Europe: A History (22 page)

Map 5.
The Ancient Aegean: 2nd Millennium
BC

The ethnic identity of the Minoans is the subject of considerable controversy. The old assumption that they were Hellenes is no longer widely accepted. The Linear A script, which might unlock the language of the earlier periods, has not been deciphered; whilst Linear B, which was definitively identified as Greek in 1952, clearly belongs only to the final phase. Arthur Evans was convinced not only of a strong Egyptian influence on Crete but also of the possibility of Egyptian colonization. ‘It may well be asked whether, in the times… that marked the triumph
of the dynastic element in the Nile Valley, some part of the older population … may not have made an actual settlement on the soil of Crete.’
²²
However, in the course of the second millennium Crete seems to have been invaded by several waves of migrants. It can reasonably be supposed that the hellenization of the island began with one of the later waves some time after the ‘great catastrophes’.

Another possibility is that the Minoans of the middle period were Hittites from Asia Minor. The Hittites were Indo-Europeans, and spoke a language called Kanesian. Their great confederation was centred on what is now Hattusas in Anatolia, and mounted a major challenge both to Mesopotamia and to Egypt. In the fourteenth century
BC
their greatest ruler, Suppiluliumash or Shubbiluliuma (c.1380–1347
BC),
extended his sway as far as Jerusalem. In 1269
BC
they entered a treaty of alliance with Egypt. (The bilingual text of the tablet recording this event, the oldest diplomatic document in existence, is now displayed in the foyer of the United Nations Building in New York.) In 1256
BC
the Hittite King Khattushilish III travelled to Egypt to attend the wedding of his daughter with the Pharaoh Rameses II. So, if Hittite influence had been spread so widely over the Middle East, there is every likelihood that it could also have been projected from the mainland to Crete. More specifically, the discovery of a bull cult at the Hittite centre of Çatal Huyuk in Anatolia suggests a connection of much greater intimacy. But nothing is certain.

According to later Greek legend, Crete was the birthplace both of Zeus and of the dreaded Minotaur. Zeus, after abducting Europa, had simply brought her to his island home. A cave on Mount Ida is still shown to tourists as the site of his birth. The Minotaur, on the other hand, was the product of a stranger passion. Pasiphaë, the queen of Minos, was said to have taken a liking to a sacrificial bull presented by the sea-god, Poseidon, and, with the assistance of Daedalus, the architect of Cnossos, had succeeded in having intercourse with it. For this purpose, Daedalus devised a hollow wooden cow, within which the intrepid queen had presumably struck a suitable pose. The resultant offspring was the monstrous Minotaur—half-man, half-beast,
Vinfamia di Creti
. Whereupon Daedalus was ordered to devise a labyrinth in which to keep it.

At that point, the plot thickened with the arrival of Theseus, hero of Athens. Theseus’ obsession with killing the Minotaur may well be explained by the fact that he was the child of yet another mother who had dallied with a bull. At all events, having joined the annual transport of seven boys and seven maidens which Athens paid to Crete as tribute, he managed to reach Cnossos; and, mastering the labyrinth by means of a ball of thread provided by Ariadne, Pasiphaë’s daughter, he slew the Minotaur and escaped. He then fled with Ariadne to Naxos, where he deserted her. By another lamentable lapse, on approaching Athens he forgot to give the agreed signal of success, which was to change the colour of his sail from black to white. His despairing father, Aegeus, threw himself into the sea, which was henceforth named after him. These stories clearly date from an era when Crete was the great power, and the Greek communities of the mainland were dependent tributaries.

Daedalus is also credited by legend with mankind’s maiden flight. Barred by Minos from leaving Crete, he fashioned two pairs of wings from wax and feathers and, in the company of his son Icarus, soared from the slopes of Mount Ida. Icarus flew too close to the sun, and plunged to his death. But Daedalus flew on to complete his escape to the mainland. ‘Minos may own everything,’ wrote Ovid, ‘but not the air’
(Omnia possideat, non possidet aera Minos)
.

