From the Vault: The Minotaur, Part 2

the Labyrinth again. This is going to be the second part of our series on the Minotaur for this October. I'm so excited because, in addition to talking more about the maze and the Monster, today we're gonna be interviewing a professor who specializes in the history of my knowing Crete. That's right. We're delighted to have Nicoletta Mamiliano, Professor of

Agan Studies at the University of Bristol, on the show. Uh. She's the author of the new book In Search of the Labyrinth, The Cultural Legacy of Minoan Crete, which is available now in paperback, hardback and as an e book. And it's a beautiful book, just loaded with with wonderful illustrations and photographs of you know, of the various motifs

that she discusses in the book. All right, so before we jump into our conversation, we should probably do a quick overview of Minoan Creed, just to give you a little bit of background. Yeah, you know, in our previous episode on the minitar we touched a little bit on the fact that these are Greek myths concerning the Minoan civilization on the isle of Crete. Um, but yeah, let's get a let's just lay a little groundwork for the

interview to follow. So Crete is an island in the eastern Mediterranean, the fifth largest in fact, it's part of what is now the nation of Greece. It's long, it's narrow, it's a largely mountainous Today it's a melting pot of European, Asian and African cultures and it's well positioned to bridge

those cultures now. Stone tools on Creed have been dated back a hundred thirty thousand years, but true human settlements weren't found here until uh it seems like a b c. But it was home to what is sometimes referred to as the first advanced European civilization. It was established by three thousand b c E and by two thousand b C they were building palaces and exhibited a rich culture. They thrived till at least fourteen fifty b C, when

they ended up entering into a period of decline. Okay, So in the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, we are getting a sort of exo mythology, a depiction of a past, once flourishing culture, but depicted from the outside by a different culture, and in a somewhat pejorative way, at least in in that particular story, right that the idea that there's a monster there and that the Greek city states like Athens would have to pay tribute to the monster in the palace on in my and Crete,

Yeah and U. And one of the big things we have to keep in mind is that, you know, we we're dealing with one ancient people's interpretations of another ancient people. Um. So we while we refer to this Bronze Age civilization today as Minoan Crete, the name itself here is referring to King Minos in Greek traditions. We simply don't know what the pre Hellenistic inhabitants of this island called themselves. Some scholars, according to Mamiliano, believe that the second millennium

BC Egyptians knew them as the people of Kef. Two. The Minoan distinction stems from the early twentieth century. Uh. This was it was dubbed by Sir Arthur Evans, the famous excavator of Nosis, the the the the major city

there on what is what is now crete. Alright, So Arthur Evans, working on excavating this ancient structure at Canossus uh Is is Knowingly he's not suggesting that like the mythical king Mino was actually the king who lived in this palace, but saying, well, that is the terminology that we already have applied to it in a mythological context, so we might as well just use it to apply to the archaeological remains of this actual civilization, right Yeah,

And I think realizing that sort of it adds the mystery of it all right, you know, and into the wonder again of of not just an ancient civilization, but one ancient civilization's interpretation of that which came before. Thinking about ancient Greek myths pertaining to the civilization of my knowing Crete uh brings up a subject that we've talked

about on the show before. But it's the modern tendency to kind of compress all of ancient history together and not realize how much time actually elapsed within what we

call ancient history. Like, for example, if you were Julius Caesar living in the you know, the first century BC of the Roman Republic, the ancient parts of ancient Egypt were more ancient to him than ancient Rome is to us now, like that much time had gone by, and so there were huge gaps of history in the ancient world even, I mean there were there were that the ancient Greeks also could look back on mysterious, vanished ancient civilizations and not know anymore about them necessarily than we

know about a lot of ancient law civilizations today. That's right. And so in some respects of me personally, when I'm reading about all this and thinking about all this, like you know, it's like a game of telephone across the ages,

with different cultures interpreting different cultures. Uh. And and I think stuff like the particularly the myth of the Minotaur, is a perfect example of this, as it be you know, begins as something to some extent rooted in this part of the world and and and isolated around at least thoughts about crete, and then it becomes this this Greek thing, and then it every time it is handled, every time it is retold, it becomes, uh, you know, it takes

on particles of new cultures and new concerns and new people. Totally. Before we jump right into the interview here, just want to throw in a couple of notes. First of all, at around the fourteen minute mark, you're gonna hear a couple of outlook pings. Uh. That's just part of doing a remote recordings these days. But don't worry. It's it's us, not you, and will only be a couple of them.

