everywhere, on walls and vases: here a spike of grass, there a bunch of crocuses or irises, a spray of lilies against the ochre background of a vase, or the Pompeian red of a wall-painting; reeds arranged in a continuous almost abstract design, a branch of flowering olive, an octopus with tangled arms, dolphins and starfish, a blue flying fish, a circle of huge dragon-flies – all these were used as themes, but they are not treated with the botanical accuracy of, say, Diirer’s flower and herb paintings. They are the unreal decor of a fantasy world, where a blue monkey picks crocuses, a blue bird perches on red, yellow or blue rocks, striped with quartz, as wild roses flower all round; a wild cat lurks in the ivy in wait for an unsuspecting bird; a green horse pulls a chariot in which two young goddesses sit smiling. Frescoes and pottery all lent themselves to this inventive fantasy. It is remarkable to find the same plant or marine motifs handled in a thousand different ways on so many vases turned out by the potter’s wheel and exported by the hundred – as if the artists wanted to relive the pleasure of creation every time.
The one area where the Cretans seem to have been ill at ease was sculpture, perhaps because it leaves less to the imagination. Their ceramic statuettes are often conventional and stiff. Some of their beautiful objects are nevertheless unforgettable: the lithe form of an acrobat, made of ivory, caught in mid-leap; several heads of bulls; a dark brown leopard carved in schist decorating an ornamental axe in Mallia. Even more remarkable are the reliefs carved on stone vases and rhytons, the countless seals made of gold, amethyst, rock crystal, agate, cornelian and ivory; and the extraordinary jewels.
Cretan art does indeed seem hard to explain: it contains borrowings of every kind, and at the same time displays all-round originality. Perhaps this is something common to island cultures. Cyprus with its extraordinary pottery from the first millennium BC, and Sardinia with its strange little bronzes from the same time, also raise the question of the uniqueness of islands. They are extreme micro-universes, wide open to the outside world, vulnerable to invasions of people, technology and even fashion – yet in the intervals between such episodes they may be quite cut off, and their trade more sporadic and less regular than elsewhere. Every foreign borrowing develops in an island as if in a laboratory, exaggerating features which become very different from the original model. This is true of other things besides art of course.
A cosmopolitan superstructure
Yet Crete in the second millennium BC, along with the rest of the Aegean under its influence, was an integral part of the Middle East in a way that Greece never would be, not even in the so-called Oriental period or in the heady days of Hellenistic influence in the east. All the Middle Eastern civilizations of this period, despite some clashes, stood on an equal footing, with open access from one to another. There was no imbalance: trade went in both directions, with mutual exchange. Across the whole area covered by these trading links, there existed a curious kind of community, a vast cultural superstructure, connecting the various regions. W. S. Smith is right to see this as the essential feature of the bronze age. The operative unit was the Middle Eastern region as a whole, rather than any single sector, not even Crete at the height of its brilliance or Egypt in the eighteenth dynasty. And indeed, if one were to look for the most dynamic element in this cultural blossoming, one would probably choose the Ugarit-Byblos axis in Syria. As a long-established hub of communications, it lay at the heart of this unified area, this confluence of contacts: from Knossos to Susa and from Mycenae to Elephantine, the history of Middle Eastern civilization in its fully developed state is therefore really a single story.
For such freedom of communication to exist, a number of conditions had to be fulfilled: above all, as noted earlier, a favourable economic climate, the presence of communities that were both prosperous and acquisitive, and an efficient network of international exchange. Lastly, encouraged by the favourable context, there was a new spirit of curiosity, quickly verging on an obsession with everything that was foreign: it influenced fashion and technology, art, architecture and even the first steps towards diplomacy. An international context was beginning to appear and, in this perspective, detailed archaeological research to determine the origins and the incidence of a given style of ornament, type of pottery, architectural detail or technique of fresco painting or goldsmithing, becomes quite fascinating – especially if one is not too obsessed with that perennial question, always the same in these studies of influence: ‘which came first?’ In relation to the overall history of the Mediterranean, this question is not very important. What really matters is that an extraordinary capacity for comparatively rapid cultural diffusion had emerged in a world where shipping was still an adventure.
