“While he led the field in
revealing Minoan art to the public, Evans allowed his literal reading of the
Greek myths to distort his interpretation. ... Though extremely well
versed in ancient Egyptian ritual ... Evans denied the influence of Egyptian
religion on the Minoans”.
Susan
Kokinda
According to Susan
Kokinda: http://schillerinstitute.org/fid_97-01/fid_012_sjk_homer.html
Archaeology and the Truth
of Man's Prehistory
The study of man's most ancient past is more important to the success of his future, than most of us comprehend. Unfortunately, in recent centuries, this has been understood and acted upon, by the oligarchic forces in society who seek to reduce mankind to the condition of beasts, and have twisted the study of pre- and ancient history to prove their definition of man, the better to accomplish this end. Outside of the vast body of work by Lyndon LaRouche, which locates man as a creature of cognition who has understood and acted upon his world for hundreds of thousands of years, only a few determined individuals have succeeded in approaching any aspects of the study of ancient man and civilization from outside the dictates of that oligarchical elite.
One happy exception to that is
the 1999 release of Homer's Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Sky Decoded,
by Florence and Kenneth Wood. Written by the daughter and son-in-law of Edna
Johnston Leigh (1916-91), this book presents and develops Leigh's hypothesis,
that the Homeric epics fall within the oral tradition of other ancient epics
which, through their sung recitation, transmitted to each succeeding generation
profound scientific ideas concerning man's relationship to his universe.
Mackey’s comment: Previously I had made brief
mention of the Wood’s extraordinary book:
This book makes real sense of
The Iliad
From the flyleaf of Homer’s Secret Iliad, by Florence and Kenneth Wood, which was deservingly awarded Book of the Year when first released in 1999.
During the 1930s the young daughter of a Kansas farmer spent night after night watching the stars and planets wheel across the vast prairie sky. Later, as a teacher in England , she combined her devotion to astronomy with a passion for Homer. This led her to a discovery which would lie buried until her daughter, Florence Wood, inherited her papers in 1991.
Her years of study, it became clear, had revealed Homer’s great epic to
be also the world’s oldest book of astronomy.
[My comment: The dating of the Iliad, and whether it
really belonged to the presumed time of Homer, is actually a challenging issue
of its own; one with which I hope to come to grips elsewhere].
The changing configuration of the stars, so important for navigation and
the measurement of time, had a fascination for the ancient world that it has
lost today. In the Iliad, battles between Greeks and Trojans mirror the
movements of stars and constellations as they appear to fight for ascendancy in
the sky. The timescale of Homeric astronomy is breathtaking; elements can be
dated to the ninth millennium BC [sic], long before the recorded astronomy of
Mesopotamia and Egypt. Geography is also represented, since the shapes of
constellations were used as ‘skymaps’ to direct ancient travellers throughout
Greece and Asia Minor.
[End of quote]
Related to this, one may read:
Taken
from: http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1616697176973091291#editor/target=post;postID=5178291178604779880
....
Ever notice how hard it is
to find a real nice cave man picture these days? Take it from me--it's not as
easy as it used to be. Those classic artist renderings from a single tooth,
from small bone fragments or from skull pieces -and on occasion, entire skulls
permitted artists to let their imaginations run wild and silmultaneously to
support the idea that our ancestors were primitive.
Click and drag photo to resize.
This
of course supported evolutionary theory and caused many who believed in the
Biblical view of creation to perplexedly wonder
where cave men fit in.
As
time goes by, the truth of what our ancestors actually looked like became more
and more evident--like us, pretty much. That's why it's becoming more difficult
to find those old cave man characterizations, even most
"knowledgeable" evolutionists have to admit that
"Cro-Magnon" and "Neanderthal man" are fully human. (Photo:top
left; recent computer and/or forensic recreations of "Neanderthal",
right and "Cro-Magnon", left who is scowling, of course. Far right:
Cro-Magnon steps out.)
So
while, in the past evolutionists have been drawing them as ape-like and brutish
to drive home the notion that we have "evolved"--we now both
(Christians & evolutionists) know that they look like what a Christian or
Bible believer would expect--us. Not only that, when " "they"
drew themselves from life, (15,000 years ago according to evolutionary time)
they tended to look more like this 
(Photo: Below, left
"caveman" self portrait) (more on these
self portraits on page 2).
(Photo: Below, left
"caveman" self portrait) (more on these
self portraits on page 2).
Obviously,
this kind of look is more like what Christians might have expected. When's the
last time you saw a representation of our supposed evolutionary ancestors with
a Supercuts like trim and hat at a jaunty angle?
In
Genesis, Adam and Eve are created without dragging knuckles--they raise
children and carry on conversations just like "normal" people. They
tilled the soil. They spoke to God. Evolutionists, however are tied to the idea
of very primitive beginnings--where for long periods, our ancestors were not
even fully men.
We've
even come to accept the idea that larger brows or thicker bodies necessarily
suggests less sophistication--less advancement. I laughed when I read this
morning that this particular evolutionist had to admit that
"Neanderthal" looked a lot like us but--probably was short and had sloping
shoulders.
