D (5:55)

Thank you for inviting me and it's a great pleasure to be here again discussing things Minoan with you.

A (6:02)

Discussing things Minoan and the Minoan Labyrinth and the Minotaur Sorting facts from fiction now in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Nico. One of the missions that you can do. It is set at the time of the Peloponnesian War, but you can go to Knossos and. And you can go to the labyrinth and fight the Minotaur.

D (6:23)

Now.

A (6:23)

No such thing as a silly question. First of all, can you first of all give us an overview of what is the Minotaur and the Labyrinth associated with Knossos?

D (6:32)

Well, the Minotaur is literally the bull of Minos, of King Minos. It's a mythological character. I don't think there was ever a bull of King Minos. And certainly I don't think there was ever a real being that had the body of a man and the head of a bull. And that was the offspring of King Minos wife, Pasipha, who had developed a passion for a bull and had sex with a bull, not using contraceptives and getting pregnant and then producing this offspring, this being that was half bull, half human, but ended up being called the Minotaur after King Minos, that was, after all, only his stepfather. And it's a figure that emerges from Greek mythology where we are told the story of this passion by Pasiphae for this beautiful bull that had been sent by a God, Poseidon, and that King Minos was supposed to sacrifice, but he thought the bull was so beautiful that didn't want to sacrifice it and sacrificed another bull instead. And this is something really stupid. This is something that you find in Greek mythology a lot. Mortals make promises to Greek gods and they never learn. If you make a promise to a Greek God, you should keep that promise because otherwise you are punished. So King Minos has these beautiful bulls sent by Poseidon. He promises to sacrifice. He doesn't sacrifice it. And the gods, because they are Greek gods, so a bit unfair, and they take it on his wife. And this is the story of the Minotaur.

A (8:45)

That's the story, isn't it? And it is one of the most bizarre conception stories of Greek mythology. And that is saying something in its own right, given certain Greek myths. Do we know how old this myth is, Nico? I know that there's always the saying that there's never one overarching version of a myth because certain aspects of myths change over time. But the origins of the Minotaur myth, I mean, do they go back 3,000 years to the Bronze Age? Do we know much about that?

D (9:14)

I personally think not. You are absolutely right. In Greek mythology, you only have bits and pieces here and there, and it's only relatively late that you actually get the full story. After the classical period, there are people that write compendium, you know, summaries of Greek mythology that tell you the full story. So there are bits that tell you the full story of exactly where King Minos comes from, who he marries, and the story of his really dysfunctional family. There are things, but they are very late elements of the story. Elements of King Minos, another character in the story, who is his daughter Ariadne, who supposedly falls in love with the Athenian hero Theseus, who is the guy who slaughters the Minotaur. Elements of this go back, well, at least to Homer, to the Homeric poems, to the Iliad and the Odyssey. But how far back into the Bronze Age? That is a different matter. When we are talking of Minoan civilization, this wonderful culture found on Crete by various archaeologists like Sir Arthur Evans, a civilization that lasts from, let's say, 3000 to about 1000 BC. Well, we don't have written evidence. We only have iconographic evidence. And it may be surprising for people to learn that in Minoan iconography, in the images that we get from Crete in the Bronze Age, there isn't a single Minotaur. Zilch. Plenty of bulls, lots and lots of bulls, but no Minotaur. It's only towards late, let's say around 1400 BC, that you find very, very few representations on seal stones. Tiny, tiny objects about this size that seem to represent hybrid figures. But it's not just mens and bulls. Sometimes it looks like men with the head of a goat or with head of dogs or women, you can see, because they have big breasts with the head of animals. And when it comes to these figures that recall for us the image of the Minotaur we are familiar with from later, from classical iconography. Body of a man, head of a bull. These have been interpreted as schematic scenes showing people performing bull leaping. Because in Minoan Crete, as I said, there are plenty, plenty of representations of bulls. And one of the most peculiar, characteristic, familiar image for Minoan Crete is people performing acrobatic over bulls. So what we find in these late seal stones, these images that seem like the head of a bull and the legs of a man, are probably schematic representations of bull leaping. I'm afraid no real minotaurs in the Bronze Age.

A (12:54)

But it's so interesting regardless, I mean, of those seal stones. And we'll explore more of that as the chat Nico, though, I would like to ask about this figure of King Minos, who of course is so big in the mythology and of course, the naming of Minotaur, the bull of Minos. Do we think it could be possible that the mythical figure of King Minos was based on an actual Minoan king? Do we think this is a real figure or a mythical figure? Minos?