It's not gonna keep going throughout the interview. Also, I want to point out that our guests at around twenty five minutes then is going to mention mason's marks, And just to give you a little background, these are marks that were found on masonry that are sort of a signature of the individuals that created the masonry work. Good dad that note, because I did not know what mason's marks were until until we look that up. Well, on that note, let's go ahead and jump into our interview

with Professor Nicoletta Mamiliano. Let's start with your book, In Search of the Labyrinth, the Cultural Legacy of the Noan Crete. Where did the I the for the book come from and what did you set out to accomplish with it? Well, I have always been fascinated by the history of research in anyone given subject. That is, I've always been fascinated by the complex relationship between past and present. I've always been interested in how a particular discipline has developed over

the centuries. That is, how theories, methods, research questions can change from one generation to another. And of course the way in which scholarly research and agendas developed is related to our present, is related to what happens in the present, and for me, the minn past and the min non cultural legacy. It's not just what happened in the second and third millennium BC, that is, the traditional chronology given

to minor and civilization. And also the minor and legacy is not just, as I said, what happened in the second and third millennium BC, and what possible material or icono, graphic, linguistic, or even spiritual legacy may have been transmitted to us via Mycenian Greece and then later via Classical Greece. For me, what we now call minorn creed is the product of interpretations, reconstructions, and complex entanglements between objects and ideas about them, and

these ideas are influenced by the present. I also think that is in it It's very important for scholars to try and understand how their own discipline, how their own subject is perceived beyond academia. And I think artistic and literary imaginations of mine own crete are good to think with. They may stimulate new ways of looking at ancient objects. Um new imaginations can make me, as a scholar, appreciate what is significant or not about my discipline for the

general public. And after all, it is the general public the taxpayer, who funds my research, and I think I have the duty to understand what fascinates would interest the general public, not just me as a scholar. Now, in broad strokes, what does the treatment of the known civilization in Greek mythology reveal about Minoan creeds place in ancient Greek culture? Well, in ancient Greek culture, in Greek mythology, what we now called minor and crete appears as a

really strange and contradictory place. Crete in Greek mythology is a land where immortal Zeus, who was also the father of King Minus, to where Zeus was nurtured, but also where he died and where he was buried minor and Crete was also a land ruled by loggiving king Minus, who was a kind of Cretan Moses. And King Minus conversed with and was wisely guided by his father Zeus.

But Crete was also a land rife with extreme sexual desires, with adulter bestiality, mostly involving women and bulls, pederasty, human sacrifice, magic, murder, and betrayal. So I would say the treatment of my non civilizations in Greek mythology reveals a rather ambivalent aptitude

by the Greeks towards this island and her past. This reminds me of some parallels with, say, the Biblical view of the Antediluvian time, the time before the flood in the Book of Genesis, which I think is simultaneously thought of as a time of greatness but also a time of sort of chaos and immorality. Uh, do you see any parallels there? Or am I running off the tracks here? Well?

Why not? I think in a sense, it's it's when people are trying to make sense of a very distant past of which they have very very um vague understanding and memories, they change it, something gets lost in translation. In a sense, um, people are trying to they know that there was something that happened in a very very distant past, but they've lost the full understanding of it, and so they try to explain it, sometimes in ways that tell you more about their present than actually the past.