(See
Also the cosmetic surgery performed on Neanderthal,in Buried
Alive, by Jack Cuozzo--See page 8 of this
section)That's still supposed to suggest that he was less advanced than modern
man--but when you really think about it, --even if it were true about the
shortness and sloping shoulders--all that would really mean is that there was
little chance he could make it as a runway model.
Shortness
and sloping shoulders--even a prominent brow have nothing whatsoever to do with
intelligence, survival or level of "advancement".
You
yourself may be short, have sloping shoulders and/or a prominent forehead. Even
so, the evidence is that our ancestors were smarter, faster, and larger--had
better eyesight, better technology than we suppose and were as
"handsome" as we are.
And
by the way, a cave man is simply a man (or woman) who lives in a cave! If they
stooped, it was because the roof was low. Why were they in there in the first
place? Perhaps war, pestilence, Flood, tower of Babel or other hardships forced
men into caves for protection in certain locales and from time to time.
One
of the items we discuss here below is suppressed information (over 100 stone
tablets) that "cave men" had an early written language--much, much
earlier than science admits.
Susan Kokinda continues:
Such a concept of man and
civilization, which could transmit science, through art, since no later than
the end of the last Ice Age, flies directly in the face of modern archaeology,
which has been dominated by the British establishment for two centuries. How
that British oligarchy has sought to destroy mankind's true history, is
captured in another book published in 2000, Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and
the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth, by J. Alexander MacGillivray. This
history is the first even remotely objective assessment of the career of Evans,
the celebrated excavator of Knossos on the island Crete, and the
"discoverer" of the glories of a Minoan civilization, which he
supposed to have given birth alone to later classical, Greek civilization.
The Role of Crete
For the word
"discoverer," however, substitute, "fabricator." Without
drawing the obvious conclusion himself, MacGillivray provides overwhelming
evidence that Evans was a degenerate racist, deployed by the British Foreign
Office, Prime Minister Gladstone, and Oxford University, at a minimum,
throughout his life. His assignment was to erase the real history of Bronze Age
Crete. That MacGillivray tiptoes around these conclusions is the great flaw of
his book.
Ironically, however, MacGillivray
was much more forceful and conclusive in a short article in the
November/December 2000 issue of Archeology magazine, where he wrote:
"While
he led the field in revealing Minoan art to the public, Evans allowed his
literal reading of the Greek myths to distort his interpretation. ...
Though extremely well versed in ancient Egyptian ritual ... Evans denied the
influence of Egyptian religion on the Minoans. ... More amazing is how
Evans conceived of the well-known ancient Egyptian symbol for the horizon, the
slope between two peaks, which adorns colonnades and buildings in Minoan art.
He transformed the horizon symbol into what he called Horns of Consecration,
ritual symbols that were shorthand for his supposed bull cult of
Minos. ... Once the trappings of his mythical agenda are removed, we will
have to re-evaluate a large body of artifacts." MacGillivray went on to
propose that the famous "bull-jumping" fresco uncovered at Knossos,
is not a depiction of an actual Cretan sport, but rather, is a metaphorical representation
of the constellations: "Orion confronts Taurus, composed of the Hyades and
Pleiades, while Perseus somersualts with both arms extended over the bull's
back to rescue Andromeda ... ."
It was his reference to Egyptian
astronomy in that article which caused this reviewer to pounce upon
MacGillivray's book, having long been convinced that the Cretan civilization of
2200-1500 b.c. was a critical link between the advanced astronomical
knowledge which shaped ancient Egyptian civilization, and its influence on the
development of Myceanean and classical Greece.
Unfortunately, the book is a
disappointment in terms of stating those conclusions, or providing a fuller
elaboration of Crete's debt to Egypt. But, whatever constraints caused
MacGillivray to pull his punches here, Minotaur is, nonetheless, a
useful, if academic, resource for documenting the extent to which the British
establishment deployed to suppress a truthful history of the origins of Western
civilization.
Evans' fraudulent treatment of
Minos parallels the much better-known fraud of British archaeology, that
civilization was born in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
around 2700 b.c. In manufacturing this "discovery," the
oligarchy certainly chose a civilization in its own image: Mesopotamia was a
society dominated by an elite class of priests and administrators, who held
their looted populations in cattle-like backwardness, subservient to an
autocratic and irrational pantheon of gods, notably the mother-earth goddess
Ishtar (or Isis, the "Whore of Babylon"). Central to their method of
control, was the priesthood's cloaking of its knowledge of the physical world
in superstition, magic, and myth.
According to the oligarchy's
Disneyland of ancient history, such cult-ridden societies erupted,
autochthonously, out of nowhere, ultimately leading to the development of
modern civilization. ….
Part Two: Was Arthur
Evans an inveterate racist?
“Evans arrived in Crete in 1893 and spent
the next four decades creating a "Minoan" civilization in the image
dictated by his, and his controllers', perverted worldview”.
Susan
Kokinda
Susan Kokinda
continues: http://schillerinstitute.org/fid_97-01/fid_012_sjk_homer.html
British Racist Evans
Returning to Minotaur
and the life of Sir Arthur Evans, we can see how the British oligarchy will
stop at nothing to enforce that latter conception. If one approaches
MacGillivray's thoroughness from such an overview of the intellectual battle
afoot, then the book is a goldmine. Without that overview, the text becomes
tediously academic.
