Around 1900 BCE a city was built on Crete. Homer described it as a ‘great city… called Knossos on …a land called Crete, in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair, rich land begirt with water’. For years scholars believed it to be a myth because of the legend he related of the minotaur and the labyrinth: King Minos, a great sea-king and tyrant and overlord of the Aegean, built a navy to crush piracy in his seas while hiding a monster in a dark labyrinth under his palace. Hidden for shame, it being the progeny of his wife, Pasiphae, born half-man-half-bull because of her ardent passion for a bull.
Every seven years, seven youths and seven maidens from Athens were sacrificed to it in tribute or retribution for the killing of Minos’ son at the Olympic Games. On the third tribute, Prince Theseus, son of King Aegeus volunteered to be one of the youths intending to kill the minotaur. At Minos’ court, the king’s daughter, fair-haired Ariadne fell in love with Theseus as he stood in the group of doomed men and women.
That night, before they were led to the entrance of the labyrinth, she gave him a spool of thread with which he could retrace his stops and a short sword to hide in his tunic. Taking the lead, he killed the man-beast and escaped the maze. Ariadne and he, with the others, raced to board the Athenian ship. On his return, he forgot to change the black sails for white. King Aegus seeing the ‘black-winged ship’ for sorrow believing his son dead threw himself into the sea now called after him.
The ship was preserved, timbers being replaced as they rotted, although philosophers debated whether it could be classed as the same vessel or not. In 399 BCE Socrates’ execution was delayed to await the return of the vessel which sailed every year from Athens to Delos to make solemn sacrifices. When Schliemann in 1844 found a wall painting with an athlete vaulting over the back of a mighty charging bull while excavating at the Mycenaean site at Tiryns, he believed he had found the origin of the Minotaur legend.
The Royal Game of Knossos
Then the city and its palace were discovered to exist. Amazed archaeologists found multi-storied buildings and sophisticated sanitation with water closets. Excavating the palace complex revealed interior walls decorated with flowering plants, fountains, joyful women wearing low-necked tops with puffed sleeves and flounced skirts conversing in gardens. In one painting a youth wore a silver earring and agate bracelet; another had picked white crocuses to place in a vase.
Evans was amazed at colours ‘almost as brilliant as when laid down over three thousand years before’. There were fragments of blue and green porcelain and painted crystal plaques. One plaque showed a galloping bull against an azure background, its head with a grey-blue horn depicted in plaster-relief. Its prominent yellow eye with fiery red iris was ‘full of life and spirit’. The palace had ‘flushing’ toilets and a sewage system with covered manholes to give easy access for inspection. Ordinary houses were made of wood and plaster, with ground-floor double doors and rows of windows in first and second storeys; some even had attics with windows.
Painted plaster reproduction of Game from Knossos (Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund)
Throughout palace and city, fragments of inlays for squares in boards and game layouts were found scratched into pavements, steps and on loose stones and terracotta tiles, some of which proved to be Senet, Twenty Squares and Mehen. But, while excavating a complex of rooms around the ‘Central Court’ Dr Evans found a strange and mysterious game board and playing pieces which he dubbed The Royal Game of Knossos.
Top Image: Patolli, a gambling game invented by the early inhabitants of Mesoamerica, where players raced to move pebbles from one end of a cross-shaped track to the other.
Source: Boing Boing.
By Jan Knights