All right, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with Nicoletta Momiliano and we're back. In your book, you discuss how how even the ancient Greeks used fragments of Minoan material culture as a catalyst for further creativity. Could you give us

an example and explain what that means? Yeah, Um, I can give you a very very precise example, which is provided by some Greek pottery, pottery of later periods that was found at nossauce Um, pottery that dates to the early to the Greek Early Iron Age, that is to

the late ninth and eight centuries BC. There is one pot in particular, a lead that was found in a Minorn tomb, which in my own tomb that had been cleared and reused in the Early Iron Age and the Early Iron Age pot is decorated with an octopus motif. And this motif is actually relatively rare in the Early Iron Age, but of course it's one of the motives that was quite common in my non crete and on

this lead. The way which the octopus is depicted, the position of the octopus head above the tentacles, the number of tentacles, which is eight, suggests that it's really derived from my non pottery of the so called marine style, and not from later examples, for example Mycenean period, where the position of the head is inverted and sometimes the

number of the tentacles is reduced. So the decoration in this spot is inspired by my non models, but it's also something new because it's created in a new style, in the style of the Early Iron Age. And there are also, i think other aspects of my non material culture that acted as catalyst for further creativity, for example, the large ruins of the Palace of Nos Sauce, and perhaps even some of the frescos that remained visible um for a few generations, or even centuries after the palace

was abandoned. The ruins were certainly quite visible even in later centuries that we know for sure. But who created these buildings, what these buildings represented were no longer part

of leaving memory. People had forgotten all that, and yet people felt the need to provide some explanations of what these ruins represented, and so later Greeks created these wonderful, fantastic stories of monsters and labyrinthes, of women having sex with bulls, powerful kings that were half divine and half human. It's actually it's also related to what Joe was asking earlier.

I think, yeah, this is this is very interesting because I think often when we think about ideological myths, the myths that are supposed to explain the origin of something, the most common thing people think of are explaining natural phenomena, you know, myths to explain where the why the mountains or this way or where the lightning comes from. But there are also ideological myths to explain cultural artifacts of human civilization, of course, and there are I think there

are explanations that relate to our physical world. You know, it's not whether it's natural phenomena or buildings. But this is the point I'm making is presided that it's that these things are no longer part of living memory, and that's one when people are trying to create stories about them, sometimes they tell us more about the present than really what happened in the past. It's almost as if they were natural phenomena. It's almost as if they are a

mountain range or something like that. Yes, well, I think people probably in the case of ruins of buildings, they would recognize what they were. But sometimes they were so astounded by kinds of buildings that people were no longer able to produce in later centuries, that sometimes they attributed their constructions to gods. For example, moving from my non treat to other areas. But the Walls of Troy that the Walls of Troy's, of course were built in the

middle of the early middle second millennium BC. But the way in which they are described in the Homeric poems eight seventh century b C, as if if they had been built by gods. But of course they were not built by gods. That were built by human people like you and me. But people had forgotten this, and they were so astounding that they thought explain them as being built by supernatural beings, and we've seen something similar in recent centuries as well. Correct. Yes, to some extent um.

Since the rediscovery of my non creed in the early twentieth century, thanks to the excavations of Saraharta Evans at Transource and by other archeologists and other sides, writer and artists have been inspired by the material culture of my non creed to create something new, from poems to ballet or paintings, and the French writer Paul Moron, in an article he wrote in the nineteen sixties, used the term

crito mania to describe this phenomenon. Mania is of course a term similar to earlier terms and used to describe similar phenomena such as Egyptomania, Great Romania, Helenomania. So is ancient creto mania comparable to our modern fascination and retellings of various historical settings and motifs like I'm instantly thinking of modern Roman sagas or various Viking TV shows and

the like. Yes, again, to some extent, crepto mania is above all borrowing of my non elements to create something completely new um and sometimes though my non elements are also used to give a more ancient, more archaic, and more Bronze Age look to later Greek dramas uh that are set in what we now call the Bronze Age or heroic past of Greece. But kreto Mania is above all the use of minorana elements to create something in new contemporary. Now, in discussing the minute are, we of

