The final blow to the resultant Minoan-Mycenaean civilisation came from outside invasion, possibly by the mysterious “ Sea Peoples.” There is also evidence that the Mycenaeans took over the Minoan administration, but adopted its artistic and orthographic practices. The natural cataclysm which was the Thera (Santorini) eruption may have shaken the Minoan psyche to its core. Perhaps the ravages of Poseidon, the Earthshaker eventually broke the spirit of this highly advanced and artistic civilisation, causing them to abandon their gods and run to the hills. There are many theories, and the topic is hotly debated by scholars of the Aegean Bronze Age. No one knows exactly who, or what, brought about the final downfall of the Minoan civilisation. How to draw a labyrinth (Costis Davaras, Guide to the Cretan Antiquities, Noyes Press, 1976 p. It is also the key to drawing a formal labyrinth pattern, as shown below: The labrys is the Minoan double-axe, which in a stylised form, is the symbol for the letter ‘A’ in the Cretan Linear A and B scripts. The resultant archaeological picture at the site is so complex that Knossos has been referred to by scholars as ‘”A Labyrinth of History.”*ĭelving deeper into these layers of history, we discover that Knossos, and the other Minoan palaces on Crete, have a more fundamental connection to the labyrinth.
#IS THERE A LABYRINTH 2 SERIES#
During the Minoan period, the palace at Knossos was rebuilt at least three times, following a series of destructions by earthquake and fire. I have visited Knossos several times, and there is certainly something labyrinthine, not only in its construction, but in its layers of construction. Hard not to, when its discoverer, Sir Arthur Evans, named it “The Palace of Minos at Knossos.” He even named the pre-Greek civilisation he discovered there “Minoan.” Most archaeologists and historians of the Late Bronze Age identify the palace of Knossos on Crete with the Labyrinth of Minos. Plutarch, in his Life of Theseus, describes how, on his return voyage from Crete having slain the Minotaur, Theseus calls at Delos “and danced with his youths a dance…being an imitation of the circling passages in the Labyrinth, and consisting of certain rhythmic involutions and evolutions” (Plutarch, Life of Theseus, Chapter 21). The labyrinth may also have been a formal dance, performed in an outdoor arena on just such a dancing floor. Homer, in Book 18 of the Iliad, describes how “Daedalus in Cnossos once contrived/A dancing-floor for fair-haired Ariadne” (Lines 592-3). (Herodotus, The Histories, 2.148, Penguin Classics 1954 translation) I went through the rooms in the upper storey… and it is hard to believe that they are the work of men the baffling and intricate passages from room to room and from court to court were an endless wonder to me, as we passed from courtyard into rooms, from rooms into galleries, from galleries into more rooms, and thence into yet more courtyards. Inside, the building is of two storeys and contains three thousand rooms, of which half are underground, and the other half directly above them. I have seen this building, and it is beyond my power to describe… It has twelve covered courts – six in a row facing north, six south – the gates of one range exactly fronting the gates of the other, with a continuous wall round the outside of the whole. Its prototype was that of Crocodopolis in Egypt, according to Ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who writes: There are, however, other descriptions of the Labyrinth. The Labyrinth was constructed by Daedalus, according to the most famous legend, to contain the monstrous Minotaur: half beast and half man, born out of an unnatural coupling between King Minos’ wife Pasiphae, and the prized bull of the god Poseidon. Note the quotation marks: this phrase is attributed to an earlier poem, possibly by Sophocles, now lost to time, but evidently well known at the time the author was writing. Now the Labyrinth which Daedalus constructed was a chamber “that with its tangled windings perplexed the outward way.” (Pseudo-Apollodorus, The Library, III.I.4, translated by James G. The labyrinth which famously housed the Minotaur is mentioned in a 1st-century AD encyclopedia of mythology titled Bibliotheca and attributed to Pseuo-Apollodorus: Photo of Knossos ruins: Image by Bigfoot from Pixabayįor this week’s challenge, let’s see if the figure of the labyrinth can help us perplex ways out of the Anthropocene predicament we are now in.