D (13:24)

Very good question. And it is not impossible that there may have been some kind of figure, a figure upon which some of these stories have been elaborated, reinvented. It is not impossible. There must have been some important figure who ruled in Crete at some point. It has been suggested even that the name Minos is a bit like Caesar, that at some point it became a dynastic title like Caesar from historical character called Caesar was then used as a dynastic title by later emperors and indeed by the Russian tsar. The word tsar comes from Caesar. I can't say that this is a fact. I think it's a very ingenious explanation. But to think of Minos, the father of Ariadne, the father of Phaedra, the stepfather of the Minotaur, as a real historical character, I think that would be a bit too far. But any character must be inspired in part by something real.

A (14:50)

It is, because it's also interesting how that you can sometimes look at figures in mythology and then explore whether there is a historical basis to them, whether it's the Trojan War or people like maybe King Midas or King Croesus in Asia Minor. So it's interesting at least to explore that with Minos as well.

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A (15:50)

So Nico Minos is associated with the palace of Knossos in southern Crete, which is a place Assassin's Creed Odyssey recreates for players to explore. In fact, we're looking at the moment in the game when players can go underneath the palace and into the labyrinth. Now, does the game's representation of the labyrinth, I mean, does it reflect where and what ancient Greeks might have imagined it to be?

D (16:13)

No, they didn't. One of the great things about Assassin's Creed, the little bits I've seen, is that they present a reconstruction of the ruin of the palace. And I think what is really clever about Assassin's Creed and something that actually sometimes I use when I try to explain things to my students about the relationship between the actual physical remains of the Bronze Age and the later, much later Greek myths that we have in various texts is this, that the Greeks of later period must have seen the ruins of the Bronze Age palace of Knossos. But the people who had built this palace, the people who had painted the frescoes, and perhaps some of the frescoes might have still been visible on the walls for some centuries after the final destruction and abandonment of Clonz. People must have wanted to explain these ruins and therefore invented these amazing stories about King Minos and his family. The ruins of the palace were part of 5th, 6th, 7th century BC Crete. But these buildings were no longer part of living memory. People had forgotten who had built these ruins. People had forgotten who had even destroyed perhaps these buildings. But the ruins were there. And this is why Assassin Credence got so good for me as a teacher, because I can show. Well, you have to imagine yourself being a Greek, seeing these amazing ruins and trying to make sense of them. People invent stories as people in other parts of Europe have invented stories of princesses in ruined castles and and so on.

A (18:28)

It almost seems like, as you say, princesses in castles, or I might think of St. George slaying the dragon. You know, that is something, let's say, in England, that we've bought into with our culture. And that is something you see images of time and time again. Was it also a case with the people who lived at Knossos in classical Greek times or on Crete? Do they really buy into this myth? Because I remember seeing coins which depicts the labyrinth. It feels like they really buy into the myth.

D (18:56)

Absolutely. But the coins date to a much later period, 5th, 4th century BCE and that is exactly. But it's, you know, like people invented stories about Stonehenge and the Druid. It's something similar. The idea that the Greeks believed that there was a labyrinth underneath these ruins is certainly possible. Sir Arthur Evans would have said that. In fact, it was the ruins and the kind of almost labyrinthine structure of the ruins of Knossos that gave birth to this idea that this was the labyrinth of King Minos. You have to remember that the ruins, the Bronze Age ruins of Knossos remained visible, but Certainly by the 2nd century BCE, they were no longer visible. And in fact, after that, people started identifying the labyrinth with other parts of Crete. Some people thought that the labyrinth was a series of quarries dug in Roman time that are to the south of the island, because again, people had forgotten some of their ancient sources that explained exactly where Knossos was and so on. And so they sought the labyrinth elsewhere. And a lot of visitors, say in the 16th, 17th, even 18th century were taken around these labyrinthine quarries in a different part of Crete.

A (20:35)

I'd like to also ask about the whole word labyrinth, Nico, because especially when you keep saying it again and again and again, it's a rather weird word. Do we know much about, I mean, the origins of the word labyrinth, how it comes into being?