Mount Ida stands 8,000 ft (2,434 m) above the sea, and one can well imagine how the thermal currents would have carried those human birds to a height where the whole of Aegean civilization was laid out like a map beneath them. Crete itself, a rocky strip some 130 miles in length, faced south to the shore of Africa and north across the Aegean. Its dominion stretched to Sicily in the west and to Cyprus in the east. To the north-west lay the Peloponnese, dominated by the city of Mycenae with its royal ‘beehive’ tombs, and its Lion Gate. To the north-east, in the angle of Asia Minor, stood the ancient city of Troy. In the centre lay the scattered islands of the Cydades, Crete’s first colonies. Nearest of all, set like a jet-black diamond in the deep blue sea, beautiful and ominous, rose the perfect cone of the island of Thera.

It is doubtful that the Minoans knew much about the lands and peoples beyond the range of their ships. They knew North Africa, of course, especially Egypt, with which they traded: Cretan envoys are depicted on the temple walls at Thebes. Cnossos at the height of its magnificence in Late Minoan II coincided with the close of the 18th Dynasty of Aminhotep III, and hence with the accession of Tutankhamun. The Minoans knew the cities of the Levant—Sidon, Tyre, and Jericho—which were already ancient, and through them the countries of the Near East. In the seventeenth century
BC
the Hebrews were still kept captive in Egypt. The Aryans had recently migrated from Persia to India. The Babylonians ruled over the Land of the Two Rivers, united by Hammurabi the Lawgiver. Hammurabi’s Code, based on the principle of ‘an eye for an eye, a. tooth for a tooth’, was the civilizational high point of the age. The Assyrians had recently become the vassals of Babylon. The Hittites, having formed the strongest state in western Asia, were starting to press into Palestine. (See Appendix III, p. 1216.)

The Minoans may well have had dealings with the pre-Latin peoples of Italy. There was no obstacle to their ships cruising into the western Mediterranean. They could also have met the Bell-Beaker People and the Megalith-Builders of Malta and southern Spain, and have sailed into the Black Sea, where they could have encountered the Tripolye People. The latter could have acted as middlemen on the last, southern leg of the trade routes which led from the dominant Unëtice and Tumulus peoples of the interior. The prime commodity was copper, its main source the mines of the Dolomites and the Carpathians.

Beyond that, the veil of the Minoans’ direct knowledge would have been firmly drawn. Whilst they basked in the Bronze Age, the northern lands lingered in the later stages of the neolithic. The westward march of the Indo-Europeans had undoubtedly begun. It is sometimes associated with the advent of a male-dominated warrior culture, which subdued both its peaceable predecessors and its
own women. The advance guard of the Celts was already on station in central Europe. The Germanic, Baltic, and Slavonic tribes rested somewhere in the rear. The first northern trappers and merchants from beyond the ‘frontier’ may well have reached the Aegean. Both amber and jade had found their way to Crete.

The eruption of Thera (Santorini) was one of the greatest events of European prehistory. In one crack of doom, like that at Krakatoa in modern times, 30 cubic kilometres of rock, fire, and sulphuric acid were blown twenty miles into the stratosphere. At a distance of only one hundred miles, the watchers at Cnossos could not have failed to see the plume and the flashes, and then the pillar of fiery ash. With nine minutes’ delay they would have heard the boom, the rumbles, and the thuds. They would have seen the sea recede as it rushed to fill the gash in the seabed, only to recover with the dispatch of a mighty tidal wave that swamped the Cretan shore under a hundred feet of brine.