Arthur Evans was born in 1851,
to a middle-class businessman father who had been picked up by British Royal
Society circles, and groomed as a promising lackey in the relatively new field
of archaeology. The young Evans was raised on a diet of Darwin, Huxley, and
Aryan racial superiority. As MacGillivray reports, "Evans came to Oxford
just as the Aryans marched from myth into history, and he was as proud as any
other to proclaim his connection to them." Evans' racism was unabashed; he
wrote in 1875 that, "I believe in the existence of inferior races and would
like to see them exterminated."
He became the son-in-law of
racist historian Edward Freeman, who once publicly expressed the wish that
every Irishman would murder a Negro, and then be hanged, for the greater good
of the Germanic race. (His marriage to Margaret Freeman, who shared the racist
views of her father and new husband, was one of convenience, since Evans was a
homosexual, whose sexual orientation became public toward the end of his life.)
Evans just barely graduated
from Oxford, thanks to the intervention of his father and Freeman. His first
assignment was as an intelligence agent deployed under the government of Prime
Minister William Gladstone. Not yet 20 years old, Evans was arrested by the
French as a spy in Paris in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war; then arrested
by the Austrians in 1875 in Zagreb, during an insurrection against the Ottoman
rulers; and finally arrested again in the Balkans in 1882.
Deployed vs. Schliemann
It was time to redeploy Evans,
and his new assignment was to destroy the work of Heinrich Schliemann, and
"replace" him as the preeminent archaeologist of Bronze Age
Mediterranean cultures. Schliemann, a German businessman, was a lifelong lover
of Homer's epics, who became convinced that Troy and Mycenae were not fictional
locations, but grounded in history. He devoted his life to proving
this--discovering, and excavating, first, Troy, and then, Mycenae.
Mackey’s comment: See my
article:
Schemin'
Heinrich Schliemann?
Kokinda continues:
Evans was introduced to
Schleimann in 1883 in Athens. In 1884, he was given the necessary credentials
for his new career, and was appointed to head Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. During
this period, the British, through Oxford, were running an "inside/ outside"
operation against the influence of the Greek classics in education. Benjamin
Jowett, representing the "pro-classical" side, was deployed to
translate Plato's dialogues, so as to beat the ideas out of them, and render
Plato an ancient Newtonian. Jowett's crime continues to this day, by the
preponderance of his translations in modern editions.
Evans was groomed to cover the
other side, attacking the "excess" reliance on the study of the Greek
classics, and, then, sabotaging the study of the origin of Greek culture.
That Schliemann was diverted
from travelling to Crete in 1883 and in 1885, in order to be honored by the
British Royal Society and Queen Victoria herself, could not have been
coincidental. Eventually travelling to Crete in 1886 and 1889, he was never
able to obtain excavation rights, and died in Italy in 1890, on his way back to
Greece and Crete. The possibility that his enemies orchestrated his demise
should not be overlooked.
Evans arrived in Crete in 1893
and spent the next four decades creating a "Minoan" civilization in
the image dictated by his, and his controllers', perverted worldview. Evans'
assignment was to portray Crete as a mysterious, relatively advanced,
autochthonous society, which gave rise to Mycenaean civilization, and from it,
classical Greece. As MacGillivray demonstrated in the magazine article quoted
above, Evans deliberately ignored, obscured, and even destroyed evidence that
Crete and Mycenae were outposts of Egyptian colonization and science.
The ‘Minoan’ Myth
MacGillivray describes in
detail how Evans simply rebuilt the palace at Knossos, and other structures, to
conform to his preconceived fabrication of Minoan society. Even the term
"Minoan" is Evans' creation; there is no evidence that the people of
Crete ever called themselves "Minoan." (Prior to his trashing of
Cretan history, Evans had performed a similar intellectual fraud on Stonehenge,
describing it as a cult center of a prehistoric Aryan belief system, rather
than the advanced astronomical observatory which it was in c.3000 b.c. [sic])
Along with this, MacGillivray
provides extensive documentation of Evans' appropriation and manipulation of
the work of some of his colleagues, and his outright destruction of the careers
of others. Not only did Evans cripple the archaeological investigation of
Cretan civilization, but he delayed for over fifty years a crucial breakthrough
in the study of the early Greek language. Evans had discovered hundreds of
baked clay tablets with a hitherto undiscovered form of writing on them, known
as Linear B. In order to enforce the idea that Crete was an isolated, unknown
culture, Evans insisted that the language could not be an early form of Greek.
He refused to make the inscriptions available to others during his lifetime. It
wasn't until the 1950's, a decade after Evans' death, that Michael Ventris, a
young British architect and cryptographer, proved to the astonishment of the
world's experts, that the language of the Linear B script was, indeed, an early
form of Greek.
Evans' life and work exemplify
the British oligarchy's method of holding back scientific advance. Through
suppression of evidence--and, more importantly, through brutal imposition of
his ideological assumptions--Evans reigned as the High Priest of a scientific
inquisition for more than [fifty] … years.
