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Homer and Late Minoan Crete

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

J. T. Hooker
J. T. Hooker
Affiliation:
University College, London.
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Extract

It is well known that Evans was not greatly interested in what happened in Crete after the devastation of the Knossian Palace, an event he placed at the very end of his Late Minoan II period. In his view, the Palace was not immediately re-occupied: some time after the catastrophe of 1400, it was inhabited by ‘squatters’, who repaired some of the damaged parts of the building but for the most part simply cleared away the rubbish deposited at the time of the destruction and lived in the Palace without substantially altering it. Evans believed that after the end of the Palatial period at Knossos the main vigour of the Minoan civilisation flowed into its Mycenaean branch and was responsible for the Achaean hegemony of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. However, the settlements at Knossos and elsewhere in Crete still preserved, though in a muted form, basic elements of the venerable native culture. The contents of the tombs in the Zapher Papoura cemetery, in use both before and after the great destruction, showed that the continuity of Minoan burial customs and pottery styles was not arrested. Evans nowhere tried to resolve the paradox which confronts anyone who takes his view of Late Minoan III Crete. On the one hand, we have the picture of a more or less impoverished country which had lost most of its importance, lying outside the main developments of the Mycenaean world and above all preserving its own culture at a time when the rest of the Aegean had been absorbed into a Mycenaean koine. On the other hand, both the Iliad and the Odyssey speak of a well-populated island of many cities which provides, under the leadership of Idomeneus, one of the largest of the Greek contingents before Troy; nothing in Homer suggests that Idomeneus is not as thoroughly ‘Achaean’ as Agamemnon himself.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 89 , November 1969 , pp. 60 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1969

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References

I am most grateful to Professor T. B. L. Webster for reading this paper and making many improvements to it.

1 Palace of Minos (hereafter PM) ii 335–344.

2 PM iv 945.

3 PM iv 356.

4 PP xix (1964) 189.

5 PM i 11.

6 For a recent survey of this dispute, see Schachermeyr, , AAHG xix (1966) 6–10.Google Scholar

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11 MP 520–521.

12 Popham, considerably supplements the corpus of published LM IIIb pottery in ‘Some Late Minoan III pottery from Crete’ in BSA lx (1965) 316–342.Google Scholar

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49 Vermeule, Emily, ‘Painted Mycenaean larnakes’ in JHS lxxxv (1965) 123–148.CrossRefGoogle ScholarCallimachus, Aetia ii 43.86–92Google Scholar preserves a memory of connections between Crete and Boeotia.

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62 Huxley, , ‘Mycenaean decline and the Homeric Catalogue of Ships’ in BICS iii (1956) 19–31 (24)Google Scholar; Willetts, , Cretan cults and festivals 136.Google Scholar Huxley reverts to the subject and discusses many other subjects relevant to the present paper in his monograph Crete and the Luwians.

63 The mention of Ariadne's abduction by Theseus (λ 321–324) is an isolated reference in the Catalogue of Women. But see Webster, op. cit. 23.

64 This (perhaps intentional?) ambiguity seems to me to rob of much of its usefulness the work of Martha Aposkitou already cited. She is at pains to assign to each of the peoples mentioned a locality, and even a rôle, in Crete at the end of LM IIIb (147–158).

65 Cf. Bolling, , The external evidence for interpolation in Homer 249.Google Scholar