D (20:51)

There is linear B tablet from Knossos dating from about, let's say, 1300 BC, ballpark figure that may contain the word labyrinth, but it's spelled with a D instead of an l, but could have sounded as L. Words that end in inth are not very Greek, although they may still be Indo European and they may belong to a kind of pre Greek substratum of population. I mean, we know Minoans didn't speak Greek. We know that before people who spoke an early form of Greek arrived in Greece, people spoke a different language, but we don't really know. I'm not really a linguist, but one thing I know is that some people, Evans in Primis in particular, wanted the word labyrinth to derive from another word, which is labrys, which means double axe. But there are problems because why should labyrinth be related to labrith? It doesn't work linguistically. Moreover, in the Greek language, the word labris is attested for the first time much, much later, and the word used for double axe is pelecus. Evans wanted this to be labyrinth connected with labrys, a word that means double axe. And he wanted this to mean that the labyrinth was the house of the double axe, because many of the mason's marks of the signs that he found inscribed on the stones of the palace at Knossos were double axis. But apart from the linguistic problem that deriving labyrinth from labrys doesn't work linguistically, to me, there is another issue here is that, yes, the double axe is very, very common Echnosaurs as a mason mark, but one we don't know that that was the word used to indicate this particular sign as back as 1200, 1300 or even, you know, 800 BCE because the word labris is not attested in Greek until much later. Yes, the sign of the double axe is very common at Knossos, but it's also known at other sites in Crete. I remember seven, eight years ago, I was digging at a site in the far east of Crete called Palaikastro. And I found a building that had some nice blocks. And one of these blocks also had this nice sign of a double axe. And other signs are also very common at Knossosauce. Not just the double axe. There are other mason's marks with other types of signs that are also very common there. Not a very close link, I'm afraid, between Labrys labyrinth, double axe. Nice story, though.

A (24:24)

A nice story. And I remember when I was at the Ashmolean Museum a couple of years ago, like being shown a bit of Minoan pottery which had. Might have been lathe pottery, but it had a double ax on it. And you have artifacts, the double axe. So even if labyrinth, you know, it isn't related to the word labyrinth, the double axe was still evidently important to these people. Nico, I must also ask, going back to the palace a little longer, because I've also seen, I mean, there is a plan of the, the Bronze Age palace and it is huge. There is over a thousand rooms. I mean, could that be a contribution to its link to the labyrinth, the fact that it was just almost a maze of so many different rooms?

D (25:04)

Yes, and also I think the fact that minor architecture compared to later classical Greek architecture, it's more confusing. It's not so symmetrical. So I think that also may have led to this idea. I don't know whether there are 1,000 rooms. I never counted them. But yes, there are many rooms, there are lots of corridors. And also, you know, it must have been awe inspiring for people coming from small villages around Crete. And just the ruins, the ruins must have seemed quite awe inspiring to the people of the 8th 7th century who lived on Crete many years after Knossos was destroyed and abandoned. And actually, we know they left little offerings, little pots, little figurines next to the still standing walls of the palace. I think that's when a lot of the stories must have been created.

A (26:19)

It's that afterlife of the palace which is also so interesting. And of course, when you get figures like Sir Arthur Evans and other people who excavated Knossos, do they uncover a lot of depictions of bulls from the Minoan palace and the nearby area to once again reinforce that link with the Minotaur of mythology.

D (26:38)

Absolutely. Imagine if, for example, some of the amazing frescoes from Knoissance with bulls stayed for a bit longer on the walls and were visible at times when the painting of these frescoes, the constructions of the panels, as I said, were no longer part of living memory, so people.

A (27:02)

Could actually venture in and, you know, see the remains and they could actually see these frescoes, these wall paintings and once again don't have that connection. But then they can create those stories from it.

D (27:12)

Exactly, exactly. You know, the palace is destroyed around let's say 1200 BC or 1350 BC depending on who you believe. For centuries nothing happens or not much. And then around 800 BC or so on, sometimes people go there and leave some offerings. And then only many centuries later, at some point on top of the palace, people built a Greek temple. But we are talking of perhaps 1,000 years after the palace was destroyed. It was almost like people had not exactly fear but some issues with these ruins.

A (27:56)

Do you think that, that maybe that later fear in later history or maybe that kind of sacred, potentially a word, I mean associated with the ruins of the, the palace. Do you think that helps preserve some of the art which was later discovered within? You know, because you didn't have it robbed all the time. Like, like other places, there was maybe a fear of later antiquity going in there.

