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Contributor: Suzanne Riordan. Lesson ID: 13082
Who were the Minoans? Why did they have a 1400-room palace? Did they really leap over bulls? Why did their civilization disappear? Who took over their land? And how is all that related to Greek myths?
Archaeologist Arthur Evans did this when he investigated this question.
An example is the myth of Theseus and the minotaur.
In ancient Greece, the Minotaur was a terrible creature that was half-man, half-bull, and it lived in a vast maze called the labyrinth on the island of Crete.
The king of Crete, King Minos, kept the Minotaur there and demanded that the people of Athens send seven boys and seven girls to be fed to the beast every year.
A brave young hero named Theseus decided to stop this. He volunteered to be one of the victims sent to Crete, but he had a secret plan.
When he arrived, King Minos' daughter, Princess Ariadne, fell in love with Theseus and gave him a ball of string. She told him to tie one end of the string at the labyrinth's entrance and unroll it as he went inside so he could find his way back out.
Theseus entered the labyrinth, fought the Minotaur, and defeated it with strength and bravery. Then, he followed the string back to the entrance, saving himself and the other young Athenians.
Theseus returned home to Athens as a hero, and the city no longer had to send people to Crete.
This is a great story that shows how courage, cleverness, and a little help from friends can overcome even the scariest challenges!
The Greek islands were home to two of Europe's first civilizations: the Minoan Civilization first and then the Mycenaean.
Many little islands are scattered between Turkey and Greece across the Aegean Sea and the Sea of Crete.
On some of these islands, ancient civilizations thrived.
They had rich forests, fertile land, and access to the sea for trading. They built magnificent palaces on top of hills, forts, and storage areas. They sailed throughout the Mediterranean, trading grain, olive oil, and wine.
Watch the video below to learn more about these ancient people.
Now that you have some background information, look closely at the Minoans.
Minoans
Archaeologist Arthur Evans discovered the civilization of the Minoans and gave it that name.
Finding some old coins that were different from the known coins of the ancient city of Mycenae, he guessed (correctly) that there was an ancient civilization on the island of Crete that existed before the Mycenaean civilizations.
Evans purchased a large property on Crete and began excavations. His findings were striking.
He found a magnificent palace at Knossos. The picture at the beginning of this lesson shows one entrance to the palace. It spread across five acres of land with 1400 rooms!
It had a home for the king, storehouses, a theater, and an arena for the dangerous sport of bull-leaping. In this sport, a man teased a bull until the bull rushed at him. Then, he would try to leap safely over the animal.
Of course, men would often not survive this exercise!
Seeing the vast palace with its hundreds of hallways, Evans believed this was the labyrinth spoken of in the Greek myth of King Minos.
There were images of bulls and bull-leaping all over the Knossos palace. King Minos was said to have kept a monster— half-man and half-bull — in this labyrinth that would kill and eat people, and the king demanded young people from Greece be fed to him.
So Evans named this new-found culture after King Minos: the Minoans.
Watch this animated re-creation of Knossos.
The palace was the center of a busy settlement. It had paved roadways and paths, bridges, and well-engineered drainage systems. All this in 2700 BC!
The Minoans dominated the islands in the Mediterranean for over 1000 years. They were expert sailors and had their navy. They traded their goods from Egypt to Spain and all along the Mediterranean.
The Minoan civilization probably ended due to a natural disaster. There was a devastating volcano eruption on the island of Santorini that had a terrible effect on Crete, either killing many of the Minoan people or weakening their civilization so that they could not fight off invaders.
Continue to the Got It? section to learn a little more about the Mycenaeans, who invaded Crete and took over the civilization of the Minoans.
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