Exploring Minoan Civilization and Discoveries

I first went to Crete on the back of a moped when I was 18 and I fell in love I have to say not with my companion but with the landscape and the Bronze Age Minoan culture there. It just seemed to me so extraordinary that men and women in their minds and with their bare hands were forging what it is to be a civilization. Crete can boast a whole number of firsts. It's said that here was the first paved road in Europe, the first throne and even the first flush toilet. We went to make the film in Crete in July in the middle of a heat wave and so we were filming in temperatures of around 104 degrees every day. So I have to say, rather sweatily, we followed in the footsteps of this man. He is, if you like, the Indiana Jones of Crete, Sir Arthur Evans. Evans, whose archive is kept here at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, made a series of spectacular finds at Knossos at the beginning of the 20th century. He uncovered a very strange world, but one that he thought was a high-octane, peace-loving first file on European Western civilisation. Here there were extraordinary things, high priestesses who grappled with snakes, athletic men who jumped over bulls five feet high. and even goddesses with opium poppies in their hair. Evans was a brilliant archaeologist, but as time goes on, we realise, of course, that the story was not quite as simple as that. Crete was not Eurocentric. In fact, it looked south and to the east, to Africa and to Asia Minor for its inspiration. Also, the Minoans had a very vexed relationship with their gods. This was a time when the gods were everywhere, in the fruit, on the trees. in the sky, when you made love, when you gave birth, and it was terribly important for the Minoans to keep the spirit world on side. But then Crete suffered a massive geophysical disaster, and so it shouldn't be any surprise that archaeologists are actually uncovering evidence of a very traumatised society. In this film we go to visit a sanctuary where it seems as though a human sacrifice has been interrupted in mid-flow. We also look at these children's bones, which have been cooked and then the flesh scraped off. So this could be evidence of cannibalism. As a historian, it felt that these were very important stories to tell, but actually as a person, they were very troubling things to deal with. So making this film rams home two things to me. First, that however many centuries or even millennia separate you from those of the distant past, It is always possible to feel a connection with the long dead. And also it reminded me that history is not a tablet of stone. We do not know the way it was. We can just try to grope our way towards the truth. Because, of course, history is not the study of the dead, but it's the study of something which is much more unpredictable and chameleon-like. It's a study of life. Down he went into that doleful gulf, through winding paths among the rocks, under caverns, and arches, and galleries. And he turned on the left hand, and on the right hand, till his head was dizzy. But all the while he held his clue. And when he saw him, he stopped a while, for he had never seen so strange a beast. His body was a man's, but his head was the head of a bull, and his teeth were the teeth of a lion, and with them he tore his prey. And when he saw Theseus, he roared, and he put his head down and rushed right at him. Of all the Greek myths, the story of the Labyrinth is one of the most dramatic and unforgettable. A subterranean struggle between the ultimate hero, Theseus, and the ultimate monster, the Minotaur. The offspring of an unnatural union between a woman and a bull. It was told and retold for centuries before anyone thought to write it down, by which time it had become just another great story from the back catalogue of the ancient world. But the roots of the myth go deep, to a time before history, when stories like this were the way that people made sense of them. themselves and their past. So where did the Greeks get the story of a flesh-eating bull man lurking in a dark menacing labyrinth? To answer that question, you have to journey far into the past. 1500 years before the Parthenon was built. Way before Homer's time. Back 5000 years to an extraordinary time and place. To Bronze Age Crete and the island of the Minoans. This is Crete, birthplace of an advanced prehistoric civilization, which then disappeared so suddenly and completely. All that remained were half-remembered, half-invented. fragments, the stuff of myth. There's something very seductive about the idea of a lost civilisation, although it usually turns out just to have been misplaced. But when it comes to the inhabitants of Bronze Age Crete, it's remarkable to think that until just over a hundred years ago, few suspected they existed. The Minotaur may have been a myth, these people were scarcely a rumour. In a spectacular archaeological coup, its people, lost to history for thousands of years, were rediscovered and named the Minoans. The lure of the labyrinth has proved irresistible ever since, with a stream of tourists, grave robbers, archaeologists and historians drawn back like me to search for traces of the lost world of the Minoans, sometimes in the most unexpected places. The picture that emerges is equally unexpected and the journey I'm going on now will take us to the very heart of this strange world where sophistication and culture exist side by side with blood and terror where beauty walks hand in hand with the beast. Crete, according to the Greeks, is Megalonisi, the big island. And compared to the other islands of the Aegean, it is a whale in a school of minnows. But it's actually not that megalo. 150 miles long and... never much more than 30 miles wide, an isolated landmass floating in the middle of the Libyan and Aegean seas. What is striking, though, is the amazing variety of landscapes that Crete manages to pack into the narrow space between its shores, enough to satisfy a continent. There are forests of pine, date palm groves skirting broad sandy beaches, and no less than 15 mountain ranges, three of them high enough to keep their snow well into spring. Rivers course year-round through the veins of the island, winding down deep, narrow gorges, and feeding the stalactites in endless subterranean caverns. Travel around and you understand why Crete has been such a fertile breeding ground for tales of daring do, love and sex, blood and gore. Anything seems possible here, even the incredible story of a king, his wife and a pure white bull. According to the myth, Crete was the realm of the powerful King Minos, a scrupulous lawgiver who was also prone to that very Greek form of arrogance, hubris. One day, to prove how far he was in favour with the gods, he prayed for a bull to be delivered to him from the sea. Poseidon very generously obliged, producing a white creature, assuming though that Minos would do the decent thing and offer it back to him in sacrifice. But the king was too enamoured of his fine gift. He sacrificed another in its place, keeping white bulls safe in a field. A big mistake. The god was offended. Poseidon's punishment was to spark in Minos'wife Pacify a fierce, uncontrollable sexual longing for this beautiful white creature. This is where the intriguing Daedalus begins to play his part in this strange story. He was the master inventor, an Athenian according to the self-regarding mainland Greeks, but working in Crete in the service of King Minos. Pacify knew that if anyone could find a way for her to satisfy her lust for the bull, it would be Daedalus, the Mr Fix-It of the Bronze Age. Never at a loss, Daedalus arranged in the squeamish Victorian version of the story for Pacify to interview the bull. He designed a hollow cow set on wheels with room enough for the queen inside. This pantomime creation was left in the field and Pacify clambered in. The result of the interview was the birth of the Minotaur. A hideous hybrid with the body of a man and head and horns of a bull. For the ancient Greeks, the Minotaur was a freak of nature. The playwright Euripides wrote of it, a monster child, a hybrid that has no place on Earth. And so the story goes that Daedalus came to design a huge subterranean labyrinth to hide the shameful offspring of Minos'wife. And there, every nine years, the tribute children, seven youths and seven maidens, would be brought from Athens to satiate the Minotaur's taste for human flesh. That is, until the brave Theseus arrived. Minos'daughter, clever, beautiful Ariadne, was the keeper of