Exploring the Labyrinth
When, in 1900, Sir Arthur Evans uncovered the enormous Minoan palace at Knossos in Crete he was filled with wonder at the marvels he found. Huge pottery bath-tubs, rain water spouts that ended in a parabolic curve so that the water landed without a splash, a bewildering maze of rooms, corridors and courtyards, and above all, the fabulous frescoes that adorned the walls.
Unfortunately, he only found fragments of the frescoes and the wonderful pictures you see in books are, in fact, his restorations. Critics have long suggested that Evans' imagination played a greater part in those restorations than the evidence. A couple of years back when the Diggings Tour went to Crete and we toured the Herakleion museum where those frescoes are on display, a close look appeared to back up the critics' charge, for the fragments of original plaster were few and far between and vast areas of "reconstructed" frescoe lay in between. In fact, one picture, which Evans decided represented monkeys picking water lilies, are now more plausibly identified as Minoan youths plucking unidentified flowers.
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| The Bull-leaper frescoe in Herakleion museum. The dark patches are the original plaster, the rest is Arthur Evans' reconstruction. |
Possibly the most famous of these frescoes - and the on which inspired Evans' imagination the most - is the "Bull leaper" which apparently depicts a young man wearing a skimpy loincloth somersaulting over a back while two girls, identified by their light-coloured skin, watch admiringly. (Alternatively, the girls are part of the act, for one appears to be grasping the bull's horns, possibly in preparation for her own somersault over its head and back.) Evans decided that these bull-leapers were not athletes participating in a particularly dangerous sport, but sacrificial victims taking part in a religious ritual, a theory that allowed him to reinterpret an ancient Greek myth.
According to the story, Minos, the cruel king of Crete, conquered Athens and obliged the Athenians to pay a tribute of seven young men and seven young women every seventh year. These were taken to Crete and fed to the Minotaur, a monstrous creature half-man and half-bull, that was kept in the middle of a baffling maze known as the Labyrinth. On the third occasion Theseus, son of the king of Athens, volunteered to go with the others and slay the monster. Helped by Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, who fell in love with him, Theseus was successful both in killing the Minotaur and in finding his way out of the maze.
In his enthusiasm for his discoveries, Evans proposed that in fact the fourteen young people were sent to "dance" with the bulls in one of the courtyards of the palace of Knossos, so rather than being fed to the bull as part of its diet, they were condemned to the dangerous sport of bull-leaping, in doing which they doubtless died. According to this re-telling of the story, it is the 1,000-roomed palace itself that is the labyrinth, its corridors and courtyards forming the maze through which Theseus had to make his way, guided by Ariadne's thread, in order to kill the bull and free the Athenian captives.
I must admit that I have never been entirely happy with this version of the tale. Surely even the densest Greek on even the darkest of nights would have been able to tell the difference between a palace and a maze? The number of sleeping attendants, over whose legs he tripped, or of screaming princesses into whose bedrooms he blundered, would surely have given the game away? Furthermore, if the Minotaur was no more than a herd of fighting bulls, merely killing one of them would hardly have delivered Athens from its awful tribute.
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| The little town of Gortyn 20 miles south of Herakleion. |
I was, therefore, extremely interested in the recent announcement of an alternative site for the labyrinth - a huge underground quarry at the town of Gortyn, a mere twenty miles from Knossos. This is no new discovery, for the quarry has been known for a long time, nor is the identification new, for the inhabitants know it as "the Labyrinthos Caves". A maze of interlocking tunnels and chambers, at least three miles in length, the quarry is, in my opinion, an excellent candidate for the infamous home of the Minotaur.
Some have rejected the identification, claiming that the quarry only dates from Greek or Roman times. It is certainly true that the quarry was extended by the Greeks and Romans for their own building work, but it is entirely possible that the later work obliterated any signs of previous quarrying. Indeed, it is as well that the caves have been rediscovered, for the British team that entered them found that locals were busying planting dynamite in them in the hope that a sufficiently large explosion would reveal buried treasure!
© Kendall K. Down 2009