Take Mallia for instance, on the north coast of Crete, one of the oldest palaces on the island, restored from time to time, but never completely rebuilt like Knossos or Phaistos. It is the only one which can give us an approximate idea of the first Cretan palaces dating from early in the second millennium. When excavations carried out at Mari on the Euphrates uncovered the marvellous Mesopotamian palace of Zimri Lim, extending over several acres, with a labyrinth of buildings around the great open courtyard, it was natural to think that this famous edifice – which people came from miles around to visit during the reign of Hammurabi (eighteenth century BC) – had served as a model for the Cretan palaces. It is older than they are and the overall plan, as revealed by aerial photographs, looks very similar to that of Mallia. The same functional demands are after all likely to produce the same kind of architecture. And we also know, from tablets preserved at Mari, that Cretan merchants who had a colony in Ugarit were engaged in active trade with the powerful city of Mari, which had trade links as far south as the Persian Gulf. If there could be commercial contacts, why not cultural ones? But then in 1954-9, excavations by a British team in Beyce Sultan on the Meander in Anatolia, turned up another palace, also built round a central courtyard. This one was smaller, and less of a ‘labyrinth’, but had several features in common with the palace at Mallia: colonnades and pillars which are entirely absent from Mari. This complicates the picture of cultural cross-fertilization, since the taste for columns may be from Egypt, and we know that there were links between Egypt and Anatolia. Yet in Mallia, a curious hypostyle room unequivocally points to direct Egyptian influence. Well, why not? After all, an Egyptian statue, probably dating from the nineteenth century BC, has been found in Knossos, and a Minoan vase has been found at Abydos in Egypt among Egyptian objects from the same period. I have no intention of joining in this debate among specialists, and will simply conclude that Mesopotamia, Crete, Anatolia, Syria and Egypt all shared certain architectural features during the second millennium BC. Even the bathhouses with tiled walls and drains, which were once thought to be a Cretan invention, have been found at Mari.
And that is not all. The Cretan frescoes which only appear rather late on, in the second palace period (sixteenth century BC), look as if they could have been inspired by the frescoes which the last king of Mari had had painted for the Zimri Lim palace, before the conquest of the city by Hammurabi in 1760. The techniques of moistening are the same, and the colours are very similar, no doubt because they were obtained by crushing the same stones, lapis lazuli for instance for the brilliant blues which were still beloved of the Etruscans centuries later. The themes are similar too: sacrificial processions, ritual scenes. But the religious inspiration, as already noted, is very different: in Mari a hieratic and entirely Mesopotamian spirit inspires the ‘investiture’ scene. Yet on the same panel, the Semitic fantasy which had already en
livened the severity of the Sumerian decoration, in the time of Akkad, is given full rein: it shows two trees, one a date-palm being climbed by two men (probably for the ceremony of fertilizing the flowers), the other a make-believe tree – its tall trunk is crowned with a bouquet of flowers like Egyptian papyrus. Between them flies a blue bird. That blue bird alone, flying between the two green trees, seems to be a link joining Mari and Crete.
But yet again, the current could have flowed either way. Around the great picture of the king’s investiture at Mari runs a border of regular spirals. It is usually assumed that the spiral, the image of the waves in a stormy sea, is an Aegean design, although some pre-dynastic pottery provides early examples of this motif. But does it matter what was the origin of a fairly common design feature? It is more interesting to chart the progress of the spiral, which turns up all over the place in the Aegean in the third millennium: it is found on the ‘frying pans’ of Syros, on handsome stone jars in Crete, and on jewels in Troy II (Priam’s treasure, as Schliemann called it). From about 2000 it turns up simultaneously in the Mari frescoes, on the ceilings of Egyptian tombs and palaces, and decorating the fantastic animals of the fine polychrome pottery known as ‘Cappadocian’, made at Kanesh (Kultepe) at a time when the pre-Hittite town was home to a colony of Assyrian merchants. The spiral is found on Egyptian seals and jewellery from the twelfth dynasty, on ceramics in Crete and other islands in the Aegean, on Cyprus porcelain, on the tombs with tholoi in Boeotia, and even in the spiral curls in the beard of a god (or prince) at Mari– something which might seem quite natural of course, but their perfect geometrical regularity is surprising. The god of war on the doors of the Hittite palace of Bogaskoy (sixteenth century b c) even has a sort of loin-cloth covered in spirals.
Crete inspires Egypt
This detail, insignificant in itself, is a timely reminder that cultural exchanges could proceed by numerous modest and unexpected paths. Thus, arguing from the evidence of printed or embroidered fabrics, from figures on vases and cylinders, Egyptian scarab amulets, or from travellers’ tales (even apocryphal), W. S. Smith imagined that the Cretans travelling to Byblos as early as the twentieth century BC must have gone on to Egypt, in the wake of the Canaanite merchants of the town, and thus could have visited the Middle Kingdom tombs carved in the rock – after all, the tombs had always been open to public view. So Egyptian painting might have contributed as much as Mari painting did to the art of the Cretan fresco. But the opposite is even more convincing: Minoan naturalism could certainly have provoked the curiosity of artists on the Nile, leading them to imitate it, and it also influenced Syria, especially the north. This is a good example of cultural transmission.
But it poses a difficult question about chronology. It was particularly in the sixteenth and then the fifteenth century that the Cretan palaces were decorated with frescoes, but it was only in the fourteenth century, after Crete had been overcome by the Mycenaeans, that Egypt saw the flowering of the so-called Amarna style, which is too close to the Minoan for there to be any doubt that it was connected. And it was in the fourteenth century too that in Mittani in Syria seals were produced decorated with the familiar lithe and long-haired silhouettes of young Cretans and the bull-fighting motifs which are also found at Kahun in Egypt.
