The Palaces of Minoan Crete

The palaces built by the Minoan people of Crete (an island in the eastern Mediterranean) between 1950 B.C. and 1450 B.C. were centers of power, both sacred and secular, with wealth based on the stores of agricultural produce from the fertile hinterland that they controlled. What happened within them? Presumably they were busy places. The receipt, recording, and storage of goods brought in from the surrounding countryside must have been a major job, particularly at those tunes of the year when the corn was harvested, the olive ripe, or the wine newly made. Administration of the goods and commodities leaving the storerooms for consumption in the palace, for use in the workshops, or for wider distribution must have taken place throughout the year. We may imagine the storage areas as busy by day, and probably carefully guarded at night.

The craft workers creating precious works in such materials as gold, Ivory, and semiprecious stones may well have been fulltime craft specialists, totally dependent on the palaces and working constantly within them, their products in demand both tor immediate use and possibly foe exchange quite far afield. Their raw materials were part of palatial wealth, and must have been kept under strict control. Similarly bronze workers, whose raw material would have been carefully recorded, no doubt worked close by. Pottery workshops seem to have been further afield, situated near the clay beds and fuel for the kilns (pottery ovens) rather than within palace confines, though their products could still have been largely or totally under palace control. The production of textiles was probably always an important palace-based activity, though we do not know in which rooms, precisely, spinning and weaving took place.

Some revisionist interpretations of the palace of Knossos have questioned whether people lived within it to any great extent. We must face squarely the fact, implicit in the above account, that unequivocal evidence for human residence as opposed to human use, is hard to find. Nonetheless, it seems overwhelmingly probable that all the palaces were lived in by some, if not all, of the people engaged in the many activities for which they show evidence. Many nonspecific rooms could have been lived in by various dependents–craft workers, guards, textile workers, servants, or slaves. This remains true even if we follow those interpretations that would prefer “temple” to “palace” as the buildings’ prime identification.

In fact, the choice of “temple” rather than “palace” is a change of emphasis rather than a change of interpretation. From the early twentieth-century work of archaeologist Arthur Evans onwards, the ingrained and embedded religious nature of the palaces has been accepted, as has the fact that “palace” is inadequate shorthand for the buildings’ complexities. There are, though, good reasons not to change wholesale to “temple” which in truth is similarly inadequate. The most obvious problem with such a change is the fact that, while a society based on large palaces with no temples has always been recognized as anomalous in the ancient world, large-scale temples with no palaces would be equally so. Unless there is a truly huge gap in our excavated evidence-possible, but as time goes on increasingly unlikely–these complex buildings are all we have. The most logical conclusion remains that they fulfilled two sets of functions simultaneously. Accurate terminology that did not privilege one function over another would require the coinage of a portmanteau term such as “palace-temple” or “temple-palace,” but this seems an undesirable deviation from terminology that is long established, whatever its shortcomings.

What, though, of the ruling elite, whether priests, kings, or both? Is there evidence that the palaces housed a royal family? The attempt to see royal apartments throws into high relief not only the difficulty of identifying precisely the function of a room from its form, but also the fact that we do not really know who, in Minoan society, held the reins of power. The Minoan tradition indicates a king- yet power may have been wielded by a priest, or by a priest-king, combining functions that we would divide into sacred and secular. Nonetheless, it still seems overwhelmingly likely that the ruling elite lived in the palaces, or perhaps in both the palaces and the important houses in their immediate vicinity.

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?The palaces built by the Minoan people of Crete (an island in the eastern Mediterranean) between 1950 B.C. and 1450 B.C. were centers of power, both sacred and secular, with wealth based on the stores of agricultural produce from the fertile hinterland that they controlled. What happened within them? Presumably they were busy places. The receipt, recording, and storage of goods brought in from the surrounding countryside must have been a major job, particularly at those tunes of the year when the corn was harvested, the olive ripe, or the wine newly made. Administration of the goods and commodities leaving the storerooms for consumption in the palace, for use in the workshops, or for wider distribution must have taken place throughout the year. We may imagine the storage areas as busy by day, and probably carefully guarded at night.

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