Knossos

by Laura Gill

  A few years later, when Dikte was nursing her second child, a daughter, news reached Karfi that Hellenes speaking a strange dialect had settled in the Kairatos river valley. Ephoros had died by then, and his successor, a younger, more cautious man, warned against venturing back down. “These Dorians, they have unfamiliar ways,” he said. “The folks in Archanes say that they’re harsh taskmasters, that they exalt Zeus above all other gods.” After that, people ceased mentioning their old homes and looking forward to a time when a return might be possible. Karfi was the present and the future. Those who were wise gave thanks to ever-living Zeus and Mother Rhea for having preserved them in the remoteness of the mountains.

  When Dikte and Tripodiskos grew old in their turn, their children and grandchildren patiently listened to their tales of Knossos, but by then Knossos was nothing but a name, a distant memory to which the elderly clung. All the younger generations knew were the highlands, the mountain ridges, and the rarified air. They had never witnessed a Bull Dance, never seen a chariot, or watched the level of the river drop as drought baked the lowlands. The Labyrinth and the Minotaur were tales to frighten and fascinate.

  Seven generations passed. When the descendants of Dikte and Tripodiskos finally ventured into the coastal plains again, they had no inkling that their foremother had been a priestess, or that she came from the bloodline that had produced the legendary Pasiphae and Ariadne. They never suspected that the story of the Labyrinth they told and retold was a collection of half-truths, more invention than fact, and that the true tale was more complicated than they could have ever imagined.

  A handful of the family eventually settled in the scrubby hills overlooking the river valley, a stone’s throw from the ruins of the house in which Tripodiskos had been born. The Dorian Greeks who were their neighbors cremated their dead. They used iron. Their women fastened their dresses with fibulae. Gone were the old fashioned flounced skirts and open bodices. Gone were the frescoes, the chariots and boar tusk helmets, and the art of writing. Dorian singers filled the evenings with songs of Theseus and the Minotaur, but the hill upon which the Labyrinth had stood remained taboo ground, a litter of stones vanished under four hundred years of overgrowth.

  Within another three generations, the people from Karfi mingled their blood with the Dorians. The village expanded toward the north and west, always avoiding the old temple mount. The Classical town that followed grew larger still, and more prosperous, vying with Gortyn in the south for dominion over Crete.

  When the Romans conquered Crete in 67 B.C., they established a new settlement, Colonia Julia Nobilis Cnossus, upon the ruins of the old. The Romans minted silver coins bearing images of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth—the labyrinth-maze of the stories, the twisting journey of the soul depicted on the seal stones that occasionally turned up under farmers’ plows. Fragments of the ancient priest-architects whose names, save one, were forgotten.

  That was the mythical Labyrinth. The real Labyrinth remained buried atop the abandoned hill, its great staircase and crumbling frescoes and storerooms filled with pithoi nestled in the earth.

  Waiting.

  Epilogue

  Daidalos II

  When Arthur Evans arrived in Crete in 1894, he had no interest in undertaking an excavation at Knossos, the site with which his name would eventually become inexorably linked.

  Educated at Oxford, the son of paper mill owner and antiquarian John Evans, a correspondent of Charles Darwin, Evans shared his father’s interest in anthropology and antiquities. Nearsighted with a keen eye for microscopic detail, the young Evans was a dedicated numismatist; the skills he acquired through that hobby he later put to good use examining the numerous examples of the prehistoric engraved gems he collected from the Athenian flea markets. Wherever he inquired about the origin of the seal stones, the dealers uniformly told him that they had come from Crete. In fact, such curiosities had been turning up around Knossos for years. Local women in particular prized them as maternity talismans, or “milk-stones.”

  Evans’s search eventually led him to the site at Knossos, but even though his Oxford connections and strong interest in anthropology and antiquities had won him the position of Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, which he held from 1884 to 1908, he was not a trained archaeologist.

  He was not even the first excavator.