Over recent decades, the
discrediting of Evans, and of other elements of British-controlled archaeology,
have broken that inquisitional control, and scientists and amateurs, such as
Edna Leigh, are now making valuable contributions to the discovery of mankind's
true pre-history. It is that history which the controllers of the Sir
Arthur Evanses of this world fear the most.
Part Three:
A fabricated
so-called “Minoan” civilisation
“Of Evans, Gere remarks that "his methods were
distinguished by
a delirious interpretive incontinence." And so
they were”.
Shadi
Bartsch
Shadi Bartsch
tells how Sir Arthur Evans created a pacifist and matriarchal “Minoan” society:
The Archaeologist as Minotaur
….
The evocative power of archeological sites stems at least in part
from their promise to put us in touch with the reality of an ancient
past. The ruined shell of the Roman amphitheater, the terracotta soldiers
unearthed near Xi’an, the sandstone façade of Al Khazneh in Petra: all collapse
centuries and millennia into a single moment of contact. In some cases, the
ruins themselves are so familiar as to generate a sense not of authenticity but
of déjà vu, as with Sigmund Freud’s famous “disturbance of memory” during his
1904 visit to the Acropolis in Athens. But as many a visitor to the ruins of
the bronze-age palace at Knossos has found to his or her surprise, some of the
palace’s most iconic sights—the throne room complex, the squat red pillars, the
frescoes of the priest-king and the "Ladies in Blue"—do not in fact
represent the glories of a bygone Cretan civilization. Instead, they owe their
appearance to the fervid imagination and wild reconstructive efforts of a
single man, Knossos’s twentieth-century excavator—perhaps inventor is the
better term—the British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans.
This disappoints terribly, of
course: one wants the echt experience, notwithstanding the presence,
especially in the United States, of any one of a number of faux Venices,
Parises, and other reproductions of the "old country" that represent
commercial pandering to the popular longing to come face to face with the
past. And yet it turns out that even a garishly recreated Knossos can
offer a rich history of its own, and it is the particular triumph of Cathy
Gere’s book to have traced the powerful impact of Evans’s reconstruction of the
site and his vision of a "Minoan" civilization upon the most fecund
thinkers and artists of his day. In the pages of this fascinating book,
Freud, de Chirico, Joyce, Picasso, Graves, and H.D. mark out labyrinthine paths
as intricate as the mythical Minoan dancers of Evans’s imagination. Fueled by
the idea of ancient Crete as Evans crafted it from the ruins, artifacts, and
paint fragments of his excavation, and encouraged by Nietzsche’s notion that
the modern era was actually repeating the history of antiquity in reverse
movement, these figures went on to embed the myth of Evans’s peaceful and
matriarchal Knossos into their own response to the twentieth century. For
them, the preoccupations of modernism—the loss of faith in the
Enlightenment’s legacy of rationalism, the search for an alternative to the
malaise of the modern state, the theological angst accompanying the death of
the Christian God—were anticipated, confronted, and resolved in the ruins of
what Evans was convinced was the palace of the mythical King Minos.
Evans himself did not discover
the site. It had already been identified as the location of bronze-age Knossos,
and the preliminary excavations of a local antiquarian named Minos (yes,
Minos) Kalokairinos had unearthed painted murals and terracotta jars.
Kalokairinos was prevented from further digging by the local Cretan assembly,
which feared that his finds might be appropriated by Crete’s Ottoman
government. Still, as Gere writes, "in the spring of 1894 the mound
of Knossos finally met its destiny in the shape of the British petitioner for
its favors, Arthur Evans." Our petitioner was sniffing out the trail of an
unknown script found on seal stones that he had encountered in Greece, and
whose source he believed to be Cretan; it was a belief confirmed by the similar
characters on some of the stones exposed by Kalokairinos. By 1900, Evans
was able to buy the site outright, and what followed were forty years of
self-financed digging and reconstruction—self-financed and also self-conceived,
since (as Gere suggests in a section on Evans’s early loss of his mother) the
archeologist was saddled with a goodly amount of psychic baggage from his own
childhood, all of which found some expression on the interpretive playing-field
of Knossos.
Of Evans, Gere remarks that
"his methods were distinguished by a delirious interpretive
incontinence." And so they were. What Evans actually uncovered as he dug
further into the mound was not insignificant: the oldest throne in Europe (a
gypsum chair plastered to the wall behind it), goddess figurines, fragmentary
frescoes. But upon these findings Evans brought to bear the volatile
combination of his own imagination and a recent innovation in the construction
industry: reinforced concrete. Where the rotted-out wooden pillars of the
palace had once stood, Evans erected concrete pillars to take their place, and
over them, originally to protect the finds, a concrete ceiling. In the course
of the next decades, a three storey modernist structure over the throne would
be erected under the supervision of the architect Piet de Jong, and the Swiss
artists Guilliéron père et fils, also working for Evans, would generate
frescoes from the most fragmentary remnants. A particularly egregious case
of invention resulted in the “restoration” of the painting of a red-skinned
Minoan captain leading a troop of black soldiers, the whole troop created
almost ex nihilo from a few patches of black pigment. The second volume
of Evans’s excavation report accordingly included a disquisition on Cretan
relations with sub-Saharan Africa, an association that would be indirectly
echoed in later scholarly attempts to link Cretan and Egyptian culture.
