Crete (8 page)

The theory I like most but believe least is that the labyrinth refers to Cretan dancing patterns. At the close of Book Eighteen of
The Iliad,
Homer describes a Cretan folk dance whose weaving motions make maze-like patterns that form and dissolve. Here it is in Robert Fitzgerald's translation:

Independently of the theories, the ancient myths have remained. The palace of Knossos was the heart of Bronze Age Crete; at the heart of the palace was the labyrinth; and at the heart of the labyrinth was the monstrous Minotaur. Here the hero Theseus came, here the king's daughter Ariadne fell in love with him and gave him the ball of twine which helped him to find his way out after slaying the monster, here Daedalus the master artificer made the wings for himself and his son Ikarus so that they could escape from the maze. Ikarus, it will be remembered, flew so near the sun, the wax that bound his feathers melted and he plunged into the sea. The island in the Sporades where his body was washed up is named after him, Ikaria. A real island, a mythic punishment for human rashness …

The excavation of Knossos by the great British archaeologist Arthur Evans has itself by now passed into the zone of myth—at least, it has assumed that blend of fact and legend somehow characteristically Cretan. What led him to it seems to have been an accident of his own physical constitution more than anything else. Joan Evans, in her biography of him, tells us that he was extremely shortsighted. If he held things very close to his eyes he could see them in the most amazing detail, but at any farther distance everything was blurred. Not much of a blessing in general terms, but it enabled Evans to make out with phenomenal exactitude the hieroglyphics on the bead seals—an earlier form of signet ring—that he came across in various parts of the eastern Mediterranean. The Athenian dealers told him that most of these came from Crete. And it was in fact in Crete that he found them again. He could not decipher the signs, but he recognized affinities with Egyptian and Mesopotamian hieroglyphics. They brought him to the conviction, one which changed the whole course of his life, that on this island there had once existed a highly developed civilization, the remains of which still lay under the ground.

It is not given to many men, proceeding almost single-handed, acting on a solitary conviction and guided by a mixture of deduction and intuition, to demonstrate to the world the existence of a hitherto totally unsuspected civilization. It was given to Evans.

In March 1899 he recruited Cretan workmen and began digging into the mound of Kephala at Knossos. He was at first looking for further examples of the hieroglyphics he had found on the seal stones. He was never to succeed in deciphering these, but in a matter of days he realized that much more than hieroglyphics was involved in the enterprise. He was in the process of uncovering the remains of a palace complex vast in its extent, showing evidence of engineering and architectural techniques so advanced that they could only have belonged to a highly developed society. It was still commonly believed at the time that European civilization began with the Greeks, somewhere about the year 700
B.C.
Evens realized he was being given the opportunity to supply a gap of 1,500 years in Europe's knowledge of its own past.

Amazing things were unearthed at Knossos in these last months of the nineteenth century. An early find was a cup-bearer fresco, discovered in two pieces, the first representation ever brought to light of a young man of the prehistoric Cretan Bronze Age, the society that Evans was to call Minoan. Day by day the ground plan of the palace was uncovered: porticos, bathhouses, courtyards, stairways, the throne room with the throne of King Minos still in its original place. But perhaps the most remarkable find of all was the remains of a fresco showing a young man somersaulting, with incredible hardihood and acrobatic skill, over the back of a charging bull, and a girl standing with arms outstretched as if to catch him as he lands. In the months that followed they encountered this theme of bull vaulting again and again. The meaning still eludes us—at least it is still argued about, which comes to the same thing. Popular sport? Gladiatorial contest? Religious practice based on the worship of the bull? Or are the stories of human sacrifice true after all? Was one of these bull leapers the hero Theseus, as we find related in Mary Renault's novel
The Bull from the Sea?

Visiting Knossos by car these days confronts one with a different kind of puzzle—and yet another example of Cretan enterprise. Which is the official parking lot? On the last half mile or so of the road that leads to the site, we counted seven at least, competing for custom. The official one was free, the others were not, though they all had large and prominent and closely similar signs proclaiming their identity as the true Knossos CarPark. Only later, when we had been maneuvered into one of the cramped and rutted unofficial parks and paid for our ticket, did we both, simultaneously, realize the difference: The official parking lot was the one with the least conspicuous sign, and it had no person at the roadside in an official-looking cap waving and smiling and guiding you in.

To our dismay the site itself was swarming with visitors, many in large groups brought by tour buses, conducted by cheerfully positive guides who give out as established fact what must surely, after so long and on such sketchy evidence, be matters of speculation. “This was the queen's bedchamber, and this was her dressing room, where the ladies-in-waiting attended on her….”

