Did kings dwell in Cretan palaces?

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33995, 8 November 1975, Page 10

Did kings dwell in Cretan palaces?

The Secret of Crete. By Hans G. Wunderlich. Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston. Souvenir Press. 367 pp. N.Z. price $10.40. "It is only since Evans that we speak of Minoan culture,” says Professor H. G. Wunderlich in this detailed study of the palaces of Crete, long accepted as evidence of an extraordinary and highly sophisticated civilisation in Bronze Age Crete more than 3000 years ago. "Were the excavated labyrinthine complexes really the ' palatial residences of glorious kings, of the legendary Minos ...? Places of worship, shrines, sanctified earth, yes, but not places for human settlement. What the excavators have unearthed are not the homes of the living but the dwellings of the dead.” And with that. Professor Wunderlich challenges rather sacred ground. A geologist of wide scholarly interests and research, he offers an intriguing alternative: that what Sir Arthur Evans excavated and reconstructed at Knossos in 1900 is evidence not of an elegant and peace-loving Minoan peoples but of a culture devoted to the gods of the underworld. That, in fact, the palaces were mortuary shrines, complexes of structures devoted to the burial, veneration, and preservation of the dead; a cult that was an integral force in the development of eastern Mediterranean civilisation.

Professor Wunderlich supports his general thesis by a detailed examination of palace construction, an analysis of burial and funerary customs in the Mediterranean region, emphasising the parallel customs in Egyptian entombment, and evidence of an exchange of not only goods but ideas, and by examining geologic formations. He concludes that the "cult of the dead seems to have been a profitable business in its heyday . ..” His interpretation is impressive both for its attention to details based on scholarly research and his knowledge of geology and engineering, and for its plausibility of argument. He is particularly impressive when he points out that whatever the reasons for the supposed disappearance of this unique culture (acknowledging the possiblity of sudden volcanic upheaval, earthquake, as well as that of hostile invasion), the decline in Minoan civilisation was really the result of what he calls the inner change of function as the decisive factor in the death of civilisations. He argues that there was not, in fact, a sudden annihilation of the Minoan culture, and contends that Evans and his followers failed to realise that physical catastrophe alone is not sufficient to destroy a civilisation. Rather, "institutions and buildings are allowed to go to ruin only when they no longer have a living function. This is an interesting — and not new — interpretation based on the evolution of civilisations. Professor

Wunderlich claims this essentially spiritual and religious cult of the dead suffered the same fate as the Egyptian pyramid and tomb constructions. Grave and tomb plundering were, and in time came to be a profitable business; one that most likely grew into a highly organised justification for hostile invasions. Professor Wunderlich suggests that entombment gradually gave way to cremation, and that there occurred the evolutionary shift from the veneration of the dead to the later Bronze Age interest in the Greek worship of heroes and gods, projected naturally through song, dance, poetry and drama, and based on initially religious preoccupations. His final hypothesis is that the Minoan-Greek culture as the fabled cradle of civilisation was neither the result of a gift nor evidence of a superior intellect. Rather, it was a developing civilisation through successive generations. And, out of this cult of the dead, grew — the result of spoken language and not script, the art of story telling and myth — the early Greek veneration of heroes and gods. The evolutionary turn was toward the living rather than the dead, the beginning of a process of enrichment for the general community. In Professor Wunderlich’s view, it was the Cretans of Greek stock who were the first to “break out of the rigid conventions of a fundamentally Stone Age religion,” which in turn led to the gradual development of a “genuine life of the mind.”