Interpretive incontinence,
certainly. But there was a good precedent for such excess. Evans was following
in the footsteps of Heinrich Schliemann, the wealthy German
merchant-turned-archeologist who, having tunneled a destructive path through
nine archeological strata at Hisarlik near the mouth of the Dardanelles,
claimed in 1873 to have found the Troy of Homer’s Iliad at the
penultimate level. (We now know that this was a Bronze Age settlement, and
that Schliemann’s spade-wielding haste actually destroyed much evidence of the
most likely Iliadic Troy.) The claim was based on the discovery of a trove of
gold and copper artifacts that Schliemann promptly labeled ‘Priam’s treasure’
and which cemented his fame in the public eye. In his subsequent
excavations at Mycenae in mainland Greece, Schliemann’s imagination again did
not fail him: uncovering, in 1876, the figure of a corpse wearing a gold death-mask,
he suggested he had unearthed Agamemnon himself, and in later accounts of his
excavations he created a backstory in which it had always been his childhood
dream to find and excavate Homer’s ill-fated city. By publishing this
archeology of ambition, as it were, he was able to mythologize himself as well
as the skeletons he had summoned to the light of day.
Where Schliemann had been merely
destructive, Evans, we might say, was constructive. But a greater contrast
between these series of excavations—Troy and Mycenae on the one hand, Knossos
on the other—would eventually shape two different modern myths about the
origins of European civilization. Schliemann’s work on Troy was a crucial step
in the construction of a Greek proto-identity for the German race. His
discovery of swastika figures scratched onto some Trojan loom-weights—together
with a female figurine also found at Troy, onto whose pubic triangle Schliemann
himself had helpfully carved a matching swastika—coincided with the development
of the Teutonic scholarship that identified the ‘Aryas’ of the Sanskrit Rigveda
with none other than the Germans themselves. The presence of similar
swastikas on some ancient German pots meant that "the Iliad could
now join the Rigveda as the historical record of the military prowess of
a racially pure people, who left a trail of swastikas in the wake of their
irresistible westward advance and whose true heirs were the Prussian
army." The hoisting of the swastika flag as the symbol of the Reich
in 1933 was merely the final step in this "invention of archeology."
And in the same year, fittingly enough, Emil Ludwig’s biography of Schliemann
was burned in Berlin: written by a Jew, it apparently lacked the wherewithal to
recognize the particularly German nature of Schliemann’s heroic idealism.
If Schliemann’s Iliadic
proto-Germans were the mythical forbearers of Nazi Germany’s own military
ethos, Evans was sickened by the atrocities of the civil war during the Cretan
fight for independence, and Gere suggests that his emphasis on the pacific and
matriarchal aspects of his ‘Minoan’ civilization was at least in part a
reaction to these horrors. When he announced that he had found the
"throne of Ariadne" at Knossos, he was staking out an allegiance not
to Homer’s warriors but to Johann Jakob Bachofen’s argument that a matriarchal
culture had preceded patriarchy on Crete. Support was lent to the theory
when in 1884 an Italian archeologist found near Gortyn the inscribed marble
remains of a fifth-century B.C.E. law code with favorable legal provisions for
women. Evans’s greatest invention, in fact, was this archetype of the
Great Mother Goddess, whose religious sway over the early Cretans he derived
from the discovery of female statuettes, seal stamps showing a "Mountain
Goddess," and the putative dancing floor of Ariadne, daughter of
Minos.
But Evans went so far as to put
aside evidence he himself had discovered pointing to a network of
fortifications on the island in order to present the Cretans as wholly
peace-loving: "His King Minos was a famous lawgiver rather than an infamous
tyrant; his labyrinth was a dancing floor rather than a monster’s
prison. So successful was he, that Mycenae and Knossos eventually came to
be seen as opposite extremes, one militaristic and patriarchal, the other
peaceful and feminine. Out of the violent hell of the struggle for Cretan
independence was born the pacifist paradise of Minoan Crete." In sum,
Evans’s multi-volume work The Palace of Minos presented this
civilization as taking place in a prelapsarian time, "a gilded infancy
suckled by a benevolent mother goddess." Although Evans shared the racist
biases of his times, he had no use for Aryan theories: his peaceful and
semitic Crete was a world influenced and improved by its neighbors to the
south, Egypt and Libya.
Here, then, was the new childhood
of Europe, a world cooked up by an archeologist eager to show that a pacific
matriarchy lay at the origin of a people caught up in the increasingly violent
twentieth century. It was a popular vision: as Gere demonstrates, Evans’s
appealing articulation of bronze-age Cretan civilization was appropriated over
and over again by its twentieth-century audiences, each adapting it to their
own needs in the service of feminism, psychoanalysis, art, Afrocentrism, and
the like. For Freud, archeology had already come to stand as the
master-metaphor for the "talking cure"--perhaps not surprisingly,
given the reverse chronology of both disciplines and the idea that the analyst,
like the archeologist, was on a search for the buried sources of the present. "A
neurosis or a hysterical symptom," as Gere observes, "was like an
archaeological tell—a mound of memories that had to be peeled away, layer by
layer, starting from the present and working back to the past, in search of a
primal scene."