  Credit for the first scientific excavation at Knossos belongs to a Cretan merchant, aptly named Minos Kalokairinos. Taking his inspiration from German businessman-turned-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann’s recent, widely publicized finds at Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns, he conducted his own amateur archaeological exploration of Kefala hill, as Knossos’s ancient mount was then known. Over the course of three months, from December 1878 to February 1879, Kalokairinos sunk twelve test trenches into the west side of the hill, where he discovered the footings of massive walls and the west magazines—rows of narrow storerooms packed with pithoi still containing burnt remnants of barley, lentils and peas. Based on the complex layout of the rooms and on the many mason’s marks he found depicting the double axe, Kalokairinos concluded that he had discovered the palace of Minos. He had absolutely no idea then that he had simply unearthed the west corner of what would turn out to be a substantially larger site.

  At this point, Cretan patriots, fearing that the occupying Ottoman regime would plunder the site and ship its artifacts to the Imperial Museum in Istanbul, intervened. They told Kalokairinos to stop digging, which he did, but if they expected him to shut his mouth, he disappointed them. Kalokairinos publicized his Knossos finds whenever and wherever he could, sending examples of pithoi to museums in London, Paris and Rome, and even to the king of Greece. One of those who took interest and helped promote Knossos was William James Stillman, American consul to Crete. Incidentally, Stillman happened to be a friend of Arthur Evans.

  Evans visited Kalokairinos at his home in Iraklion in 1894. While there, he viewed Kalokairinos’s field notes and personal collection of artifacts, which included a burned clay tablet incised with the hieroglyphic script that so fired his interest. A product of the Victorian era, Evans believed that writing was a cornerstone of all civilization. In Kalokairinos’s clay tablet he found more proof that the civilization that had built the monumental citadels of Mycenae and Tiryns, and fought with Troy for dominion over the Aegean must have been literate.

  After Kalokairinos showed him around the Knossos site, Evans attempted to purchase Kefala hill from the Turkish landowner, something which Schliemann himself had tried unsuccessfully to accomplish a few years earlier. But Evans was patient, determined and diplomatic where Schliemann was hotheaded and impulsive. He was also incredibly lucky. Time and the political climate were against the Ottoman occupiers, and when they were expelled in 1899, Evans bought the entirety of Kefala hill from the newly formed Cretan Republic. Excavations at Knossos lasted a full eight seasons, from 1901 to 1930. Evans’s reports are contained in the monumental, multi-volume The Palace of Minos. His discussion of the hieroglyphic clay tablets he found during the excavations are contained in the two-volume Scripta Minoa.

  Evans did not live to see Linear B, the predominant script of the two he discovered at Knossos, translated, but he would have been astonished to learn that the language of the tablets was a very archaic form of Greek. He had always maintained that the Mycenaeans never occupied Knossos. We now know that Mycenaean Greeks ruled Crete from Knossos from the mid-fifteenth century B.C. to the end of the Bronze Age around 1200 B.C. Work on translating Linear A, the earlier Minoan script, is ongoing.

  The Knossos that tourists see today is largely the result of Evans’s speculative ideas about what Bronze Age Knossos would have looked like. The “reconstitution” of the site, as he called it in his writings, was a necessary form of conservation—and in part he was correct. To give examples, we can look to the Throne Room and Grand Staircase, both highlights of the Knossos tour.

  The Throne Room suffered from exposure to the elements after the first dig, obliging E
vans to supply a roof. The Grand Staircase’s original wooden supports had burnt and rotted away; workmen had to replace the temporary, insufficient scaffolding with reinforced concrete to prevent structural collapse. Evans guessed from the organic remains and fresco images that the original columns had possessed a distinctive downward taper. That he later had the columns painted red with black bases was a decision founded on fresco evidence depicting the palace and its environs. Some of Knossos’s columns were colored red.

  Nevertheless, twenty-first century archaeologists and academics shudder in horror over the extent to which Evans altered the site. Rather than let the actual remains stand, Evans laid concrete, plaster and iron over the ancient materials, doing irreparable damage in the process.