D (28:20)

There are some places of memory that for us think of the Twin Towers, Auschwitz of course, I'm not saying that the Minoan palace was something like that. What I'm saying is that there is a relationship between some of the memories that people have of a place and what people do or do not do. Normally say if a place is destroyed by a big earthquake or something, sometimes people simply just go back and rebuild and continue to live there. But there are some events that people don't go back. They prefer to move elsewhere and we don't know. But it is interesting that Knossos is not immediately reinhabited. There is a big destruction, but it's not that the people vanish, but they just don't go back and build there. Later bits of the panace were destroyed, but more by much, much later. People using beautiful stones to build their own houses and other things.

B (29:42)

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A (30:19)

I like to go back to the architectural layout of the palace, but actually go beneath where it's commonly assumed that the labyrinth was. And as it's shown in Assassin's Creed Odyssey and so on now with archaeological excavations there. I've done many interviews before and I love talking about the underworld beneath the buildings, the sewers and the drainage because it's such an important part of ancient civilizations. I mean, if there wasn't a labyrinth underneath the palace, do we know much about that important, you know, not seen part? Do we know much about the sewers and the drainage? And was there a Bronze Age toilet in the palace as well?

D (30:58)

Yes, there was certainly a sewage system or a drainage system. But I was also thinking of as you were talking and talking in or something underneath. When we are digging an archaeological site, we always think of something as underneath, underneath the soil, but it wasn't necessarily underneath. In the Bronze Age, this is what happens when sites are destroyed. You know, walls fall in, wind, other things bring soil in. And in most cases, in fact, when people do rebuild on top of ruins, things become underneath, become below the soil, but not because they were originally so, but because people build on top. And this is why in some countries you have lots and lots of archaeological sites that are called tells that are little mounds because, you know, the settlement start at this level and then people keep building on top of, on top, on top and so create this tell or mounds or hayuk in, in Turkey. I mean, if you think of the, the level of the street in London, what it must have been even only 200 years ago, it's much, much lower. Because when people build repair a street, they don't dig and re asphalt rebuild the soil. You build on top. So it looks as if things are below the ground, but it's simply, it's because the street level has risen to some extent. This is what also happened a bit at Knossos. Yes, there are rooms that were basements, but also rooms that were at ground floor. Now look as if they are underneath the ground because things have fallen in. As an archaeologist, it's always fun to explain this to people that we have reason. It's not that things are necessarily under the ground, they're under the ground now, but there are all kinds of reasons why they are under the ground. And it's not because they were labyrinth underneath the palace, but there was certainly a very sophisticated drainage system so big that people can actually go inside and crawl. I have a couple of colleagues, friends of mine many years ago wrote an article about this and they spent part of their summer crawling inside the drains of Knossos.

A (33:51)

It's not the ideal place where a minotaur would be anyway, but actually I find this Stuff even more interesting, like to learn about actually how these people lived in the palace and with all this drainage and so on. Nico, as time goes on, later in ancient history than in medieval times and Renaissance, and the fact that the myth of the Minotaur is always there, one of the most popular myths of ancient Greece is it almost as if overshadows the rest of the Minoan story, especially as the Minoans become almost a lost civilization for so long that when you do get to the people like Sir Arthur Evans and others, when they're starting to dig around there, do they have, like, a copy of their Minotaur myth in one hand and a shovel in the other, and they want to find evidence for it? So does it kind of cloud their judgment when excavating a site like Knossos?

D (34:40)

Yes and no, but perhaps more yes than no. I'll tell you why. It's not that Evans would go and dig at Knossos with a story of the Minotaur in his hand, but obviously, I mean, he knew his classics very, very well and therefore knew about this. And he certainly interpreted very, very early on. He found an impression made on clay by a seal that he calls the young Minotaur. I think that was in 1901. And people have studied this image again and again, and it turns out that this Minotaur is not a Minotaur, but the monkey.

A (35:30)

The monkey tour. Okay, okay.