There are two possible explanations, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is the presence of migrant labour: skilled Cretan craftsmen might certainly have chosen, after the capture of their homeland, to flee to northern Syria, which they knew well, or to the prosperous and sophisticated Egypt of the eighteenth dynasty, where there was a ready demand for skilled labour. The other explanation, subtly developed by W. S. Smith, has the advantage of providing a more detailed story of how the Cretan style found ways and means of infiltrating the resistant traditions of the formal Egyptian style by the sixteenth century.
In Egypt as in Mesopotamia (think of the handsome vase of Warka or the ‘standard frieze’ at Ur of the Chaldees), there was a very ancient practice of representing a scene or decorating a painted vase in superimposed strips (like a strip cartoon). The onagers in Ur, harnessed to a chariot of war, appear in the frieze on three levels: but rather like a sequence of stills from a film, it is really always the same onager (a kind of donkey), his gentle trot gradually turning into an all-out gallop. Similarly in Egyptian reliefs, the corn is cut, loaded on to the back of donkeys, carried to silos and unloaded: the characters follow each other through the horizontal strips which regularly divide up the wall, with no big picture displaying each element within an overall composition. The actors in the scene are linked conceptually, not spatially. Movement is therefore sacrificed. The background or the landscape disappears, and is evoked only symbolically: an ear of corn or a flower positioned over a bull denotes a cornfield or a meadow on a Mesopotamian vase; in Egypt, a few lotus blossoms, a fishing scene and some explanatory hieroglyphs are enough to indicate an estate in the Delta, the property of the departed. In the eastern Mediterranean, only the Aegean artists compose pictures in the sense we would understand the term: the flowers or scrolls, often asymmetrical, on a vase from Camares; the Cretan dancers or Mycenaean warriors randomly placed on the oval setting of a gold ring, or the blue bird of Knossos in a rocky landscape: all these freely occupy the space recreated by the artist.
Egypt went on being broadly faithful to its traditional strip-cartoon compositions until Roman times, that is for about three millennia. But there were a few interruptions which therefore take on some significance. At the end of the sixteenth century BC, in the time of Tutmosis I, a period when foreign fashions were very popular, Egyptian art was tempted by a new sense of movement. This was the first temptation. Animals in flight from a hunter – undoubtedly inspired by the ‘flying gallop’ dear to the Cretans and Mycenaeans – occupy thewhole space of a picture, this time without any horizontal divisions. Or sometimes the dividing lines start to undulate or move apart to depict a hill or a feature of relief. Cretan influence can be detected too in a more impressionistic use of colour: a drawing is obscured by a patch of colour, lines become blurred, a penchant for curves makes a skirt swirl or a banner flap in the wind.
In the last decades of the century – in the time of Amenophis III, who collected plants during his Syrian campaigns and had them carved on the walls of his tomb at Karnak and painted on the walls of his palace – another decorative feature from the Aegean caught the fancy of the Egyptians, the art of flower painting. During the reign of Amenophis’s son Akhenaten, who sidelined all the ancient gods and worshipped only one, the sun god, the tradition of tomb painting changed radically along with everything else. The prince built from scratch a new capital city, Tell el-Amarna. In this revolutionary climate, the new style triumphed: it combined movement – birds on the wing, lions or greyhounds chasing a gazelle – with plants, flowers, insects, fish, all handled with the freedom and naturalism of the Cretans. The ‘green room’ in the northern palace at Amarna, with its painted thickets of papyrus, was nothing like the countless marshland scenes which were previously a favourite subject of Egyptian painters. The new style invaded not only painting but porcelain, painted and carved furniture, and caskets. It was copied elsewhere: a porcelain rhyton found in Cyprus might have been manufactured in Amarna, give or take a few details.
Is it so surprising then that the eclectic art par excellence, in an age of eclecticism, should have been the Syrian art of Byblos and Ugarit? Its luxury products – ivories, bowls made of gold or chased silver, jewels, multi-coloured pottery – were made for export to foreign places. This was the beginning of an ‘international art’, conscious of differences in style and playing on them, shamelessly borrowing from every kind of source simultaneously. It was produced for a foreign clientele who had to be charmed into buying.
The universalism of Amarna
One could easily prolong this review of the cultural exchanges and influences of the second millennium, especially if one wanted to do justice to the spread of plants, of vines and
olives in particular, or of technologies like glassblowing, pottery and enamelling; or even to the spread of medical remedies, if we are to judge by the Egyptian doctor who is depicted in a Theban painting at the bedside of a Syrian prince.
But in those far-off times, the essential language of civilization was clearly that of religion. Mesopotamian and Hittite mythology, the poems of Ugarit would yield many examples of strange hybrids. Gods and myths travelled throughout the Middle East, along with the most everyday cultural goods. The example of the Hittite pantheon, in which three or four religious traditions came together, is perhaps too good to be true. We might look instead at the curious poem in which the messengers of the gods of Ugarit fly to Crete to bring back the god of the Cretan artisans, their patron saint so to speak, Kothar Wa-Khasis: he is then commanded to build the Palace of Baal. It would also be easy, but perhaps a little repetitive, to trace the travels from place to place, through all their metamorphoses and name-changes, of the gods of the weather, thunder and the heavens.
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World Page 20