We clamber to identify the rooms, understand the layout of this vast place, more like a town than a single building, where monarchs and priests and artisans and slaves lived nearly four thousand years ago. A longish line of people are waiting for their turn to view the throne room, one of the most celebrated sights of Knossos. After ten minutes or so of gradual forward movement we reach the cagelike bars which, separate the anteroom from the throne room. We peer through the bars, straining to make out details in the dim interior: the pale, streaky-looking gypsum throne of Minos on the right, still standing on the spot where it was found, flanked by copies of the original frescoes of crouching griffins; the sunken bath, perhaps for ritual cleansing—Minos, it seems, was both priest and king; a sort of recess beyond, perhaps serving as a shrine, or perhaps … But now there sounds the voice of the latter-day priestess, guardian of the sacred precinct, who is keeping an eye on things from her bench in the anteroom: “Move along, please! Don't stay too long at the viewing point!”

We have been allowed approximately thirty seconds. Shuffling forward again, we get trapped in a corner, surrounded by seemingly enormous Scandinavians, in our ears the loud and confident voices of various guides. Not panic, perhaps, but feelings of oppression certainly. We are in a modern version of the Knossos labyrinth, how can we get out? Here, as in a different way in those vast beach hotels that specialize in packages, being the solitary individual has its snags. Wandering about the ruins, trying to make head and tail of things, the single person gets hemmed in, confused by alien voices. The member of the group does not suffer this fate: He has the comfort of numbers, he occupies the space, he is with the others, listening to the same voice, looking at the same things.

Knossos: the queen's apartments

Very difficult, in such a crowd, to exercise the powers of imagination and intuition needed to feel the wonder of this place, get a sense of the remote society that once flourished here. We all get in one another's way with our exclamations, our sun hats, our ungainly scramblings. Only at certain times, early in the morning, or during the hot middle hours of the day when the bus excursions have their scheduled lunchtime, the extraordinary nature of the place comes over one in a wave. The storerooms with their great earthenware jars for oil and grain; the workshops where the jewelers and smiths and potters made the objects for use and decoration never since surpassed for the quality of their workmanship and design; the royal quarters with their spacious, light-filled apartments; the vivid frescoes depicting people in their daily lives and all manner of birds and animals and flowers—dolphins, partridges, octopuses, lilies. Any of these things, even the smallest detail, can become a focal point for wonder, and one begins to understand what Pendlebury, who knew more about the palace of Minos than just about anyone else, meant when he wrote thus of its final destruction, probably due to a combination of earthquake, volcanic eruption on the nearby island of Santorini, and the onslaught of invaders: “With that wild spring day at the beginning of the fourteenth century
B.C.
something went out of the world which the world will never see again; something grotesque perhaps, something fantastic and cruel, but also something very lovely.”

One thing which makes Knossos different from all other Minoan sites on Crete is the reconstructions that were carried out by Sir Arthur Evans—as he by then had become—mainly in the course of the 1920s. In his passion for what he had discovered, his desire to protect the recently exposed remains from the weather, his wish to make the layout of the palace more easily understood by the visitor, he used the architectural details he found in fresco fragments to reconstruct some of the buildings, making use of bricks, metal girders, and cement to rebuild the columns and door lintels destroyed in those distant fires.

Knossos: Shield frescoes from the head of the grand staircase

This use of modern materials caused heated arguments at a time when there was a strongly romantic feeling about ancient remains. Evans was called the “builder of ruins” in the French press. Many people since then have felt that he went too far, that his use of the frescoes was too subjective. But there can be no doubt that he saved some important buildings from collapse, among them the grand staircase of the palace, regarded as unique in architectural history, with five flights of stairs still preserved in situ.

Unreconstructed, altogether less adorned and distinctly less crowded, are the palace of Festos, second largest of the Minoan palaces, overlooking the bay of Mesaras on the south coast, and the smaller palace of Agia Triada two miles nearer the coast. These are sites rich in archaeological interest with superb views over the plain of Mesara to the Libyan Sea. I am not by nature very exacting when it comes to exploring ancient remains. It doesn't really give me any great satisfaction to know whether this niche or that was actually the family shrine, or precisely how high the staircase was, or—in any detail—how the water pipes were all joined up. I would only forget these things again. Making precise identifications on these Minoan sites is a headache anyway, for clues are scanty, and on-site information even scantier. Wandering here on a summer morning with the evidence of ancient life all around one, the olive groves and vineyards covering the plain below, the majestic peaks of Psiloritis rising to the north and the warm breath of Africa against your face—it is difficult to imagine a pleasanter way of spending an hour or two.

In 1908, inside a small chamber at Festos, one of the most famous finds in the history of Minoan excavation was made, the disk of baked clay, later to be known as the Festos Disk, dating from around 1700
B.C.
Its provenance is still disputed, but the evidence indicates that it was made in Crete. At present housed in the Archaeological Museum of Iraklion, it is something truly to marvel at, a solid disk roughly six inches in diameter, completely covered back and front with ideographs inscribed in spiral form from the circumference to the center, 241 signs in all, among them running figures, heads crowned with feathers, ships, shields, birds and beasts and insects, each one impressed with great care on the wet clay using some kind of stamp. And all this several thousand years before Gutenberg!