But more strikingly, Freud went
so far as to identify Evans’s Knossos with a pre-Oedipal stage putatively
experienced by the West in its Cretan infancy and to identify this historical
moment in the development of civilization with a stage in the psychic
development of the child: the presence of the Minoan mother goddess in
pre-patriarchal Crete (as he argued in Moses and Monotheism) represented
a parallel to a young girl’s primary attachment was to her mother. And
into this pottage of correspondences between the dig at Knossos and the
analyses in his Viennese study, Freud then added an odder still ingredient:
"inherited memory." According to this Lamarckian twist in his
thought, the history of the human species had left traces in the brains of
modern individuals, so that Minoan civilization, which was thought to have
perished in a cataclysmic earthquake or eruption against which its Great Mother
Goddess had offered no protection, "actually laid down the psychic
structure of the pre-Oedipal stage and its termination" in the
maturation process of every generation of children. The unfortunate Mother
Goddess thus went the way of all Freudian mothers: both Cretan
civilization and the pre-Oedipal child realized that these feminine forces
could not hold a candle to a paternal God and a pater. Not Freud’s
brightest hour, perhaps; Gere amusingly quotes the complaint by Yosef Hayyim
Yerushalmi, the great Jewish historian, that the theory of inherited memory
relies on "structures of thought and modes of discourse as alien as those
encountered by an anthropologist studying the Bororo or Nambikwara tribes in
the Brazilian unknown."
Freud, of course, was hardly the
only appropriator of Cretan symbolism. Gere pays witty homage to many equally
fascinating figures. Evans’s contemporary, the classicist Jane Ellen
Harrison, was likewise convinced by the goddess seals and statuettes of Knossos
that the island contained coded references to the transition from matriarchy to
patriarchy. In a famous chapter entitled "The Making of a
Goddess" from her Prolegomena to a Study of Greek Religion, Harrisonpresents
the Olympian gods of the Greeks not as the rational deities of a civilized
Hellenism, but as the patriarchal usurpers of female rule: as she wrote in
some disgruntlement, "Woman who was the inspirer, becomes the temptress;
she who made all things, gods and mortals alike, is become their plaything,
their slave, dowered only with physical beauty, and with a slave’s tricks and
blandishments." Meanwhile, the painter Giorgio de Chirico was
painting his own likenesses of Ariadne, the heroine isolated in a industrial
modernist landscape that perhaps not coincidentally resembled Evans’s
reconstruction of the throne room complex. In an odd twist of fate, De
Chirico had earlier taken drawing lessons from none other than Émile Gilliéron pere.
Among the other figures for whom Gere traces out Minoan connections and
coincidences, the biographical material on Robert Graves is particularly
striking. Graves, like Harrison, lamented the transition from matriarchy
to patriarchy in his Minoan-themed best-seller of 1948, The White Goddess, but
in this he was apparently influenced by the years he spent in erotic thrall to
the unbalanced American poet Laura Riding, who magnificently declared herself a
figure of destiny named "Finality." Graves threw himself out a
third-story window on Finality’s behalf but survived to write Goodbye to All
That.
The final part of the story is
dedicated to the role that Knossos played in the ongoing debate about north
African civilization’s influence on the eventual cultural and intellectual
hegemony of classical Athens. Starting in 1917 with an article by George
Wells Parker on "The African Origin of Grecian Civilisation," Gere
traces the modulations of this argument in the work of the Senegalese polymath
Cheikh Anta Diop and in the "Black Athena" hypothesis championed by
Martin Bernal. Both Diop and Bernal have argued that the Egyptian pharaohs
were black Africans, the former most notably in his book The African Origin
of Civilization, the latter in the three volumes of Black Athena. Crete
enters the picture already with Parker, who thought that the red-skinned
figures of the frescoes had African facial features; Diop believed that Crete
was a colony of Middle Kingdom Egypt, and that its inhabitants had fled to the
Peloponnese after the volcanic eruption on Thera. Gere does not delve into
the bitter controversy around the Black Athena thesis, but she does point out
that Evans’s belief that Minoan civilization had political hegemony over Greek
Mycenae lost steam after it became clear that the unfamiliar script on the
tablets dug up at Knossos, Linear B, was in fact archaic Greek and not a
Semitic language from north Africa. This cast doubt upon the
straightforward narrative of cultural inheritance from Egypt to Crete, and
Crete to the mainland.
Recently the fabled Minoans have
fallen farther still, with the discovery of new archeological evidence that
suggests the possibility that they carried out human sacrifice and even
cannibalized children. It is interesting to speculate on what Evans would have
done had he come face to face with this evidence: would it have gone the way of
the other material that had no place in his Pax Minoica? It is surely
difficult to find a spot for human flesh on the pacifist’s dining
table. We cannot know, but what Gere’s stimulating study repeatedly
reminds us is that archeology can be not only a recovery of the past, not only
a reflection of the present, but also a projection about our own culture and
its ideals. "There is no escaping the fact," as she concludes,
"that we read the human past to understand the present, and then interpret
it in the light of the future that we fear or desire."