the keys to the labyrinth. With her help, Theseus set off to slay the beast. You can't help wondering whether there's a grain of truth alongside all this mythical cock and ball. Whether the Athenian tribute speaks of a time when mainland Greece was under Crete's thumb and the triumph of Theseus over the Minotaur points to the moment when the tables were turned. Of course there was no half man, half bull. Perhaps there was a flesh and blood King Minos and a wily Princess Ariadne. You could speculate for hours. But it's not time wasted. Nothing comes from nowhere. And some of the greatest archaeological discoveries were driven by the need to know whether myths had a historical leg to stand on. MUSIC PLAYS The first to test the reality of the myths was Heinrich Schliemann, one part pioneer archaeologist, two parts treasure seeker. In 1871, at Hisilik on the coast of modern-day Turkey, he discovered what he claimed was the site of the Troy that Homer had written about. The finds were electrifying, including a spectacular hoard of jewellery that he got his wife Sophie to model for an enthralled world. It seemed that the works of Homer were history, not poetry, and the public was gripped. But Schliemann didn't rest on his laurels. He turned his attention to the other players in Homer's great epic, at Mycenae, on the Greek mainland. What Schliemann discovered there was what he believed to be the home of the Greek warlord Agamemnon. Graves just inside the city walls were opened to reveal the military trappings and wealth of the High King. Swords, daggers, cups, rings, and most famously of all, the death masks, crafted from wafer-thin, glittering gold. For some classically educated scholars, this was a real shock. For them, prehistoric civilization was a contradiction in terms, and yet... There was something undeniably civilized and sophisticated about all this stuff. While some simply gawped at Schliemann's finds, there were others whose instinct told them that the horde from Mycenae was just the beginning. One of Britain's leading Egyptologists, Flinders Petrie, argued that the Mycenaeans, as they were now known, were no sudden apparition. These pottery fragments, some of his own finds from Egypt, had already got him thinking. These are 300 years older than that treasure from Mycenae. He knew they weren't the same as the ones he had found in Egypt. ...and he had a strong hunch that they came from somewhere in the Aegean. Find the people that made these, Petrie said, and you'll find whoever it was that came before the Mycenaeans. And I bet they'll turn out to be Europe's first civilization. The Starters pistol had been fired and one of the greatest archaeological races of all time was up and running. Somewhere in the Aegean, there was a lost world just waiting to be found. And so in 1900, chasing the lead of Schliemann and Petrie, a 48-year-old British archaeologist with a long distinguished career behind him came to Crete, to a place called Knossos. His name was Arthur Evans and Knossos was soon to be inextricably linked with him. When Arthur Evans began digging here on the morning of March the 23rd 1900, he could have given you a dozen sound archaeological reasons for picking the site. The place was littered with tantalising clues. Roman coins, pottery shards from Homer's time, ancient walls disappearing into the hillside, and then there were these exquisite prehistoric seal stones and rings that locals had been finding in the area for generations. Knossos was a site with a big label on it saying excavate me. Layer upon layer of topsoil was carried away. At first in wicker baskets by the 31 strong workforce. Then two weeks later as the size of the task dawned on Evans by 100 men. using iron wheelbarrows. And as the speed of the excavations picked up, so did the excitement. Evans sketched a plan of the emerging walls with scrolled edges, like the pirates'maps in children's books, complete with an X to mark the spot where treasure had been found. The buildings they were uncovering here were far bigger and more complex than anything that Troy or Mycenae had to offer. Wherever they dug, they just seemed to go on and on. Cascading staircases, twisting corridors, a bewildering complement of rooms, some small and intimate, others elegant and imposing. This was a labyrinth, but far more than just a monster's cage. The site that Arthur Evans and his men had uncovered at Knossos surpassed the expectations of even the most optimistic hunter of the past. A five thousand year old civilization previously buried in myth had been brought blinking back into the real world. He hadn't found a city of gold, but the hoard from Knossos was even richer than that of Troy or Mycenae. The quality of the finds was extraordinary, but it wasn't just the craftsmanship that made a powerful impression. Once into the excavations, the men digging at the west entrance discovered a huge imposing fresco fragment of a charging bull. It was life-size and lifelike, sculpted from lime plaster in high relief. Meeting this creature head-on as it emerged from the earth was a spine-chilling experience. As one of the workmen brushed back the soil to expose its flaring nostrils and sharp horns, he screamed out in terror, believing he disturbed a demon, or worse still, the devil himself. Evans had found his labyrinth and his bulls. All he needed now was evidence for King Minos and the myths would be fully realized. On the 13th of April 1900, just three weeks after the The first basket of earth had been filled. Workman began to uncover a complex of little antechambers, leading into a main room behind. On the south wall, workers unearthed a fresco fragment of a bull's hoof and all around the room, fine gypsum benches. But it was the north wall that harboured the most exciting secret. Here, Evans uncovered something he must have dreamt about finding. An elaborately carved throne. Harriet Boyd, a pioneering young American archaeologist, was lucky enough to be with Evans when the throne was revealed. In her journal notes, she described the moment of discovery. Intense excitement, she wrote, as a workman removed the last earth from the oldest throne in Europe, and the stone chair stood forth intact. Evans toyed with the idea that this was the throne of Ariadne, apparently reasoning that the wide moulded seat was more suited to the ample buttocks of a woman. But before long he was decided, and in a telegram to the Times he announced the discovery of the throne of King Minos. The Minoans had arrived. The discovery of the throne was the culmination of years of dreaming. Evans later said it was as though he'd been given an open sesame and a prehistoric Civilization beyond his wildest imaginings had appeared from a crack in the earth Knossos was indeed the seat of King Minos. He certainly had good taste in palatial pads. This was an incredible structure, and befitting one of the most powerful kings of the Bronze Age, it's built with no expense spared. At its peak, Knossos covered an area of 700,000 square metres, more than three times the size of Buckingham Palace and its grounds, with an approach as grand as the Mall. If you thought the Romans had the monopoly on precision road building, then think again. This is Europe's first made road. It was constructed out of clay, cement and stones and faced with limestone slabs. You have to imagine it flanked on either side with grand houses leading straight from the town of Knossos right up to the palace. Daedalus himself would have been proud of this elegant boulevard. It's a masterpiece of prehistoric urban design. At the risk of sounding like an estate agent, the palace boasts an impressive array of original features. Hinged doors, drainage systems, and what Evans famously described as a flush toilet. Another first for the Minoans. Knossos is a building that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. You feel you're being taken on a journey that's been expressly designed to beguile and seduce, as well as bewilder and confuse. You find yourself in gorgeous stone-clad rooms, and then walking past rows of pithoi, man-size alibaba jars in dark, sunken storerooms. Each of the seven or eight separate entrances feels like it's reserved for a different occasion. Some for privileged access, some, like here at the north entrance, for immediate or inspiring impact. But whatever route you take brings you here. The immense central court. 