Improper answers
JOHN BARRON
A few years ago everyone was writing a Turkey book. Now Crete and Mycenae are all the rage. The coffee-tables -ate groaning, and the bookcases too, for works of serious scholar- ship appear in as great numbers as the picture- books. Of the latter, at least, Dawn of the Gods is a worthy competitor. The objects for illustration are admirably selected;, many are hard to find elsewhere, and they have never been better photographed. A pity, though, that there is almost never any indication of scale, since many miniature works are enlarged beyond their actual size. The uninitiated will not easily guess that the Minoans of Crete, unlike the mainland Mycenaeans, never went in for large-scale sculpture.
But the visual excellence of her book is not enough for Mrs Hawkes. She is not content merely to comment on her pictures of Bronze Age Greece; she is determined that the text is to be read for its own sake. To this end she imports what she calls 'mild idiosyncrasies' into a historical narrative of Minoan and Mycenaean times—say 2000 to 1000 ac—in the context of what came before and after. Briefly, the argument is this. The Minoans of Crete, non-Indo-European worshippers of sexuality, devoted to luxurious living in palaces decorated with fine wall-paintings but unprovided with fortifications, represent the feminine element in the human psyche. The Mycenaeans, on the other hand, rough northern immigrants with their towering fortresses and their Trojan War, represent the male element. When the two civilisations met and the Mycenaeans overran Crete, the feminine element so far prevailed as to mould a new culture which survived the `dark age' following the collapse of the Bronze Age kingdoms, and came to fruition in classi- cal Greece: The historical narrative jerks backwards and forwards so often that the reader is left quite confused as to the sequence of events; and there are altogether too many ill-founded con- jectures, some of them of doubtful relevance, such as that Stonehenge may have been built by an exiled Mycenaean chief. It is, moreover, to be regretted that the author declines to take sides in the Evans-Palmer controversy over the date of the last grand palace at Cnossus —a controversy which she herself brought to the public notice in the Observer some years ago. For if Palmer were right, and the palace was not destroyed until c 1200 after a lengthy period of Mycenaean occupation (and not two hundred years earlier, as Evans believed), both the political and the cultural history of Crete would have to be written very differently.
Opinions will differ as to the depth of the darkness into which Greece was plunged be-
tween the final destruction of Mycenae c 1100 ac and the generation of Homer c 750- 700. For Mrs Hawkes's thesis to be plausible, a great measure of racial and cultural con- tinuity will have to be demonstrated. In fact, this is not easy. Ionia and Athens claimed a Mycenaean element in their populations. But many cultural accomplishments had certainly been lost—large-scale stone sculpture and architecture, gem-engraving, above all the art of writing—and the question of continuity is not to be settled by mere assertions and a blind belief in Homer, who in the later period purported to write the history of the earlier.
For while many details of his account may be Mycenaean, many more certainly reflect conditions of his own day. It used to be thought that all Homeric references to bronze body armour must be anachronistic, none having' been found in Mycenaean excavations. Mrs Hawkes justly points out that through a more recent find at Dendra we now know that the Mycenaeans, too, possessed plate armour. On the other hand, the funeral rites of Achilles' friend Patroclus, as described in the Iliad, need no longer be supposed to have been based on a genuine tradition from the Bronze Age. Dr Karageorghis's excavations at Salamis in Cyprus show that similar rites were practised in Homer's own day.
The supposedly masculine and feminine characters of the Bronze Age cultures do not rest on any very secure foundations. The cen- tral fact is that the Minoans worshipped a goddess as their chief deity, while the Mycenaeans presumably brought the Indo- European sky-god (Zeus) into Greece. But it is abundantly clear that the chief deity of the palaces of both cultures was female. This is surmised both from the nature of votive offer- ings made to them and from the fact that their classical successors in temples on the palace sites were all female. If it is argued that on Mycenaean sites it was the alien Cretan goddess who entered and prevailed, this says little for the masculinity of the Mycenaeans. In fact, societies of more masculine bent, in Mrs Hawkes's terms, tend often to be those in which womanhood is most idealised. We know that the warrior rulers of the Mycenaeans were kings. It is suggested that the Minoans may have served a queen. There is absolutely no evidence to support (or indeed to refute) this notion, and it serves merely to prejudice the case in the author's favour.
What, then, of the Cretan frescoes, with their scenes of peaceful luxury enjoyed by both sexes apparently on equal terms? For the most part they are too damaged, and too imagina- tively restored, to provide safe evidence of social behaviour; though it is true that women are prominent. What of the palaces unforti- fied? Mycenaean Pylos was similarly unpro- tected: In her case it is assumed that the inhabitants saw no need for defence, and there is no reason to seek a different explanation for Crete.
What, finally, of the overwhelming sexuality of the Minoans, occupying all the energies which might otherwise have been devoted to war and other masculine pursuits? There is ample evidence of Cretan interest in fertility, which is, however, shared with the Mycenaean mainland. But fertility and sexuality are not at all the same thing—as we have lately had pointed out: the Pope is for the one and against the other. Minoan art gives no encouragement at all to believe that the people were in any way obsessed by sex. Not for them the snigger- ing cartoons of many a vase-painter of the classical period. We are told that all their religious symbols are sexual—male columns, trees, mountain peaks, stalagmites; female caves and tombs. But the truth is that any pro. jection or concavity can be pressed into the service of such hypotheses, and in most cases verification is impossible. The male pen, the female paper, their offspring the review.
If Mrs Hawkes were to argue that the Minoans were lovers of beauty and the Mycenaeans warriors who themselves were attracted by that beauty, and to point out that the classical Greeks, like the later Mycenaeans, _were both warlike and cultivated, then no one 'could disagree. TO put forward imagined psychological explanations for the nature of a people's material remains, in the absence of any written tradition more informative than their account-books during a period of emer- gency, is no part of an archaeologist's re- sponsibility.
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