The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean Read Online Free PDF Page A

most astonishing of all, the murals? The most famous of these is based, so far as one can see, on what appears to be a large piece of toffee in one corner, bearing a few barely identifiable traces of colour. From this Evans has extrapolated a wildly exuberant design of leaping dolphins–pleasing, perhaps, but far, far from authentic.
    Did King Minos–the question has to be asked–really exist? According to Homer, he was the son of Zeus and Europa, but Diodorus Siculus, writing in Agrigento during the first century BC , gives him a rather less elevated lineage and relates how, in a contest for the kingship of Crete, he prayed to Poseidon to send him a bull from the sea for sacrifice. The god obliged, but the bull was so beautiful that Minos could not bear to sacrifice it and kept it for himself. In revenge Poseidon caused Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, to fall in love with the animal, and it was their most unnatural union that engendered the Minotaur, half man and half bull, whom the King kept in a Daedalus-designed labyrinth. None of this, admittedly, suggests a historical personage; on the other hand Thucydides, a historian who normally keeps his feet firmly on the ground, credits Minos with having assembled the first great navy in the Mediterranean, subjugating the Cyclades, largely clearing the sea of pirates and establishing governors on certain islands of the Aegean. As for the labyrinth, there is no better description of the palace of Knossos; the unwary visitor without a guide may well envy Theseus, who, leaving the Minotaur dead behind him, had the advantage of Ariadne’s thread to lead him back to freedom. Finally, the bull. He is seen, or at least suggested, everywhere throughout the palace; there is a fascinating fresco–perhaps a degree or two more authentic than most–showing a charging animal with an intrepid little athlete somersaulting clear over his horns. In the life as well as the religion of the Minoans the bull clearly played a key role; one would love to know more about him.
    This extraordinary civilisation–talented, cultivated and extremely rich–ruled an empire covering most of the islands of the Aegean and until around 1400 BC exercised a powerful influence over the whole eastern Mediterranean, leaving traces as far afield as Transylvania and on the Danube, as well as in Sardinia and the Aeolian Islands just off the northeast coast of Sicily. It must have been fun to be a Minoan. The objects that they left behind them give the impression of a happy, peaceful, carefree people, secure enough to leave their cities unwalled; the invention of the potter’s wheel provided them with drinking vessels, jugs and storage jars in astonishingly sophisticated shapes, which they decorated with swirling abstract patterns or designs of birds, flowers and fish. Their clothes were elaborate–sometimes almost fantastical–with a good deal of toplessness, their jewellery of dazzling golden filigree. They enjoyed a degree of luxury unprecedented in history and not to be equalled until the dissipated days of the Roman Empire. Their life was easy, their climate delectable. They mistrusted all things military. They made love, not war.
    But then disaster struck, as sooner or later it always does. Just what happened is unclear. An invasion by a powerful and vindictive enemy has been suggested; in such a case that enemy would most probably have been Mycenae. A likelier explanation–though it does not necessarily rule out the other–lies in the tremendous volcanic eruption which occurred around 1470 BC on Santorini (the modern Thira), some sixty miles to the north. Knossos was simultaneously shattered by a series of violent earthquakes, while an immense tidal wave swept against the north coast of Crete, flooding every harbour along it. The eruption also threw up a vast cloud of ash similar to that which was to bury Pompeii thirteen centuries later. (Some of this ash has been identified as far away as Israel and Anatolia.)