54 metres. From north to south, 27 meters wide, the size of four tennis courts fitted together with room enough to spare. Clearly, this space could accommodate huge numbers of people, but no one knows what it was used for. It's a giant question mark at the heart of Knossos. Archaeologists are still trying to solve the riddle of this enigmatic space. But the most enduring theory is also the most dramatic. That the central court was the stage for a spectacular religious ritual. This was Tauro Cathapsia, bull leaping. And it was to Knossos what gladiatorial combat was to Rome. There are lots of clues from Minoan art as to how these scary sounding ceremonies would have been performed. Although there's still plenty of room for interpretation. And I'm sure every seasoned bull leaper would have had his own repertoire of tricks. One possible technique though would have been to have grabbed the bull by its horns as it charged towards you. To be flung up onto its back as the animal tossed its head and then somersault back down onto the ground. Whoever pulled off these crazy stunts must have been fantastically strong and supple, especially bearing in mind the sheer size of these animals, because these were crossbreed aurochs, particularly foul-tempered, standing six foot high at the shoulder and with a horn span to match. Aurochs have been extinct for nearly four centuries, so just try to imagine being in the presence of a beast whose hoof print is the size of a man's head. Bulls have been worshipped as symbols of fertility since the Stone Age. So perhaps bull leaping was an attempt to capture some of their elemental power. The people who did this were clearly revered, as you can see from this beautiful ivory figurine of one of the leapers. Confident and sinewy, his limbs have been elongated to emphasize his agility. For the Minoans, bull leaping was as much about self-belief. as religious belief. You should think of the bull as an honoured guest, the king of the beasts invited to the palace, an envoy from the natural world. He's here as a dancing partner, formidable and impressive, but it's still the bull leapers that are calling the tunes. These displays weren't designed to reduce the potency of the bull, but for the Minoans one thing was clear, the bull charges because that's what he does, man leaps because he chooses to. But it wasn't just in the bull leaping ritual that the Minoans reveled in their intimacy with the natural world. Their art is infused with the same spirit of self-confidence and daring. It seems there was no style they wouldn't try, no materials they wouldn't use, no technique too complicated to employ. It's almost as though once the Minoans realised what humans were capable of, they couldn't stop themselves, they became addicted to creating. From ivory carving to faience beads, from fresco painting to stone sculpture, it was all done with elegance and panache. Minoan artists took their cue from the natural world, but they weren't its slavish imitators. Nature provided the raw materials, texture, form, colour and they felt free to play with them to manipulate and extemporise. The hothouse culture of this island produced some fabulously exotic fruit. These eggshell thin cups are called Camarys ware, named after the cave where many examples were found. They are almost 4,000 years old, but they sit happily on the style pages of a glossy magazine. And it's not just the artifacts that seem to speak to us across the millennia. The recovery of this fresco fragment during the second season at Knossos is one of the most charming of all the stories to have come out of the dig. The visiting French scholar, when he saw the pieces being reassembled, burst out, Mais c'est sans des Parisiennes! The basic idea being that this three-and-a-half-thousand-year-old woman wouldn't have seemed out of place strolling down the Champs-Élysées. For Evans. La Parisienne, as she became known, was the perfect Minoan. Refined, sophisticated, strangely modern, and above all, European. Right from the start, he believed that the prehistoric cultures of Greece and the Aegean were different from contemporary cultures of Egypt and the Middle East. Knossos and its artistic riches had only served to strengthen this impression. The culture of the Minoans, he said, expressed a free and independent spirit. Independent, that is, of the powerful pull of the other cities and kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. Evans pictured his Minoans as lords and masters of their own island culture, able to keep the rest of the world at arm's length. He came to see Minoan Crete as the place where Europe's first naissance or birth took place. And the culture from which all subsequent renaissance sprang. Classical Greece, Imperial Rome, even the good old British Empire itself. All of them had a trace of Minoan DNA in their genes. Evidence for what was arguably the Western world's first civilization had emerged from the earth at Knossos. How many more secrets was the rest of Crete still hiding? While Evans'worker ants continued to pick over the bones of Knossos, other archaeologists went Minoan hunting elsewhere on the island. Further along the north coast from Knossos, French archaeologists turned their attention to a site here at Malia, and what they discovered, along with similar finds in the south, added a rich, intriguing layer of complexity to the picture that Evans had started. It soon became clear that although the palace at Knossos was a prodigy, it wasn't unique. And if Daedalus had designed it, then others had been playing copycat all over Crete. Here at Malia and at Festos and at Ayatriada on the south of the island, other palaces were discovered in quick succession. They're all more compact than Knossos and each has its own unique features, but they're still built to the same... blueprint. Everyone has its central courtyard, everyone has its warren of pithoi packed storums, and everyone has its public arena where Pallas and the people met. Suddenly, labyrinths were cropping up all over Crete. They all clearly belonged to the same architectural family as Knossos, so they were all immediately given the same family name, Pallas'. It's a tribute to the persuasiveness of Evans'vision that the name has stuck. But how appropriate is it? You might think buildings as grand as Malia are all the proof you need for the existence of some kind of monarchy. Why build a palace fit for a king, other than to put a king in it? But then when you look for other telltale signs of a ruling dynasty, Bronze Age Cretans... seems surprisingly Republican because unlike other contemporary cultures such as Egypt in the Middle East here there are no giant or inspiring statues no insignia stamping a badge of ownership on buildings and the land around them there is only an empty throne Minos is conspicuous by his absence. When Minoans are shown performing some kind of public function, they usually share the stage with others, suggesting power is also shared. No one emerges as top dog. All men seem equal. And if anything, the women seem more equal than the men. Cretan girls loom large in art and myth. Not just decorative creatures, but women who appear to be prestigious and influential, custodians of their culture. But however prominent women are, the overriding atmosphere in the palaces is unexpectedly corporate and anonymous. So maybe Malia and Knossos weren't palaces at all, but places where the Minoan people came together to exercise their collective power. And as soon as you manage to put the seductive vision of kings and princesses to one corner of your mind, the possibilities are endless. What I'm reminded of when I visit the palaces are monasteries. Just imagine those powerful institutions with one foot in heaven and one foot planted very firmly in the real world. Alongside the abbeys and shrines there were workshops and offices, turning out anything from illuminated manuscripts to potent liqueurs. The surrounding farmlands would have been worked by the people. but the fruits of their labour belonged to the monastery. The palaces, too, may have functioned as granaries for the gods and festival halls in which the harvests could be stored and the generosity of the gods honoured. Like other Bronze Age cultures, the Minoans relied on the food that they could grow to survive. Without rich farmland, timely spring rain and the sun at harvest time, these storerooms, usually full to bursting, would have been empty and... bitter with the taste of dust. Keeping on side those gods that decided whether you ate that year or died hungry was a serious business. In Egypt at this time we know that over a third of the year 120 days were devoted to agricultural festivals. It's where the festival hall