  Evans poured his entire fortune into Knossos, and for better or worse his name is forever associated with the site; both the man and his reconstructions have become part of the archaeological record. If Evans let himself get carried away with his speculations, his painstaking work nevertheless brought the Minoans into the public’s attention where other rediscovered civilizations remain obscure.

  In a way, Knossos retains its mystical aura and its function as a place of pilgrimage and worship of a sort, only now it is half a million tourists a year who come to gawk at the inspiration for the mythical Labyrinth. It is marketed as the palace of Minos, though it is uncertain that a king ever lived there. While the site undoubtedly strikes some visitors as a tourist trap, a half-imagined Bronze Age Disneyland, it is useful in helping people visualize what the site might have looked like in its heyday.

  Author’s Note

  When I started researching this novel back in the summer of 2012, I knew I wanted to tell a story set in the historical Labyrinth of Knossos. Soon, I realized that Knossos, with its complicated cycles of building, destruction, and reconstruction spanning centuries, offered its own compelling narrative. I had freedom to explore avenues apart from the oft-visited retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur, and the Santorini eruption. I could travel back to the Neolithic, to the first founding of the settlement. I could explore the origin of the Minos legend, and the time of the peak sanctuaries and the first writing system in Crete. I could tell the stories of priests, priestesses, scribes, architects, and merchants who dwelt outside the realm of Greek mythology.

  Nonetheless, no novel about Knossos would have been complete without some attempt to retell the stories of Theseus and Ariadne, Daidalos and Ikaros, Minos and Europa and Pasiphae. After all, those tales sprang from somewhere. I hope readers will be surprised and delighted by my interpretation, and in some cases, complete deconstruction, of the ancient legends.

  Knossos’s long history of human habitation began around 7000-6000 B.C. Neolithic people, probably from Anatolia and the Dodecanese islands in the eastern Aegean, arrived and settled the valley. In material culture and belief, particularly regarding bull worship, in Chapter One’s story “The Founder,” I linked my island-hopping Neolithic settlers from Rhodes with the contemporaenous culture of Çatal Höyük.

  Translating “Knossos” as “the Place of Knos” at the end of Chapter One is conjecture on my part. The name is pre-Greek, possibly Minoan, and the Minoan language has not yet been deciphered. The –ossos/issos suffix was widely used in place names such as Knossos, Amnissos, Tylissos, Kyparissos and others. Translating the suffix as “place of” is a reasonably educated guess.

  Where character names are concerned, examples of abbreviated Minoan names appear in the Knossos Linear B tablets. However, because neither the historians nor linguists working with Linear B, a Mycenaean Greek writing system, can decipher the syntax or conventions of Minoan, a non-Greek language whose origins yet remain unknown, and whose own writing system, Linear A, remains undeciphered , it’s impossible to normalize these names.

  The Egyptians recorded a handful of Minoan names, which include Rusa, Bansabira, Pinaruti, Nashuja, Yishharu and Yikashata—all of which I have used. Gendering these names is difficult, as the Egyptians did not specify the sex of the individuals listed. I have seen Bansabira occasionally used as a woman’s name, but, again, as we don’t know the Minoan conventions for male and female names, it’s impossible to be sure.

  Other character names were derived through educated guesses about Minoan types. Still others were borrowed from Babylonian, Sumerian, and Hurrian sources. Minoan Crete had strong commercial and diplomatic ties to the Near East, so it’s reasonable to assume that Akkadian was one of the languages spoken at Knossos. Mesopotamian, Hurrian, Canaanite, and perhaps even the occasional Egyptian name, might at various times have been in vogue.

  Mycenaean names creep into the novel at a later point, to reflect social and political changes. Names such as Alektryon, Wordeia, Argurios and Tripodiskos are all authentic examples found on Linear B tablets.

  The names of the gods used in the novel are attested from Linear B sources. Older forms such as Potidnu, Potidas, Raziya and Rhaya are extrapolations.

  I do not subscribe to the view that Minoan Crete was a matriarchal, Goddess-oriented society subjugated by patriarchal, misogynistic Mycenaean Greeks. That’s the kind of black and white, oversimplified male versus female trope that has been propogated by feminist authors ever since the publication of Jacquetta Hawkes’s work Dawn of the Gods. If anything, the archaeological evidence and decipherment of the Linear B tablets reveal a much more complex world than Hawkes could have known about in 1968.