course are discussing balls. How did balls factor into Minoan civilization and how is this reflected in Greek myth? Well, bulls appear very very frequently in minor representations, especially from the mid to late second millennium BC. We find representations of bulls in frescos pottery, terracotta figurines, in tiny, tiny seal stones um and particularly fascinating are the representations of bull leaping, that is, of human figures producing acrobatic somersaults

over the back of charging bulls. But interestingly and contrastingly, depiction of minotor images, that is, of ceatures that are half bull and half human are actually very very rare and relatively late in my norn creat And also we may wonder whether some of these representation may simply be very stylized representations of bullyping, because they appear on tiny

seal stones or seal impressions. Um and animals human hybrids do exist in my Norn creat but it's also interesting to see that there is no prevalence of bulls necessarily because some of these human hybrid representations, including some of the early ones, tend to involve other animals um, birds

or gods for example. So how exactly one god from my non rules to later Greek representations of the mint or as a hybrid figure is not entirely clear, and I think this process must have been quite complex, and exactly what happened I don't know. Is it possible to infer anything about the tone of how these images are

presented in actual Minoring artwork? So the the depictions of bull leaping or of animal human hybrids, including with bullparts or as you mentioned, with birds or goats, does this convey a sense of um, of fearfulness or terror the way the minotaur would in Greek myth or? Is the tone different? Does that make any sense? Well, as I said,

it's um, I don't. I think we have to decouple bull representations in Minor and Creete and later representations, because really, how we got from one to the other it's really complicated, and I honestly don't know how this hand and whether there is a necessarily a direct link. Some people have even suggested that the minor tours in later Greece are not necessarily derived from my norn Creed, but are derived

from other Near Eastern civilizations, later civilizations. But the way in which bulls are presented in my norn Creed, do they show term I don't, well, certainly not all of them. Um. The contrary, some people UM describe the the acrobatics over bulls like almost like a kind of dance over over bulls. It's a like a very interesting showing kind of relations ship between human and animals. I wouldn't say they represent

anything necessarily terror. I mean, there are some representations where you said, see human beings being gored by bulls, but many other representations is is the human being who successfully produces these wonderful somersaults over the boom? So I wouldn't say it's necessarily terror. And the other hybrid figures, and they are so small, um, they are not part of large compositions, it would be difficult to say whether they have any fearful terror elements in them. I would say probably.

The answer to that is again my hunch is probably no. It simply shows an interesting fascination in the animal world. Armed now, of course, the myths involved the greatness involved not only the minute are but the labyrinth. Is there currently any archaeological evidence to support the existence of the Manoan labyrinth of Greek myth or some actual structure or

complex that would have inspired it. I mean yes and no in the sense that there is no building in my non treat that can be described as a complicated maze, that is a complicated system of parts or edges, designed as a puzzle through which one has to find the way. No, but the ruins of my non palaces, especially the ruins of cloissance Um, can have for us a kind of

labyry in fine appearance. And also Sarah Evans, the excavator of Cloissance, presented the large stature that he excavated as the real Cretan labyrinth because he connected the word labyrinth with labraries, which is a term used in later Greek text to indicate the double ax. And he also suggested that labyrinth meant the house of the double ax, because he noted that many Mason's marks found at Cnaissance in very prominent locations. Had the shape of this object had

the shape of a double axe. But I should like to remark that the connection between the word labyrinth and labraries appears to be much more tenuous than Evans suggested, because there are linguistic difficulties in relating the these two words that have been pointed out by several philologists, by

several linguists. And also I'd like to remark that yes, Mason's marks in the shape of a double axe do appear very frequently and perhaps most frequently at Cnossource than are the minor on sides, but they're not exclusive to Cronos Source. You can find in them also at other minor on sides. And also that there are other signs are the masons marks that are also very common at Cnossauce.

Now in addition to the miniatur and the labyrinthya. Of course, the other key part of these stories is King Minos himself behind the you know, the fantastic and the monstrous aspects of the particular character that we find in Greek mythology. Is there a true historic element to this king? Who knows? Perhaps? Possibly?