theory comes into its own. Perhaps these palaces were giant venues dedicated to the celebration of the island's fertility. On this beautiful vase, you can sense both the relief and the joy in the faces of the harvesters as they carry symbolic sheaves from the fields, singing and laughing. Perhaps they're on their way to the palace to give thanks to their gods for another successful harvest. In a world of palaces and frescoes and beautiful artefacts, it's easy to overlook the ordinary Minoans. Who would have been kept far too busy to worry about the finer points of bull leaping? Luckily the archaeological riches of Crete weren't restricted to the posh end of the market. Welcome to the Cheap Seats. While grand buildings like Knossos and Festos were being excavated, Harriet Boyd, the American archaeologist, was exploring a site at Gorniar that has told us a huge amount about Minoan Crete beyond the palaces. The treasures found at Gournay Isle were the stuff of everyday life. Fish hooks, carpenters'saws, potters'wheels, all a far cry from the steatide vessels and the ivory figurines of the palaces. And yet it was populations like these that made the most of the world. the Minoan world go round. It was their ambitious craftsmanship that produced those objects, their industry that put food on the table for the kings or priestesses or whoever it was that lived at places like Knossos. In a society that was so productive, everyone had their role to play. And if the gods had been kind and the harvests were plentiful, you can imagine the men and women of Gorniar enjoying life in their flourishing market town. We can even visualize the kind of homes the inhabitants of Gorniar might have lived in. This 3,000-year-old clay model of a house is amazingly detailed. It seems that the houses had no more than five small rooms on the ground level, basements for storage, and an open flat roof. No doubt the prime spot to get some relief from the heat and increase the chances of a good night's sleep. Most of the houses at Gorniar would have been white, just like the picture postcard Greek villages are today. But fresco evidence suggests that some of the wealthier homes would have been given a subtle colour wash. The palette was taken direct from the landscape and the pigments would have come straight out of the earth. Yellow ochres and red oxides that would have given you everything from a delicate pink to a rich chocolate brown. I'd have loved to have seen Gorniar back then, the watercolour painting clinging to the wall. to its hillside looking out across the sea. By the end of the 1920s, Minoan civilization, from the poshest of palaces to the humblest fisherman's cottage, had come a long way from being lost. But whatever extra details archaeologists like Boyd added... The master plan belonged to Evans. He'd been the first to enter the labyrinth. He'd given the Minoans their name, defined the qualities that made them unique. And in his multi-volume book, The Palace of Minos, he'd even sketched out a plausible history for them, from their sudden rise to their equally dramatic collapse. Around 1450 BC, as Evans saw it, the palace of Knossos had emerged victorious from a bitter, island-wide civil war that had left the rest of Crete in flaming ruins. Even in their moment of destruction, it seemed, the fate of the Minoans lay in their own hands, free from outside influences. Arthur Evans was a brilliant archaeologist, and he was a showman. His version of the Minoans was made up of spade work, observation, intuition and flights of fancy. If you enter the labyrinth, you're just as likely to meet him at its heart as you are mine at all. But since his death, new generations of archaeologists have uncovered fresh evidence that tells a rather different story. When Arthur Evans died, the jigsaw puzzle of Minoan Crete appeared to have been completed. Apart from one piece that he never found a place for. Alongside the beautiful frescoes and vases, what he discovered at Knossos were thousands of small clay tablets covered in different kinds of writing. He saw endless possibilities running across their marked surfaces. If he could just decipher them, he'd break a silence that had lasted for thousands of years. MUSIC PLAYS Evans named these different scripts, rather prosaically, Linear A and Linear B, and he was convinced that they were examples of a unique Minoan language, one that would prove beyond all doubt the Minoans'superior status as an independent island nation. In other words, Evans could give the Minoans their history. The problem was that he couldn't make sense of the tablets and he died before he could drag his Minoans out of the prehistoric world. It wasn't until after his death that other scholars could get their hands on the evidence and study the tablets in depth. Even then, it took years for anyone to break the code. And when someone did, the archaeological world was in for a bit of a shock. When Michael Ventris heard Evans lecture as a schoolboy, He'd become driven by the desire to recover what he too was convinced was the lost language of the Minoans. But after years of hard labour, he announced in 1952 that what he'd been struggling with wasn't Minoan at all, but a difficult and archaic form of Greek, the language spoken by the Mycenaeans. The Greek warlords from the mainland. So suddenly, the great fires of 1450 BC began to make more sense. Maybe they weren't the result of a Minoan civil war, but evidence for a wholesale Mycenaean takeover in Crete, with a mighty Knossos left intact to become the invaders'headquarters. And when you think about it, it's not surprising that the aggressive Mycenaeans wanted to stake their claim to Crete. For a thousand years, the Minoans had been showing the rest of the Bronze Age world how to make a serious success of things. That's admiration and envy building up over 40 generations. What eventually made the Minoans vulnerable to a Mycenaean coup is still the subject of heated archaeological debate. But however they got here, it seems they were here. Johnny-come-latelys usurping control for the last 200 years of a civilisation that had been up and running for thousands. The Mytomians took up the trappings of Minoan culture with relish and no little respect, but inevitably they changed things. This tomb is of a type entirely new to the island, the monument of a warrior culture, a fortified treasure house, here to assert clan prestige and individual honour, alien concepts to the Minoans. Once the scholars had got over the shock of Ventris'decipherment, the people were hungry to discover what Linear B could tell them about the kind of place Minoan Crete had become under the rule of the Greeks from Mycenae. The tablets turned out to be the contents of a Bronze Age filing cabinet, a meticulous record of the business end of palace life. This one deals with a shepherd called Poros and details his flock. We know that he had 28 rams and 72 ewes. It's an extraordinary thought that every itinerant herdsman up on the hillside was being monitored by the bean counters in the palace down below. It's not a grand history, but it's still short circuits used straight into the lives of the people. There are references to bronze smiths, bakers and farmers, and even the individual names of oxen. Dusky, noisy and spotty. We also get a glimpse of loftier beings. Some of the gods and goddesses worshipped at places like Knossos. A number of the tablets record offerings to the religious powers. Here there are two litres of olive oil offered to Pipituna, an early Minoan goddess. Down here you can see that there are 12 given to all the other gods and the lucky priestess of the winds gets 36. Clearly worship had its bureaucratic side too. The decipherment of Linear B is one of the most significant breakthroughs of Bronze Age archaeology. But Linear A still remains a stubborn mystery. Most experts reckon this is the unique Minoan language that Evans was searching for. And if the work that's being done on it ever does succeed, it could unlock as many secrets as the richest of Crete's excavations. Evans's version of the Minoans, once apparently so complete and satisfying, had begun to unravel with the decipherment of Linear B, and other troubling new evidence soon followed. Far from not leaving any Cretan stones unturned, it was becoming clear that the first generation of Minoan archaeologists had only scratched the surface. This is Anima Spilia, the Cave of the Winds, a small sanctuary about half an hour's drive from Knossos. In the 1970s, a discovery was made here that changed the world.

