One of the interesting aspects of imagining or recreating Minoan daily life - including religious practice - is that we don't have any textiles to speak of: no altar cloths, no curtains, no rugs or baskets. The damp Mediterranean Sea air tends to rot organic materials pretty swiftly. So we only have a few tiny fragments of the real thing, plus pictures of them in Minoan art.
But we have an interesting reflection of soft materials in some creative ceramics the Minoan potters made. Minoan pottery was pretty imaginative all round, including loads of 3d decorations and other fun details. But this particular class of ceramic vessels is unique: They all look like they're made of soft materials.
Let's continue our exploration of Minoan clothing, shall we? Perhaps the most well-known item of Minoan clothing is the open-front top that Minoan women wear in much of the art. As I mentioned in Part One, this style probably involved sacred symbolism and would not have been considered racy or immoral in that time and place.
People are fascinated by Minoan clothing, but they're also confused by it. I thought I would take a little time to explain and show you some images from Minoan art so we can all enjoy the lovely garments the Minoans wore.
Please note that this is a two-part blog post (Part Two coming next week) but it's NOT divided into men's vs. women's clothing, because there is considerable overlap in some of the styles of clothing worn by different genders.
Last time, we looked at what kinds of vegetables the Minoans grew in their gardens. But they needed to season those veggies so they were especially tasty to eat, right? So what kinds of herbs and other seasonings did they use?
The first and most obvious one is salt. Like other island-dwelling people, the Minoans used sea salt. It's easy to make - just collect up some sea water and evaporate the liquid, using heat from the Sun or from fire. The Minoans were surely doing this all the way back in the Neolithic, though most of the evidence for it comes from later on.
Sir Arthur Evans believed that the huge building at Knossos was the legendary King Minos' palace and the big buildings in the other Minoan cities were the palaces of Minos' brothers and rivals. A century later, the signs at most of the Minoan sites still identify these buildings as palaces despite the fact that Evans' theories have been discredited and archaeologists now agree that the structures were temple complexes, not palaces.
A few archaeologists are notorious for taking their students through museums and pointing out the inaccuracies on the placards that describe Minoan artifacts (museum curators are not usually archaeologists and don't always communicate with archaeologists about the artifacts on display). So people visit the museums and come away with some incorrect notions.
When I talk with people about the ancient Minoans, I find they often believe that everything we know about ancient Crete was dug up by Sir Arthur Evans a century ago, and that's it. But that's not the case.
Evans is famous, sure, but did you know that the Minoan site at Gournia was originally excavated by the American archaeologist Harriet Boyd-Hawes? Work at the site was still ongoing this summer (2019). In fact, work at a lot of Minoan sites is still in progress, and we're learning and discovering more all the time. Here's a sampling of what's happening these days in the world of Minoan archaeology:
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