High above Cnossos, on the northern slopes of Mount Juktas, the priests of the mountain shrine busied themselves with the human sacrifice which the disaster demanded. On this occasion, the everyday offerings of fruit, seeds, or wine, or even the slaughter of a prime bull, would not suffice. In the dark central chamber of the temple, one man prepared a blood-bucket adorned with the figure of a bull in white relief. At the inner end of the western chamber, a young woman lay face down, legs apart. On a low table, a young man lay with his feet bound—on his chest a bronze-bladed knife engraved with a boar’s head. Beside him stood a powerful man of status, who wore a precious iron ring and an agate sealstone engraved with the figure of a god punting a boat. But the earthquake triggered by the eruption of Thera struck first. The temple roof collapsed. The sacrifice was never completed. The bodies of the participants remained where they lay, to be discovered three and a half millennia later.
²³

The dating of Thera’s eruption has largely been achieved by dendrochronology. In 1628
BC
the rings of trees as far apart as the bristle-cone pines of California and the bog oaks of Ireland entered a period of stunted growth. Temperatures evidently plummeted throughout the northern hemisphere, probably in response to the Veil effect’ of high-floating volcanic dust. Confirmation of a world-wide disaster in the period 1645
BC,
±
²⁰
years, comes from sulphuric acid deposits in the relevant ice-layers in Greenland. Recent carbon-dating at Thera itself also suggests an eruption date at least a century earlier than the original estimate of 1500
BC.
Scientific doubts remain, of course; but 1628
BC
is clearly ‘the best working hypothesis’.
²⁴

The palace at Cnossos escaped the later fate of Pompeii and Herculaneum. A westerly wind happened to be blowing on the day of the eruption, and the heaviest deposits of ash fell on the coast of Asia Minor. Even so, Cnossos was rocked by the quake that felled walls and pillars; and one has to assume that damage to the vital Minoan navy was extensive, if not total. In the space of a few hours the cone of Thera was reduced to a smouldering ring of black basalt cliffs round an eerie, sulphurous lagoon. Like the stump of rock in the centre of that lagoon, Crete must have been left marooned at the centre of a blasted empire.

Archaeological layering on eastern Crete shows that a clear interval of time separated the Thera eruption from a subsequent, and still unexplained, disaster which left the palace of Cnossos in ruins, with the clay tablets baked so hard by fire that they can still be read today. Thera did not destroy Cnossos, as was once proposed. But it certainly delivered the first of the blows which spelled the end of Minoan civilization. Material destruction and population loss must have been enormous, the disruption of trade crippling. A weakened Crete was left open to the mercy of Dorian warriors, and in due course was thoroughly hellenized.

The violent end of Europe’s first civilization inevitably prompts thoughts about the rise and fall of civilizations in general. One wonders whether the Minoan survivors would have blamed their misfortunes on their own shortcomings. One wonders whether the Catastrophe Theory that applies to various branches of the physical sciences can equally be applied to the long-term patterns of human affairs. One wonders whether the mathematical Theory of Chaos can somehow explain why long, tranquil periods of growth and development can be suddenly interrupted by intervals of confusion and disorder. Is it conceivable that the eruption of Thera was provoked by the fluttering wings of some prehistoric butterfly?

Archaeologists and prehistorians think in large spans of time. For them, the prehistoric, Bronze Age civilization which came to an end with Cnossos and Mycenae was but the first of three great cycles of European history. The second cycle coincided with the classical world of Greece and Rome. The third cycle, which began with the ‘systems collapse’ at the end of the Roman Empire, coincides with the rise of modern Europe. It is still with us.

Almost 3,500 years have passed since the destruction of Cnossos. In that time the face of Europe has been transformed many times over. Just as Greece succeeded to the glory that was Crete, so Rome was built on Greek foundations, and ‘Europe’ on the relics of Rome. Vigorous youth, confident maturity, and impotent age all seem to be encoded into the history of political and cultural communities as they are in the lives of individuals. Europe has no shortage of successors to the fate of Crete—of states and nations that once were strong and now are weak. Europe itself, which once was strong, is now weaker. The nuclear explosion at Chernobyl in April 1986 alerted people to the possibility of a continental disaster of Theran proportions; whilst in 1989 the explosive liberation of the nations of Eastern Europe inspired hopes of greater peace and unity. The watchers of late European III worry whether their fate will be one of terminal decline, of invasion by some new barbarians, or perhaps of catastrophic destruction. Or perhaps they will live to see the last golden summer of Late European IV.