It's said that here was the first paved road in Europe, the first throne and even the first flush toilet. We went to make the film in Crete in July in the middle of a heat wave and so we were filming in temperatures of around 104 degrees every day. So I have to say, rather sweatily, we followed in the footsteps of this man.

He is, if you like, the Indiana Jones of Crete, Sir Arthur Evans. Evans, whose archive is kept here at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, made a series of spectacular finds at Knossos at the beginning of the 20th century. He uncovered a very strange world, but one that he thought was a high-octane, peace-loving first file on European Western civilisation.

Here there were extraordinary things, high priestesses who grappled with snakes, athletic men who jumped over bulls five feet high. and even goddesses with opium poppies in their hair. Evans was a brilliant archaeologist, but as time goes on, we realise, of course, that the story was not quite as simple as that. Crete was not Eurocentric.

In fact, it looked south and to the east, to Africa and to Asia Minor for its inspiration. Also, the Minoans had a very vexed relationship with their gods. This was a time when the gods were everywhere, in the fruit, on the trees. in the sky, when you made love, when you gave birth, and it was terribly important for the Minoans to keep the spirit world on side.

But then Crete suffered a massive geophysical disaster, and so it shouldn't be any surprise that archaeologists are actually uncovering evidence of a very traumatised society. In this film we go to visit a sanctuary where it seems as though a human sacrifice has been interrupted in mid-flow. We also look at these children's bones, which have been cooked and then the flesh scraped off.

So this could be evidence of cannibalism. As a historian, it felt that these were very important stories to tell, but actually as a person, they were very troubling things to deal with. So making this film rams home two things to me.

First, that however many centuries or even millennia separate you from those of the distant past, It is always possible to feel a connection with the long dead. And also it reminded me that history is not a tablet of stone. We do not know the way it was. We can just try to grope our way towards the truth. Because, of course, history is not the study of the dead, but it's the study of something which is much more unpredictable and chameleon-like.

It's a study of life. Down he went into that doleful gulf, through winding paths among the rocks, under caverns, and arches, and galleries. And he turned on the left hand, and on the right hand, till his head was dizzy.

But all the while he held his clue. And when he saw him, he stopped a while, for he had never seen so strange a beast. His body was a man's, but his head was the head of a bull, and his teeth were the teeth of a lion, and with them he tore his prey. And when he saw Theseus, he roared, and he put his head down and rushed right at him.

Of all the Greek myths, the story of the Labyrinth is one of the most dramatic and unforgettable. A subterranean struggle between the ultimate hero, Theseus, and the ultimate monster, the Minotaur. The offspring of an unnatural union between a woman and a bull.

It was told and retold for centuries before anyone thought to write it down, by which time it had become just another great story from the back catalogue of the ancient world. But the roots of the myth go deep, to a time before history, when stories like this were the way that people made sense of them. themselves and their past. So where did the Greeks get the story of a flesh-eating bull man lurking in a dark menacing labyrinth? To answer that question, you have to journey far into the past.

1500 years before the Parthenon was built. Way before Homer's time. Back 5000 years to an extraordinary time and place.

To Bronze Age Crete and the island of the Minoans. This is Crete, birthplace of an advanced prehistoric civilization, which then disappeared so suddenly and completely. All that remained were half-remembered, half-invented.

fragments, the stuff of myth. There's something very seductive about the idea of a lost civilisation, although it usually turns out just to have been misplaced. But when it comes to the inhabitants of Bronze Age Crete, it's remarkable to think that until just over a hundred years ago, few suspected they existed. The Minotaur may have been a myth, these people were scarcely a rumour. In a spectacular archaeological coup, its people, lost to history for thousands of years, were rediscovered and named the Minoans.

The lure of the labyrinth has proved irresistible ever since, with a stream of tourists, grave robbers, archaeologists and historians drawn back like me to search for traces of the lost world of the Minoans, sometimes in the most unexpected places. The picture that emerges is equally unexpected and the journey I'm going on now will take us to the very heart of this strange world where sophistication and culture exist side by side with blood and terror where beauty walks hand in hand with the beast. Crete, according to the Greeks, is Megalonisi, the big island.

And compared to the other islands of the Aegean, it is a whale in a school of minnows. But it's actually not that megalo. 150 miles long and...

never much more than 30 miles wide, an isolated landmass floating in the middle of the Libyan and Aegean seas. What is striking, though, is the amazing variety of landscapes that Crete manages to pack into the narrow space between its shores, enough to satisfy a continent. There are forests of pine, date palm groves skirting broad sandy beaches, and no less than 15 mountain ranges, three of them high enough to keep their snow well into spring.

Rivers course year-round through the veins of the island, winding down deep, narrow gorges, and feeding the stalactites in endless subterranean caverns. Travel around and you understand why Crete has been such a fertile breeding ground for tales of daring do, love and sex, blood and gore. Anything seems possible here, even the incredible story of a king, his wife and a pure white bull.

According to the myth, Crete was the realm of the powerful King Minos, a scrupulous lawgiver who was also prone to that very Greek form of arrogance, hubris. One day, to prove how far he was in favour with the gods, he prayed for a bull to be delivered to him from the sea. Poseidon very generously obliged, producing a white creature, assuming though that Minos would do the decent thing and offer it back to him in sacrifice. But the king was too enamoured of his fine gift. He sacrificed another in its place, keeping white bulls safe in a field.

A big mistake. The god was offended. Poseidon's punishment was to spark in Minos'wife Pacify a fierce, uncontrollable sexual longing for this beautiful white creature. This is where the intriguing Daedalus begins to play his part in this strange story. He was the master inventor, an Athenian according to the self-regarding mainland Greeks, but working in Crete in the service of King Minos.

Pacify knew that if anyone could find a way for her to satisfy her lust for the bull, it would be Daedalus, the Mr Fix-It of the Bronze Age. Never at a loss, Daedalus arranged in the squeamish Victorian version of the story for Pacify to interview the bull. He designed a hollow cow set on wheels with room enough for the queen inside. This pantomime creation was left in the field and Pacify clambered in. The result of the interview was the birth of the Minotaur.

A hideous hybrid with the body of a man and head and horns of a bull. For the ancient Greeks, the Minotaur was a freak of nature. The playwright Euripides wrote of it, a monster child, a hybrid that has no place on Earth. And so the story goes that Daedalus came to design a huge subterranean labyrinth to hide the shameful offspring of Minos'wife. And there, every nine years, the tribute children, seven youths and seven maidens, would be brought from Athens to satiate the Minotaur's taste for human flesh.

That is, until the brave Theseus arrived. Minos'daughter, clever, beautiful Ariadne, was the keeper of the keys to the labyrinth. With her help, Theseus set off to slay the beast. You can't help wondering whether there's a grain of truth alongside all this mythical cock and ball.

Whether the Athenian tribute speaks of a time when mainland Greece was under Crete's thumb and the triumph of Theseus over the Minotaur points to the moment when the tables were turned. Of course there was no half man, half bull. Perhaps there was a flesh and blood King Minos and a wily Princess Ariadne. You could speculate for hours.

