Hellfire that ended the cult of HUMAN SACRIFICE
Ruthless, savage — but the Minoans were also the first true civilisation in Europe. Now, new research has revealed the...
THE boy struggled, but his hands were bound and the priest, a towering figure, was too strong. Pacing behind them with a 16-inch blade in one hand, the priestess was indifferent to the pleadings of the youth.
For miles they had walked, from the great city of Knossos, cradle of the Minoan civilisation, up into the rocky wilderness surrounding the summit of Mount Juktas where the temple of Anemospilia was tucked away.
The young man’s cries of desperation were carried away in the clamour, a menacing roar erupting from the ground. Ash fell from the darkening sky, coating the landscape in white. There was no time to be lost if the gods were to be placated and the world restored to order.
By necessity, the ceremony was brief and brutal. The victim was strapped to the altar, a bare stone slab, as the priestess called on the deities to accept the offering.
A jar stood ready to collect the blood. Bull’s blood in happier times, or that of smaller animals on lesser occasions. But in this emergency, with the earth threatening to swallow an entire civilisation, a greater gift was required.
As the woman’s chanting rose to a crescendo, the priest raised the bronze blade and plunged it into the hapless sacrifice. A yelp and then silence.
But it was too late. Priest and priestess would outlive the victim by a matter of minutes. Another gigantic quake struck the temple, dislodging great stones from its roof and burying all three bodies in fallen masonry. There they would lie undiscovered for millennia.
With apocalyptic forecasts of Covid-19’s effects fuelling nationwide anxiety, it is easy to take comfort in the fact earlier societies have had it much harder and survived. But we must not forget others have had it harder still and disappeared into history, swept away by capricious Mother Nature. Such was the fate that overtook the Minoans of Crete, builders of the first civilisation on European soil.
For as new research now suggests, this great seafaring empire, centred on Greece’s largest island, was overwhelmed in 1560BC by a cataclysmic volcanic eruption on Santorini, 60 miles to the north across the Aegean Sea.
RINGS in tree trunks studied by British and American scientists show that the explosive collapse of Mount Thera on Santorini, now popular with tourists, was so powerful it spewed molten debris as far as Crete, sealing the fate of a civilisation that was to be lost for almost 3,500 years.
An ‘ unusually light’ ring on a palm-sized trunk of tree has been enough to convince researchers that the eruption changed the chemistry of the soil on Crete.
Battered by the earthquakes and tsunamis that followed, the greatest power in the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age succumbed, its survivors later falling victim to invaders from the mainland. Thus died a civilisation that built Europe’s first paved roads, multistorey buildings and even lenses.
For centuries the Minoans have been lauded as an essentially peaceful people responsible for importing Middle Eastern civilisation into southern Europe.
Founded on maritime commerce, backed by the likes of wine and olives, they developed a highly sophisticated society over 12 centuries, in which women enjoyed substantial power. Their religion celebrated nature and fertility.
But they had a far more bloodthirsty side. More recent research suggests the Minoans were more warlike than their admirers imagine, and human sacrifice and even ritual cannibalism were rare but real parts of their culture.
Certainly, strength and physical prowess were revered by the Minoans, who enjoyed boxing and the deadly sport of bull-leaping — evading a charging bull by vaulting out of danger. Women also took part, risking goring and excruciating death.
We do not know what the people of this lost empire called themselves. The written language they devised was named ‘Linear A’ by Sir Arthur Evans, the British archaeologist who began excavations at Knossos in 1900. it is yet to be deciphered and illustrations — paintings on walls and pottery — must be our guide.
indeed, it was Evans who named this race the ‘Minoans’, drawing on the classical legend of Minos, son of Zeus and king of Crete, who built a labyrinth to house the Minotaur, a creature half-man, half-beast that was the product of his wife’s illicit congress with a white bull.
The bull was a gift to Minos from the sea god Poseidon, who wished him to sacrifice it as an act of respect. But when Minos kept the animal, Poseidon plotted revenge, creating the unholy union resulting in the man- eating Minotaur, later l slain by hero Theseus, aided by b Minos’s daughter, Ariadne.
in Evans’s imagination, the palace a at Knossos, a vast warren of buildings and courtyards covering five acres, resembled Minos’s deadly labyrinth. And so he bestowed the name of a fictional and hapless king on the nameless p people he was investigating.
But this advanced civilisation did not shy away from barbarity. in legend, the Minotaur was fed from human sacrifices supplied as t tribute to Knossos from Athens — until Theseus ended its bloody career. So, too, did the Minoans engage in the offering up of human life, according to archaeologists working on sites across Crete.
As Mount Thera rumbled — causing the evacuation of the Minoan colony on Santorini and shaking the ground on Crete — offerings of young lives may have been viewed as the only way of placating an increasingly menacing natural world.
The temple of Anemospilia, a few miles from the palace of Knossos, was excavated in 1979 by a team headed by Greek archaeologist Yannis Sakellarakis. it was he who concluded the boy was sacrificed to stave off imminent destruction.
Peter Warren, a former professor of archaeology at Bristol University and noted Minoan scholar, has discovered evidence of what he believes to be child sacrifice — and even ritual cannibalism — at Knossos: children’s bones with knife marks scored into them.
Maria Vlazaki-Andreadaki, the Greek archaeologist who excavated the site where a woman’s remains were uncovered in 2012 with blows to the skull, explained: ‘ We cannot avoid mentioning human sacrifice in Minoan Crete.
‘Finding the skull of the young woman split with a sharp instrument at the “seams” in conjunction with ritual acts should not be surprising, since Greek mythology has abundant examples of purifying sacrifices of virgins in society’s effort to face a great disaster.
‘The myths of virgins in the role of [sacrifice] are presented as acts of deep submission and devotion to the divine, as a kind of negotiation with the supreme powers and not as unscrupulous slaughter.’
it is believed the sacrifice, alongside animals, coincided with an earthquake and subsequent fire.
Ultimately, these dark and desperate rituals were unsuccessful.
And so the fate of the Minoans teaches us we are powerless in the face of unbridled Nature.
We are being given a glimmer of that reality now, as the certainties of our civilisation are shaken by a new and frightening threat. Fortunately, it is but a glimmer.