But the issue who really ruled in my non Creed is very much debated, and perhaps we should bear in mind that when we talk of my non Creed, we speak of about two millennia, and it is very likely that political systems, these social organizations changed in this two millennia. Some scholars think that perhaps some form of royalty and perhaps even of Chrossian supremacy may have existed in Crete, especially in what archeologists called the Neoplacial period, that is,

from about seventeen hundred to fourteen fifty BC. But there are also many scholars who prefer to see my non creed as ruled by women or by some kind of gender balanced elite class, almost like council or a corporation of men and women together, rather than a single ruler. But it's possible that for some part of the history of my noncreat for some periods, there may have been a supreme ruler whose memory might have inspired later stories

about King Mines. All right, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with Nicoletta Momiliano, and we're back now. As for the Minotar, the mythic minotar itself, why do you think the minetar

resonates so strongly in Western traditions. Do you think it reveals something about the broader human condition, or rather, are we inflating and building on something that would have had you know, far different, more specific associations for ancient people's well, I think that, at least for some ancient people, for some Greeks, the story of the Minotour had more specific association um, because in a sense, the Greek myths related to King Minus, the Minotour and song could be seen

almost like a morality tale, an example of a punishment inflicted by the gods because King Minus didn't keep one of his promises to the gods. Um. But of course, the story of the Minotour, like many many other Greek myths, m Greek narratives, and not just Greek narratives, but also Near Eastern narratives ken and has been endlessly re imagined to address different aspects of human condition at different times

and in different periods. And there are some fascinating examples of really different imaginations and different symbolies of the encounter, for example, between theseus and the minor term. And you can find many examples in literature or in the visual and performing arts from the last novel by andre A. Gid says, just the encounter is more almost like an

encounter between the individual and his own sexuality. Um. There are other encounters in uh works by Picasso, in works by the Greek, famous Greek author Nikos Katzanzakis, in which the encounter between theseus and the minor tour is almost like an encounter between and all the civilization and non civilization and the Greek civilization, UM and so on. So the symbolism changes all the time, and there are so many different examples. So of course it is because it

relates to um different aspects of the human condition. I said, whether it's seen as a symbolism of one's sexuality, to the animal elements in human beings, almost like a struggle between different impulses. So it can be reimagined and invented with different meanings all the time. Now, in your book you you you mentioned various examples of artistic performance or literary works that are you know, based in some part on the minitar myth or Mino and creed. Do you

do you have a personal favorite? Now, this is really the most difficult quest for me to answer, because you really put me on the spot here those I have so many favorites, it's it's very difficult for me to choose because also it's so many different materials, as he said,

for performance, literary works and songs. In the visual arts, probably my favorite it work occupied by the material culture of my non cret is Paul klass sketch titled the Snake God This and Her Enemy that he created in nine But I also love um one of the sketches made by Mark Chagall. One is an irreverent take on famous my non fresco of bull leaping, and I also sound like some of the paintings by a local Cretan painter,

the one who actually produced the cover. The illustration for the cover of my book Roussettos Panagiatakis has um very very sexy mino tour um and uh, and I like it very much. It reminds me of salvatorro Da L's surrealistic paintings. And in the performing arts, I have a very very soft spot for the gigantic snake goddess that appears in the opera Mino Tour by the British composer.

A contemporary British composer Sir Harrison birth Whistle, and I also have a soft spot for the ballet La Premi didem Phone, which was first performed in nineteen twelve in Paris and was choreographed by the famous dancer Baslav Nijinsky and the costumes who are created by Leon Box and

the costumes have some my non elements. And among literary works, I like a poem written by Cecile Lewis entitled Statuette Late mine on which was written around ninety seven and again is also inspired by the famous snake Goddess from Cnossus.