But it's not time wasted. Nothing comes from nowhere. And some of the greatest archaeological discoveries were driven by the need to know whether myths had a historical leg to stand on. MUSIC PLAYS The first to test the reality of the myths was Heinrich Schliemann, one part pioneer archaeologist, two parts treasure seeker.

In 1871, at Hisilik on the coast of modern-day Turkey, he discovered what he claimed was the site of the Troy that Homer had written about. The finds were electrifying, including a spectacular hoard of jewellery that he got his wife Sophie to model for an enthralled world. It seemed that the works of Homer were history, not poetry, and the public was gripped.

But Schliemann didn't rest on his laurels. He turned his attention to the other players in Homer's great epic, at Mycenae, on the Greek mainland. What Schliemann discovered there was what he believed to be the home of the Greek warlord Agamemnon.

Graves just inside the city walls were opened to reveal the military trappings and wealth of the High King. Swords, daggers, cups, rings, and most famously of all, the death masks, crafted from wafer-thin, glittering gold. For some classically educated scholars, this was a real shock. For them, prehistoric civilization was a contradiction in terms, and yet... There was something undeniably civilized and sophisticated about all this stuff.

While some simply gawped at Schliemann's finds, there were others whose instinct told them that the horde from Mycenae was just the beginning. One of Britain's leading Egyptologists, Flinders Petrie, argued that the Mycenaeans, as they were now known, were no sudden apparition. These pottery fragments, some of his own finds from Egypt, had already got him thinking. These are 300 years older than that treasure from Mycenae.

He knew they weren't the same as the ones he had found in Egypt. ...and he had a strong hunch that they came from somewhere in the Aegean. Find the people that made these, Petrie said, and you'll find whoever it was that came before the Mycenaeans. And I bet they'll turn out to be Europe's first civilization.

The Starters pistol had been fired and one of the greatest archaeological races of all time was up and running. Somewhere in the Aegean, there was a lost world just waiting to be found. And so in 1900, chasing the lead of Schliemann and Petrie, a 48-year-old British archaeologist with a long distinguished career behind him came to Crete, to a place called Knossos. His name was Arthur Evans and Knossos was soon to be inextricably linked with him.

When Arthur Evans began digging here on the morning of March the 23rd 1900, he could have given you a dozen sound archaeological reasons for picking the site. The place was littered with tantalising clues. Roman coins, pottery shards from Homer's time, ancient walls disappearing into the hillside, and then there were these exquisite prehistoric seal stones and rings that locals had been finding in the area for generations. Knossos was a site with a big label on it saying excavate me.

Layer upon layer of topsoil was carried away. At first in wicker baskets by the 31 strong workforce. Then two weeks later as the size of the task dawned on Evans by 100 men.

using iron wheelbarrows. And as the speed of the excavations picked up, so did the excitement. Evans sketched a plan of the emerging walls with scrolled edges, like the pirates'maps in children's books, complete with an X to mark the spot where treasure had been found.

The buildings they were uncovering here were far bigger and more complex than anything that Troy or Mycenae had to offer. Wherever they dug, they just seemed to go on and on. Cascading staircases, twisting corridors, a bewildering complement of rooms, some small and intimate, others elegant and imposing. This was a labyrinth, but far more than just a monster's cage.

The site that Arthur Evans and his men had uncovered at Knossos surpassed the expectations of even the most optimistic hunter of the past. A five thousand year old civilization previously buried in myth had been brought blinking back into the real world. He hadn't found a city of gold, but the hoard from Knossos was even richer than that of Troy or Mycenae. The quality of the finds was extraordinary, but it wasn't just the craftsmanship that made a powerful impression.

Once into the excavations, the men digging at the west entrance discovered a huge imposing fresco fragment of a charging bull. It was life-size and lifelike, sculpted from lime plaster in high relief. Meeting this creature head-on as it emerged from the earth was a spine-chilling experience.

As one of the workmen brushed back the soil to expose its flaring nostrils and sharp horns, he screamed out in terror, believing he disturbed a demon, or worse still, the devil himself. Evans had found his labyrinth and his bulls. All he needed now was evidence for King Minos and the myths would be fully realized.

On the 13th of April 1900, just three weeks after the The first basket of earth had been filled. Workman began to uncover a complex of little antechambers, leading into a main room behind. On the south wall, workers unearthed a fresco fragment of a bull's hoof and all around the room, fine gypsum benches.

But it was the north wall that harboured the most exciting secret. Here, Evans uncovered something he must have dreamt about finding. An elaborately carved throne. Harriet Boyd, a pioneering young American archaeologist, was lucky enough to be with Evans when the throne was revealed. In her journal notes, she described the moment of discovery.

Intense excitement, she wrote, as a workman removed the last earth from the oldest throne in Europe, and the stone chair stood forth intact. Evans toyed with the idea that this was the throne of Ariadne, apparently reasoning that the wide moulded seat was more suited to the ample buttocks of a woman. But before long he was decided, and in a telegram to the Times he announced the discovery of the throne of King Minos.

The Minoans had arrived. The discovery of the throne was the culmination of years of dreaming. Evans later said it was as though he'd been given an open sesame and a prehistoric Civilization beyond his wildest imaginings had appeared from a crack in the earth Knossos was indeed the seat of King Minos.

He certainly had good taste in palatial pads. This was an incredible structure, and befitting one of the most powerful kings of the Bronze Age, it's built with no expense spared. At its peak, Knossos covered an area of 700,000 square metres, more than three times the size of Buckingham Palace and its grounds, with an approach as grand as the Mall. If you thought the Romans had the monopoly on precision road building, then think again.

This is Europe's first made road. It was constructed out of clay, cement and stones and faced with limestone slabs. You have to imagine it flanked on either side with grand houses leading straight from the town of Knossos right up to the palace.

Daedalus himself would have been proud of this elegant boulevard. It's a masterpiece of prehistoric urban design. At the risk of sounding like an estate agent, the palace boasts an impressive array of original features. Hinged doors, drainage systems, and what Evans famously described as a flush toilet.

Another first for the Minoans. Knossos is a building that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. You feel you're being taken on a journey that's been expressly designed to beguile and seduce, as well as bewilder and confuse.

You find yourself in gorgeous stone-clad rooms, and then walking past rows of pithoi, man-size alibaba jars in dark, sunken storerooms. Each of the seven or eight separate entrances feels like it's reserved for a different occasion. Some for privileged access, some, like here at the north entrance, for immediate or inspiring impact. But whatever route you take brings you here.

The immense central court. 54 metres. From north to south, 27 meters wide, the size of four tennis courts fitted together with room enough to spare.

Clearly, this space could accommodate huge numbers of people, but no one knows what it was used for. It's a giant question mark at the heart of Knossos. Archaeologists are still trying to solve the riddle of this enigmatic space.