Part Four: Crete
as the Egyptian ‘Isle of the Dead’
“Whereas there is a now a more common consensus
that the initial conclusions reached by Evans about the Minoan civilisation are
part modern invention, part based on archaeological discoveries, the framework
of the “Minoan civilisation” has not been publicly criticised as much as it
perhaps should have been”.
Philip Coppens
Philip Coppens re-visits
a theory about Crete formerly promoted by Oswald Spengler (1930’s):
Crete: the Egyptian island of the dead?
….
The man who put Crete on the archaeological map was Arthur Evans, an
English archaeologist who excavated Knossos from 1900 onwards, having purchased
the site on which the ruins were located. As excavations progressed, the
palace, located in the hills south of the capital Heraklion, was quickly
identified with the legendary site of the “Palace of King Minos” – the “Minoan
civilisation” was coined. Since Evans’ time, it is accepted that the palace
culture of Crete was that of a trading empire, typified by lavish and large
palaces, which can therefore often be found along the coastline, rather than in
the heartland or mountainous regions.
But according to the German geologist Hans Wunderlich, Crete’s history
has been harshly misinterpreted. Whereas there is a now a more common consensus
that the initial conclusions reached by Evans about the Minoan civilisation are
part modern invention, part based on archaeological discoveries, the framework
of the “Minoan civilisation” has not been publicly criticised as much as it
perhaps should have been. Wunderlich, however, spoke up against that status quo
in the 1970s, and rather than just argue against the conclusions, also put
forward a theory of his own about what Crete might have been. Three decades
later, Wunderlich’s interpretation has remained a hot topic of debate, though
as it does not involve aliens or Atlantis, it has not captured the attention it
should perhaps deserve. 
The “Minoan legacy” is the presence of several immense and complex
buildings – palaces – built over several floors. One problem is that there is
more than one palace – it is unlikely that all of these were palaces for a
central king. It has therefore been argued that these were “secondary” palaces
that controlled “regions”.
All palaces all adhere to the same design: they are situated on
lowlands, are close to the seashore, often aligned to important mountains, or
more particularly: mountains with important caves, sometimes mythically
connected with the birthplace or the place of burial of deities, Zeus in
particular.
These observations allow for the argument that the “palaces” could more
likely be “temples” – that their purpose is more religious than residential.
For sure, archaeologists are quick to point out that certain parts of the
palaces definitely had a religious function. But some go further. In fact,
archaeologist Oswald Spengler stated in 1935 that these “palaces” were temples
for the dead. The Minoan royal throne to him was not the seat from which the
king held audiences, but instead the seat for a religious image or a priest’s
mummy.
His opinion was not taken seriously, as it went against the – still –
accepted belief and Spengler himself could not pursue his own line of thinking
as he died the year following the publication of his thesis. Hans Georg Wunderlich
continued where Spengler had left off. Both Wunderlich and Spengler noted that
the state of the palaces was particularly bizarre. Thousands of people are
believed to have roamed the corridors of the Palace of Knossos, but the
staircases throughout the complex look as if they have never been used! Most
sections of the complex reveal no sign of usage, or age. This in itself is
bizarre. It is all the stranger as the material used was gypsum, a very soft
material. Why they used this inferior material to the widely available
marble-like limestone, is a great mystery – if the palace was meant for the
living.
Still, some argue whether the dead had any need for a sewage system, of
such complexity that it would take until Roman times before a similar
construction could be seen. There is apparently even a bathroom with a flushing
toilet, though there is some discussion whether this is an original find, or an
“addition” made by Evans. Evans did many reconstructions throughout the
complex, and some of these have been labelled “unfortunate”, as they are felt
to be more in line with the early 20th century culture than with that of the
ancient Minoans. But the problem, once again, is that the so-called bathrooms
are faced with gypsum too – and that substance and running water are mutually
exclusive, as it is not resistant to it.
Most remarkable, however, is the fact that the ancient Minoans did not
leave much behind – little waste, not many utensils, etc. have been found
within the ruins… perhaps because no-one lived inside? 
The Palace of Knossos is famous for its
depictions of white women and red men. The scenes depict processions, the men
dressed in skirts. But the most remarkable aspect of these scenes is that they
are identical with scenes – and equally old – found in Egyptian temples. They
speak of an island, identified in Egyptian sources as “Keftiu” – Crete.
The Palace of Knossos is famous for its
depictions of white women and red men. The scenes depict processions, the men
dressed in skirts. But the most remarkable aspect of these scenes is that they
are identical with scenes – and equally old – found in Egyptian temples. They
speak of an island, identified in Egyptian sources as “Keftiu” – Crete.
For a very long period, it was felt that the Minoan and Egyptian
civilisations evolved independent from one another, a thesis still adhered to
by some historians. But these discoveries contradicted this assumption. It
revealed that in the 18th Dynasty (ca. 1600-1500 BC) [sic], when Crete reached
its apogee, there was an intense exchange between the two civilisations.
Some archaeologists have interpreted the processions as nothing more
than “state visits” and exchange of gifts, i.e. forms of diplomacy, between
Crete and Egypt, thus trying to keep the status of an independent Crete intact.