And I love the story the short story The Ivory Acrobat by the American writer Don Delillon, and the ivoryan Krobat is named after another the famous fine discovery from Cnossauce, and I also like Don Delillo's novel The Names, which has plenty of references to Minor and Create so recently on the show. In considering a couple of different Greek myths that feature a monster, one's the myth of Perseus and Medusa and the other is Theseus and the Minotaur.

In reading both of them, I find, as a modern reader, I feel a lot of sympathy for the monster, for for Medusa and for the minutea, it seems, uh, it seems very unfair to them what happens to them, almost like they're not even really the aggressor of the story. That the hero is kind of the aggressor of the story. And both the case of Perseus and and theseus. So it is that way of reading the story completely alien

to the context in which they originated. Is that just our modern way of interpreting a story, where you know, the people who originally told and heard these stories probably would not have felt such sympathies. Or is that element of kind of pity and unfairness there even in the ancient understanding of these myths. I honestly don't know, because uh, certainly some a lot of modern imaginations of the myth of Thesis and the Minotor that I've come across when

working on my book sympathize with the minotor completely. Um. For example, in g the Minotor is not the monster at all, it's a beautiful young man. Again, in Sir Harrison Bird Whistles Opera the Minotor, the sympathy is with the Minutor, not with the other people at all. Um to say, I mean to say that nobody in antiquity ever felt something like this would be I think unfair and unjust. There might have been some people in antiquity who may have felt some sympathy for the monsters. Well,

I can't exclude this a priority. I would have probably thought that the majority of the people didn't. But why not? I mean it's I mean, it's like saying that everybody, every modern person now feels sympathy with the minotor. Perhaps many people do nowadays, but not everybody might do. So why should we treat the people who lived in antiquity as a complete single block. Different people may have reacted in different ways to these stories. Somebody a bit original

might have felt sympathy for the minotor. Why not? And some people even thought that the minotor was not an animal at all. Even in antiquities. There are lots of different explanations and different views. So I would not want to say a priori that nobody in antiquity felt sympathy with the minotor, although it strikes me as perhaps a kind of sensibility and uh that it's a bit more modern.

But ancients could be very modern too in their feeling, in their feelings in there, in the way in which they present things that are not necessarily black and white. But though this stray is quite a lot from my no and crete, this has more to do with the later periods with Greek mythology. So it's it's Halloween season for many of our listeners. UM, So we're wondering if you could recommend any particular suitable minoteur related works for

the Halloween season. Um. Like you mentioned so many different things. For instance, I noticed that you mentioned a minute our book by Russian author Victor Pelvin. I read it it really enjoyed his novel The Sacred Book of the Werewolf many years ago, and I just hadn't been keeping I hadn't really kept up with what other other things he had written. But you you point out that that he wrote a minotar based work as well. Yes. Well, to be perfectly honest, I can't think of, um, something that

is particularly spooky, that is in the spirit suitable to Halloween. UM. But many reimaginations of the myth of the minoritor can be a bit unnerving and disturbing. UM. And indeed, I would say the book by Victor Pelevin that you have just referred to, which was published in English with the title The Helmet of Horrors. I think it's a bit of an unnerving story because it reimagines the Labyrinth of Minus as very modern internet chat room. That sounds good.

This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for talking to us today. Thank you so much. All right, well, there you have it. Thanks once again so much to Professor Nicoletto Mamiliano again, author of In Search of the Labyrinth, the Cultural Legacy of Minoan Creed. It's out now, you can find it. It it you know, it just came out. It's available in paperback, hard back, and as an e book.

In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, such as our our previous episode of the Minotaur on the Minotaur, or if you want to look out for our next episode that is gonna deal a little bit more with the Minotaur. We can't stop, Yeah, we can't start. We're lost in the Labyrinth. Um. If you want to check any of that out, you can find our podcast wherever you get your podcasts, wherever that happens to be. We

just ask that you rate, review, and subscribe. But you can find us at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That'll shoot you over to the I heart page for our podcast, and if you go there, I think there's a link for a store you can check that out. There's some t shirts, some logos, some stickers, et cetera, including a few that are mythological in nature. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.

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