  Knossos was never a royal residence in the sense that Sir Arthur Evans envisioned. The type of inventory found in the Pylos Linear B archive, detailing the female menials who performed the endless tasks of the palaces—as bath attendants, cooks, scrub maids, laundresses, and water carriers—is completely absent from the Knossos archive. Far from being the “palace of Minos,” Evans described, Knossos probably functioned more like the temple-and-administrative complexes of the Near Eastern world. Knossos’s secular rulers most likely dwelled in the “Little Palace” nearby.

  The complex of buildings built on the tell now known as Kefala Hill was destroyed and rebuilt at least three times between 1900 and 1200 B.C. The major destructions are highlighted in the novel.

  Readers may disagree with my dating of the Santorini eruption to 1525 B.C. Dating the eruption is problematic even for scholars. Some of the scientific evidence, including analysis of a petrified tree, suggests a date around 1628 B.C., but other evidence, including certain artifacts found at Akrotiri (called Terasos in the novel), suggests a more recent date of 1550-1500 B.C. I elected to go with the lower chronology.

  The model for the eruption as depicted in Chapter Seven’s tale, “Counting the Dead,” is the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, right down to the pumice rafts of human remains Dadarusa encounters. Whether Katsamba was struck by a tidal wave is a matter of conjecture, since the evidence is now buried under an international airport serving Herakleion, but the scenario exists within the realm of possibility given that the devastation at nearby Amnissos was so severe.

  It’s been assumed that the Mycenaean takeover of 1450 B.C. was an invasion launched from without. That might not have been the case. As Crete was a crossroads for culture and trade in the eastern Aegean, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that some Mycenaeans might already have established themselves in Crete. My model for the Mycenaean coup is the Germanic “invasion” of Britain in the post-Roman era. In that case, Germanic mercenaries were invited to settle in Britain in exchange for protection against other marauders. The rulers of Crete could have employed Mycenaean mercenaries to help maintain civil order in the chaotic years following the Santorini eruption, and later been overthrown in a homegrown coup.

  Of the cast of thousands populating the novel, only two characters are directly based on real people. In Chapter Five, “The Sacred and the Profane,” High Priest Urtanos was inspired by the priest whose remains were discovered at the ruined temple of Anemospilia in 1979. In Chapter Nine, “Ariadne,” Wedaneus’s employer, Master Anaxoitas, is the supervisor/property ow
ner whose name appears as a-no-qo-ta on eight of the Knossos Linear B tablets.

  And lastly, speaking of real-life figures, what of Daidalos? The inscription on Daikantos’s work table in Chapter Nine is an authentic Linear B document. It’s tempting to read the term “Daidalaion” as “the temple/building of Daidalos,” and the translation is by no means definitive, but it does offer the tantalizing possibility that someone named Daidalos was known to the Knossian scribes of the fourteenth century B.C. Was Daidalos a real-life architect, later worshipped as a god like the historical Imhotep of Egypt? Legend remembers him as the genius who built the Labyrinth, yet as we have seen, there were many Labyrinths, one built atop the other, and perhaps several generations of architects who might collectively have been remembered as Daidalos. This is why I invented the order of the priest-architects of Daidalos, and why I consciously named Didanam’s son, Alektryon’s architect in Chapter Eight’s tale, “Inauguration Day,” Daidalos.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would have not been possible without my tireless editor and alpha reader, Kev Henley.

  I must also thank Dr. Colin MacDonald and Dr. Alexander MacGillivray of the British School in Athens for answering questions about Knossos, and the Twitter follower (who wishes to remain anonymous) who put me in touch with them.

  About the Author

  Laura Gill has a passion for Mycenaean and Minoan culture. She has a Master’s Degree in English Literature from California State University, Northridge, and has worked as a secondary school teacher and florist. Previous works include Helen’s Daughter and The Orestes Trilogy.