But the most enduring theory is also the most dramatic. That the central court was the stage for a spectacular religious ritual. This was Tauro Cathapsia, bull leaping. And it was to Knossos what gladiatorial combat was to Rome.

There are lots of clues from Minoan art as to how these scary sounding ceremonies would have been performed. Although there's still plenty of room for interpretation. And I'm sure every seasoned bull leaper would have had his own repertoire of tricks. One possible technique though would have been to have grabbed the bull by its horns as it charged towards you.

To be flung up onto its back as the animal tossed its head and then somersault back down onto the ground. Whoever pulled off these crazy stunts must have been fantastically strong and supple, especially bearing in mind the sheer size of these animals, because these were crossbreed aurochs, particularly foul-tempered, standing six foot high at the shoulder and with a horn span to match. Aurochs have been extinct for nearly four centuries, so just try to imagine being in the presence of a beast whose hoof print is the size of a man's head. Bulls have been worshipped as symbols of fertility since the Stone Age. So perhaps bull leaping was an attempt to capture some of their elemental power.

The people who did this were clearly revered, as you can see from this beautiful ivory figurine of one of the leapers. Confident and sinewy, his limbs have been elongated to emphasize his agility. For the Minoans, bull leaping was as much about self-belief. as religious belief.

You should think of the bull as an honoured guest, the king of the beasts invited to the palace, an envoy from the natural world. He's here as a dancing partner, formidable and impressive, but it's still the bull leapers that are calling the tunes. These displays weren't designed to reduce the potency of the bull, but for the Minoans one thing was clear, the bull charges because that's what he does, man leaps because he chooses to.

But it wasn't just in the bull leaping ritual that the Minoans reveled in their intimacy with the natural world. Their art is infused with the same spirit of self-confidence and daring. It seems there was no style they wouldn't try, no materials they wouldn't use, no technique too complicated to employ.

It's almost as though once the Minoans realised what humans were capable of, they couldn't stop themselves, they became addicted to creating. From ivory carving to faience beads, from fresco painting to stone sculpture, it was all done with elegance and panache. Minoan artists took their cue from the natural world, but they weren't its slavish imitators.

Nature provided the raw materials, texture, form, colour and they felt free to play with them to manipulate and extemporise. The hothouse culture of this island produced some fabulously exotic fruit. These eggshell thin cups are called Camarys ware, named after the cave where many examples were found. They are almost 4,000 years old, but they sit happily on the style pages of a glossy magazine. And it's not just the artifacts that seem to speak to us across the millennia.

The recovery of this fresco fragment during the second season at Knossos is one of the most charming of all the stories to have come out of the dig. The visiting French scholar, when he saw the pieces being reassembled, burst out, Mais c'est sans des Parisiennes! The basic idea being that this three-and-a-half-thousand-year-old woman wouldn't have seemed out of place strolling down the Champs-Élysées.

For Evans. La Parisienne, as she became known, was the perfect Minoan. Refined, sophisticated, strangely modern, and above all, European. Right from the start, he believed that the prehistoric cultures of Greece and the Aegean were different from contemporary cultures of Egypt and the Middle East. Knossos and its artistic riches had only served to strengthen this impression.

The culture of the Minoans, he said, expressed a free and independent spirit. Independent, that is, of the powerful pull of the other cities and kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. Evans pictured his Minoans as lords and masters of their own island culture, able to keep the rest of the world at arm's length. He came to see Minoan Crete as the place where Europe's first naissance or birth took place.

And the culture from which all subsequent renaissance sprang. Classical Greece, Imperial Rome, even the good old British Empire itself. All of them had a trace of Minoan DNA in their genes. Evidence for what was arguably the Western world's first civilization had emerged from the earth at Knossos.

How many more secrets was the rest of Crete still hiding? While Evans'worker ants continued to pick over the bones of Knossos, other archaeologists went Minoan hunting elsewhere on the island. Further along the north coast from Knossos, French archaeologists turned their attention to a site here at Malia, and what they discovered, along with similar finds in the south, added a rich, intriguing layer of complexity to the picture that Evans had started.

It soon became clear that although the palace at Knossos was a prodigy, it wasn't unique. And if Daedalus had designed it, then others had been playing copycat all over Crete. Here at Malia and at Festos and at Ayatriada on the south of the island, other palaces were discovered in quick succession. They're all more compact than Knossos and each has its own unique features, but they're still built to the same...

blueprint. Everyone has its central courtyard, everyone has its warren of pithoi packed storums, and everyone has its public arena where Pallas and the people met. Suddenly, labyrinths were cropping up all over Crete.

They all clearly belonged to the same architectural family as Knossos, so they were all immediately given the same family name, Pallas'. It's a tribute to the persuasiveness of Evans'vision that the name has stuck. But how appropriate is it? You might think buildings as grand as Malia are all the proof you need for the existence of some kind of monarchy.

Why build a palace fit for a king, other than to put a king in it? But then when you look for other telltale signs of a ruling dynasty, Bronze Age Cretans... seems surprisingly Republican because unlike other contemporary cultures such as Egypt in the Middle East here there are no giant or inspiring statues no insignia stamping a badge of ownership on buildings and the land around them there is only an empty throne Minos is conspicuous by his absence.

When Minoans are shown performing some kind of public function, they usually share the stage with others, suggesting power is also shared. No one emerges as top dog. All men seem equal. And if anything, the women seem more equal than the men.

Cretan girls loom large in art and myth. Not just decorative creatures, but women who appear to be prestigious and influential, custodians of their culture. But however prominent women are, the overriding atmosphere in the palaces is unexpectedly corporate and anonymous.

So maybe Malia and Knossos weren't palaces at all, but places where the Minoan people came together to exercise their collective power. And as soon as you manage to put the seductive vision of kings and princesses to one corner of your mind, the possibilities are endless. What I'm reminded of when I visit the palaces are monasteries. Just imagine those powerful institutions with one foot in heaven and one foot planted very firmly in the real world.

Alongside the abbeys and shrines there were workshops and offices, turning out anything from illuminated manuscripts to potent liqueurs. The surrounding farmlands would have been worked by the people. but the fruits of their labour belonged to the monastery.

The palaces, too, may have functioned as granaries for the gods and festival halls in which the harvests could be stored and the generosity of the gods honoured. Like other Bronze Age cultures, the Minoans relied on the food that they could grow to survive. Without rich farmland, timely spring rain and the sun at harvest time, these storerooms, usually full to bursting, would have been empty and... bitter with the taste of dust.

Keeping on side those gods that decided whether you ate that year or died hungry was a serious business. In Egypt at this time we know that over a third of the year 120 days were devoted to agricultural festivals. It's where the festival hall theory comes into its own. Perhaps these palaces were giant venues dedicated to the celebration of the island's fertility. On this beautiful vase, you can sense both the relief and the joy in the faces of the harvesters as they carry symbolic sheaves from the fields, singing and laughing.

