Flashback: Mesopotamia And The Minoans

Minoan manufactured objects had been transported to Mesopotamia by the 18th century BC, nearly 4,000 years ago.

This is proven by the ancient site of Mari, on the western side of the Euphrates River in modern Syria.

• French archaeologists there excavated more than 20,000 Akkadian clay tablets during the 1930s.
• They wrote records of the kings of Mari, including one named Zimri-Lim who ruled ca. 1750 BC.

One tablet writes about the ice that ZimriLim was using in his summer drinks, which included wine, beer, and fermented barley-based drinks flavored with either pomegranate juice or licorice-like aniseed.

DISCOVERY AND OVERVIEW OF THE MINOANS

The Mari letters mention the Minoans, and a possible Minoan interpreter (or an interpreter for the Minoans), present at the site of Ugarit in north Syria during the early eighteenth century BC, where they were receiving tin that had been sent westward from Mari.14

However, there seems to have been a special relationship with Egypt beginning in the fifteenth century, during the time of Hatshepsut and then Thutmose III, which is why our tale begins at this point in time.

Sir Arthur Evans in the early 1900s called them the Minoan civilization.

We don’t actually know what they called themselves.

The Egyptians, Canaanites, and Mesopotamians had different names for them.

They established a civilization on Crete during the 3rd millennium BC that lasted until ca. 1200 BC.

Around 1700 BC, the island was hit by a devastating earthquake that required the rebuilding of the palaces at Knossos and elsewhere.

However, the Minoans recovered quickly and flourished as an independent civilization until Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland invaded them in the second millennium.

• They continued under Mycenaean rule until everything collapsed ca. 1200 BC.

Evans named the newly discovered civilization as “Minoan” after King Minos of Greek legend.

• He ruled Crete during ancient times, complete with a Minotaur (half man, half bull) in the labyrinthine subterranean extensions of the palace.

Evans found numerous clay tablets, and other objects, with writing on them—in both Linear A (still undeciphered) and Linear B (an early form of Greek probably brought to Crete by the Mycenaeans).

However, he never did discover the real name of these people, and, as mentioned, it remains unknown to this day —despite more than a century of continuous excavation not only at Knossos but at numerous other sites on Crete as well.17

Evans uncovered numerous imports from Egypt and the Near East at Knossos, including an alabaster lid inscribed in hieroglyphs with “the good god, Seweserenre, son of Re, Khyan.”18 Khyan, one of the best-known Hyksos kings, ruled during the early years of the sixteenth century BC. His objects have been found across the ancient Near East, but how this lid got to Crete is still a mystery.

Of additional interest is an Egyptian alabaster vase found many years later during another archaeologist’s excavation in a tomb at the site of Katsamba on Crete, one of the port cities on the north coast related to Knossos. It is inscribed with the royal name of Pharaoh Thutmose III: “the good god Men-kheper-Re, son of Re, Thutmose perfect in transformations.” It is one of the only objects bearing his name to be found in the Aegean.19

The 5th-century Greek historian Thucydides claimed that the Minoans had a navy and ruled the seas during this period:

“And the first person known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.3– 8). To earlier scholars, this became known as the “Minoan Thalassocracy,” from kratia meaning power and thalassos meaning sea. Although this supposed Minoan naval supremacy has now been called into question, there are mentions of “Keftiu-boats” in the Egyptian records—Keftiu being the Egyptian term for Crete at that time—although it is unclear whether these were boats from Crete, going to Crete, or built in a Minoan manner.

Evans’s successor at the site, John Devitt Stringfellow Pendlebury, was extremely interested in the possible connections between Egypt and Crete; he excavated at the Egyptian site of Amarna (Akhenaten’s capital city, of which we will speak more below) as well as at Knossos.

Pendlebury even published a monograph on the topic, entitled Aegyptiaca, in which he collected and cataloged all of the Egyptian imports found at Knossos and elsewhere on the island, before being shot to death by German paratroopers when they invaded Crete in 1941.

Evans and Pendlebury found additional imported objects at Knossos, and it has become clear over the ensuing decades that the Minoans seem to have been in both the import and the export business, industriously networking with a number of foreign areas in addition to Egypt. For instance, cylinder seals from Mesopotamia and storage jars from Canaan have been found at various sites on Crete in Middle and Late Bronze Age contexts, while Minoan pottery and other finished objects, or at least mentions of them, have been found in countries stretching from Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Cyprus to Syria and Iraq.