D (35:34)

You see, Evans is looking at this image in 1901 and saying, this is a young Minotaur. And even 20 years later, even much later, still calling it the Minotaur. Even if by then he should have known better. His idea of linking labries with labyrinth. Yes, the classical sources have influenced and will continue to influence people's perceptions of the Minoans. And this is good and bad. I think it's bad when people are trying to fit in their interpretation of the archaeology and so on. But on the other hand, what the name of Knossos was when how the locals called the area in the late 19th century, early 20th century, the area that was excavated by Evans and before Evans, the first person that had a modern excavation of Knossos was called Minos. Minos. Minos Calucerinos. He dug there in 1878, and it's because of his excavations and what he found that eventually decided to dig there. But the place to where they were digging was known by the locals as Capizaria, which means the place of the pithoi, these large storage jars, or tslevi ikefara, the squire's knoll. Tzelevi is a Turkish word that means the sire, the squire. If you were offered to go and visit the archaeological site, Tapetharia or Tuzalevi Kephala, or the squire's gnome, to visit the palace of Minos, which would you choose? In a sense, it's good to maintain the association that these places have with Greek mythology. But I think it's important for people to understand that, yes, there isn't really a Minotaur, there isn't a King Minos, but that the ruins acted as catalyst for the creation of these amazing stories.

A (38:05)

I mean, absolutely, Nico. And it's. We could talk for a long time about that legacy of the Minoans since they are rediscovered just over 100 years ago, couldn't we? And how you have that myth looming large in the background, one of the most popular myths of Greek mythology. And many people seeing these new discoveries from Knossos and with that myth looming large in the back of their mindset, but trying to interpret the Minoans and you get these various different interpretations of the Minoan civilization. There's a kind of a pacifist one, isn't there as well? And, but then there's the, the bull leaping and everything. It's fascinating how that legacy of the Minoans, it's very. It changes and changes throughout the 20th century.

D (38:47)

Yes, indeed. Some years ago I actually published a book on this which looks precisely at how the Minoans have been used, reinvented beyond archaeology in other cultural practices, from opera to paintings, poetry. It's absolutely fascinating. And you know, sometimes people take the inspiration only from the Bronze Age structures and invent new stories. And some people use a mixture of the old mythology, the story of Theseus and the Minotaur and Ariadne, the clue of Ariadne and so on. But also color, give a kind of Bronze Age local color to these old, well known stories. I mean, the most famous of all probably are the books by Mary Reynold, the King Must Die and the Bull from the Sea, which is a retelling of the story of Theseus, but using an awful lot of allusions and Bronze Age background.

A (40:07)

Renneke, I've got a good question for you. To wrap this up in Assassin's Creed, you can use something called an animus to go back in time. If you had an animus, and you could go back to Bronze Age Minoan Crete, you could go to Knossos. I mean, is there a particular moment from the history of Knossos that you would want to go and visit or a particular place you'd want to see and understand from the archaeology that you've done.

D (40:35)

Well, how many centuries am I allowed? Because I can tell you one thing, I wouldn't want to be there towards the end. I would like to be there at the beginning. I would like to be there around let's say 1900 DC. I would like to see, supposedly the first monumental building of Knossos is being is constructed. I would like to see that. For me as an archaeologist, it would be fantastic to try and understand what the so called first Minoan palace really looked like. Because we think of the palace of Minos, the palace at Knossos Festos, people who visited Menoan palaces, most of what they see are structures that date to, let's say from about 1600 BCE or later. And people who have studied the Minoans and their so called palaces usually talk of a first palace period and the second palace period. And at Festos and other sites, things are a bit clearer than at Knossos. At Knossos, the remains of the so called first palace are pretty slim on the ground. Whether perhaps because a lot of them have been destroyed and the second palace has been built on top. So this is where I would like to see whether Knossos was really already the most powerful place on the island of Crete, or whether perhaps the people in the south, the people at Phaistos, were the top dogs. So 1900 B.C. and if I could, I'd like to be a man, not a woman.

A (42:50)

Well, Nico, this has been absolutely brilliant and really highlighting not just the story of the Minotaur and the labyrinth, but also delving into the archaeology and the work and what links to the Minotaur myth and what doesn't, and actually exploring what did lie beneath the palace at Knossos. Sewers, not labyrinth. Nico, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you.

D (43:16)

Thank you very much. Lovely to see you again.

A (43:23)

Well, there you go. There was Professor Nico Momigliano talking through the story of the Minoan labyrinth. Truth versus myth. What do we know? What is the archaeology saying? I hope you enjoyed the episode, an episode that was first released on our sister podcast, Echoes of History. So if you want more history over the Christmas break, definitely go and check out their archive. Thank you once again for listening to this episode. Please follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well. Well, we'd really appreciate that. Now don't forget you can also sign up to History hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with the new release every week. Sign up up@historyhit.com subscribe. That's all from me wishing you a very merry Christmas and I'll see you in the next episode.

B (44:22)

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