But there is evidence that does not support this conclusion. The scenes were
depicted in Egyptian graves and the processions were clearly linked with the
dead. This makes Crete directly linked with the Egyptian dead.
It was such evidence that led Wunderlich to revisit Spengler’s opinion.
He came to the conclusion that the palaces were not built for a living king…
but for a dead one; that sections of the palace were clearly designed to allow
for the storage of the remains of the dead. And Wunderlich argued that this was
the main reason behind the close alliance between Crete and Egypt, going as far
as to suggest that the practice of mummification in Egypt was performed by
Cretans – and that the mummification itself might have occurred in Crete.
(above) scenes of the “Keftiu” at Egyptian
courts. (below) scene from Cretan palaces.
The bull was important both in Crete and Egypt. In Egypt, the animal is
linked with the deceased king, whereas the bull is depicted on all Minoan
monuments, though its specification function is unclear, because of the absence
of any knowledge on the Minoan religion. The palaces depict lilies and lotus
flowers, plants that had an important, religious function in Egypt.
The Minoan palaces have a depiction of what is known as “bull leaping”:
people performing acrobatics on a leaping bull. Experts have identified that
this form of acrobatics is physically impossible – humans and bulls cannot
interact in such a manner. The question is therefore whether these scenes
depict “imaginary” scenes, i.e. scenes that might occur in the Afterlife?
Wunderlich also noted that the name of king Minos is identical to the
first king of the Egyptian First Dynasty, Menes. But in the Homeric legends,
Minos is not so much king, as a judge, “wielding a golden sceptre while
dispensing laws among the dead.” If Minos ruled Crete, Crete was therefore an
island of the dead.
Hard archaeological evidence cementing a link between Crete and Egypt
comes in the form of the Haga Triada sarcophagus – the perfect object in
discussing funerary similarities. It depicts a griffin wagon and the sacrifice
of a bull, but most importantly, offerings being made to the dead, shown in
upright posture. The ceremony was performed in the open air, before the
deceased was moved to an underground vault, where he received the horns and the
blood of the bull. Likely not coincidentally, models of sacrificed animals have
been found in great number in the Cretan palaces. Though the scene shows the
mummy upright, later, the position seems to have been changed to sitting – the
reason why Spengler speculated the “royal throne” might have accommodated a
mummy.
Wunderlich asks – rightfully – why “the selfsame cult objects depicted
on the sarcophagus should have been found in, of all places, the so-called
domestic quarters of the king in the Palace of Knossos? If so, that the king
was no longer among the living when he dwelt in these rooms! For the rooms
identified by Sir Arthur Evans as living quarters evidently served for the
performance of a ceremony such as is depicted on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus:
the invocation and ritual veneration of a dead, not a living, person.” Indeed,
Wunderlich argues that what Evans interpreted as a bathtub was actually an oval
sarcophagus. The ventilation openings in the bottom, to help preserve the dried
mummies, Evans took as drainage holes for the bathwater. Evans himself saw the
strong Egyptian artistic influence: “This accumulating evidence of early
intercourse with the Nile Valley cannot certainly surprise the traveler fresh
from exploring site after site of primeval cities which once looked forth from
the southern spurs of Dikta far across the Libyan Sea, and whose roadsteads,
given a favourable wind, are within forty hours’ sail of the Delta.” Wunderlich
went even further and suggested that Crete in essence was no civilisation, but
a “vassal state” of Egypt.
Still, Evans was reluctant to endorse the Egyptian theme, even when in
March 1904, a tomb was discovered that contained an Egyptian basalt bowl, many
Egyptian alabaster bases, an Egyptian lapis lazuli necklace with pendant
figures, with the tomb itself – known as the Royal Tomb of Isopata, destroyed
in 1942 – resembling the rectangular layout of the tombs of Egyptian nobles at
Thebes. Still, writing to his father, he did remark: “It is curious what an
Egyptian element there is.” J. Alexander MacGillivray has commented how Evans
“continued to maintain that Minoan culture was independent of Egypt, even as he
personally continued to gather evidence to the contrary.” In 1991, in the
Egyptian Nile Delta, a team of Austrian archaeologists led by Manfred Bietak
discovered a palace complex in Tel ed-Daba (Avaris). An area on the western
edge of the site, known as Ezbet Helmi, revealed a large palace-like structure
dating to the Hyksos period (18th century BC). [sic] The ancient gardens
revealed many fragments of Minoan wall-paintings, similar in style to those
found in the palace at Knossos in Crete. It was not the first such discovery as
German archaeologist Eduard Meyer had found Knossos-like paintings in the tombs
of the necropolis of Thebes West.
It has been suggested that the Avaris paintings with a distinctive
red-painted background may even pre-date those of Crete and Thera and possibly
have influenced some of the 18th Dynasty tomb paintings that appear to include
Minoan themes such as the “flying gallop” motif of horses and bulls. In the
18th Dynasty strata of Ezbet Helmi, Dr Bietak also discovered many lumps of
pumice-stone, which could have come from the volcanic explosion on the island
of Thera, occurring in the 15th century BC and identified as the cataclysmic
event that ended the Minoan civilisation.
Mackey’s comment: But see my multi-part Theran series, beginning with:
Problematical Thera Dating. Part One: Introductory
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