Perhaps they're on their way to the palace to give thanks to their gods for another successful harvest. In a world of palaces and frescoes and beautiful artefacts, it's easy to overlook the ordinary Minoans. Who would have been kept far too busy to worry about the finer points of bull leaping?

Luckily the archaeological riches of Crete weren't restricted to the posh end of the market. Welcome to the Cheap Seats. While grand buildings like Knossos and Festos were being excavated, Harriet Boyd, the American archaeologist, was exploring a site at Gorniar that has told us a huge amount about Minoan Crete beyond the palaces.

The treasures found at Gournay Isle were the stuff of everyday life. Fish hooks, carpenters'saws, potters'wheels, all a far cry from the steatide vessels and the ivory figurines of the palaces. And yet it was populations like these that made the most of the world. the Minoan world go round.

It was their ambitious craftsmanship that produced those objects, their industry that put food on the table for the kings or priestesses or whoever it was that lived at places like Knossos. In a society that was so productive, everyone had their role to play. And if the gods had been kind and the harvests were plentiful, you can imagine the men and women of Gorniar enjoying life in their flourishing market town. We can even visualize the kind of homes the inhabitants of Gorniar might have lived in. This 3,000-year-old clay model of a house is amazingly detailed.

It seems that the houses had no more than five small rooms on the ground level, basements for storage, and an open flat roof. No doubt the prime spot to get some relief from the heat and increase the chances of a good night's sleep. Most of the houses at Gorniar would have been white, just like the picture postcard Greek villages are today. But fresco evidence suggests that some of the wealthier homes would have been given a subtle colour wash.

The palette was taken direct from the landscape and the pigments would have come straight out of the earth. Yellow ochres and red oxides that would have given you everything from a delicate pink to a rich chocolate brown. I'd have loved to have seen Gorniar back then, the watercolour painting clinging to the wall.

to its hillside looking out across the sea. By the end of the 1920s, Minoan civilization, from the poshest of palaces to the humblest fisherman's cottage, had come a long way from being lost. But whatever extra details archaeologists like Boyd added...

The master plan belonged to Evans. He'd been the first to enter the labyrinth. He'd given the Minoans their name, defined the qualities that made them unique. And in his multi-volume book, The Palace of Minos, he'd even sketched out a plausible history for them, from their sudden rise to their equally dramatic collapse.

Around 1450 BC, as Evans saw it, the palace of Knossos had emerged victorious from a bitter, island-wide civil war that had left the rest of Crete in flaming ruins. Even in their moment of destruction, it seemed, the fate of the Minoans lay in their own hands, free from outside influences. Arthur Evans was a brilliant archaeologist, and he was a showman.

His version of the Minoans was made up of spade work, observation, intuition and flights of fancy. If you enter the labyrinth, you're just as likely to meet him at its heart as you are mine at all. But since his death, new generations of archaeologists have uncovered fresh evidence that tells a rather different story.

When Arthur Evans died, the jigsaw puzzle of Minoan Crete appeared to have been completed. Apart from one piece that he never found a place for. Alongside the beautiful frescoes and vases, what he discovered at Knossos were thousands of small clay tablets covered in different kinds of writing.

He saw endless possibilities running across their marked surfaces. If he could just decipher them, he'd break a silence that had lasted for thousands of years. MUSIC PLAYS Evans named these different scripts, rather prosaically, Linear A and Linear B, and he was convinced that they were examples of a unique Minoan language, one that would prove beyond all doubt the Minoans'superior status as an independent island nation. In other words, Evans could give the Minoans their history.

The problem was that he couldn't make sense of the tablets and he died before he could drag his Minoans out of the prehistoric world. It wasn't until after his death that other scholars could get their hands on the evidence and study the tablets in depth. Even then, it took years for anyone to break the code.

And when someone did, the archaeological world was in for a bit of a shock. When Michael Ventris heard Evans lecture as a schoolboy, He'd become driven by the desire to recover what he too was convinced was the lost language of the Minoans. But after years of hard labour, he announced in 1952 that what he'd been struggling with wasn't Minoan at all, but a difficult and archaic form of Greek, the language spoken by the Mycenaeans.

The Greek warlords from the mainland. So suddenly, the great fires of 1450 BC began to make more sense. Maybe they weren't the result of a Minoan civil war, but evidence for a wholesale Mycenaean takeover in Crete, with a mighty Knossos left intact to become the invaders'headquarters.

And when you think about it, it's not surprising that the aggressive Mycenaeans wanted to stake their claim to Crete. For a thousand years, the Minoans had been showing the rest of the Bronze Age world how to make a serious success of things. That's admiration and envy building up over 40 generations.

What eventually made the Minoans vulnerable to a Mycenaean coup is still the subject of heated archaeological debate. But however they got here, it seems they were here. Johnny-come-latelys usurping control for the last 200 years of a civilisation that had been up and running for thousands.

The Mytomians took up the trappings of Minoan culture with relish and no little respect, but inevitably they changed things. This tomb is of a type entirely new to the island, the monument of a warrior culture, a fortified treasure house, here to assert clan prestige and individual honour, alien concepts to the Minoans. Once the scholars had got over the shock of Ventris'decipherment, the people were hungry to discover what Linear B could tell them about the kind of place Minoan Crete had become under the rule of the Greeks from Mycenae.

The tablets turned out to be the contents of a Bronze Age filing cabinet, a meticulous record of the business end of palace life. This one deals with a shepherd called Poros and details his flock. We know that he had 28 rams and 72 ewes. It's an extraordinary thought that every itinerant herdsman up on the hillside was being monitored by the bean counters in the palace down below. It's not a grand history, but it's still short circuits used straight into the lives of the people.

There are references to bronze smiths, bakers and farmers, and even the individual names of oxen. Dusky, noisy and spotty. We also get a glimpse of loftier beings. Some of the gods and goddesses worshipped at places like Knossos. A number of the tablets record offerings to the religious powers.

Here there are two litres of olive oil offered to Pipituna, an early Minoan goddess. Down here you can see that there are 12 given to all the other gods and the lucky priestess of the winds gets 36. Clearly worship had its bureaucratic side too. The decipherment of Linear B is one of the most significant breakthroughs of Bronze Age archaeology.

But Linear A still remains a stubborn mystery. Most experts reckon this is the unique Minoan language that Evans was searching for. And if the work that's being done on it ever does succeed, it could unlock as many secrets as the richest of Crete's excavations. Evans's version of the Minoans, once apparently so complete and satisfying, had begun to unravel with the decipherment of Linear B, and other troubling new evidence soon followed. Far from not leaving any Cretan stones unturned, it was becoming clear that the first generation of Minoan archaeologists had only scratched the surface.

This is Anima Spilia, the Cave of the Winds, a small sanctuary about half an hour's drive from Knossos. In the 1970s, a discovery was made here that changed the world.

Transcript for:Exploring Minoan Civilization and Discoveries

Transcript for:
Exploring Minoan Civilization and Discoveries