Minoan Traditions

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Minoan Traditions

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Festivals & Processions, Dance, Sports, Rituals, Absence of War, Burials

Festivals & Processions
- The Britomarpeia -- festival held in her honor in the Archaic cities of Chersonesos and Olous (Wikipedia)
- The paen -- a solemn dance procession expressing praise or tribute, accompanied by the lyre or flute.
- Communical Feast Days -- "Few modern excavators in Crete would deny that the great deposits of cups and bowls we find in cupboards near the entrances to the palatial buildings point toward communal feasting on a grand scale.... At Knossos, the evidence for feasting goes well back into the Early Minoan period, to roughly 2600 BC. If the Minoans were anything like most pre-industrialized societies, they observed a very full calendar of sacred feast days. The ancient Egyptians, for example, devoted more than one hundred days of each year to communal feasting."
- The "famed" Chorus at Knossos. "The chorós, our chorus, in ancient Greece was the band of singers and dancers in the religious festivals and dramatic performances around the altar of Dionysus (but) it was also a place.... To the ancient Greeks, the chorus signified both the activity itself, and the place where the community gathered to perform it...."
- "Art historians have made much of the processions, singing, and dancing represented in Minoan art, which most scholars agree must be linked to sacred ritual performance.... Paul Faure, when he imagined Minoan daily life, pictured the palaces as the venues for this ritual activity. Faure based his image on the temples of ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant, as well as the sanctuaries of ancient Greece.
  Perhaps the later Greek tales of the chorus and labyrinth refer to the same place: a sacred district reserved for communal gatherings. These open spaces may have been designated early in the Bronze Age, but formally defined when permanent shrines, storerooms and preparation buildings were erected around them at approximately the same time as the Egyptian Labyrinth was built. The limits of the central court were marked out and the palace built as a unity, a very costly enterprise.
  This line of thinking takes us a long way from the [palace as] seat of powerful secular authority, as Evans proposed, for under the ritualistic model, kings would have derived much of their power from divine mandate. It takes us into the realm of divinely inspired priestly authority in a corporate society and allows us to imagine the Cretan palaces as great sanctuaries; lively places where the community gathered to celebrate the first day of each month, the phases of the sun, moon, and the five visible planets; and all of the other relevant festivals that societies devoted to the earth, and which its fruits and its seasons feel obligated to observe.
  This is one theory largely based on the ancient authors and how they remembered Knossos, but which also takes the latest archaeological finds and thinking into account. I believe that the best way to understand why the Minoans built their palaces is to conduct research and excavations with a greater sensitivity toward Crete's sacred environment and how it affected its inhabitants, and move on from the economic models of the twentieth century AD."
  (Return to the Labyrinth)
Dance
- "Dance in ancient Crete was largely related to religion and daily life. Music, dance, and poetry were all parts of the same art. Dance closely related to music and its verses. Poetry, for instance, was often interpreted through dance rather than spoken or sung words." (Dance in Modern and Ancient Greece)
- Ritual dances for the goddess took place in open fields of lillies. (History of Sex)
- Types of dances:
  - funeral dances
  - circle dances performed around altars, trees, pillars, sacred objects, and musicians
  - maze or labyrinthe dances
  - wedding dances (geranos or crane dance)
  - symposia (after dinner) dances
  - dance mania / wild dancing -- "The worship of certain divinities, particularly in the cults of Asiatic gods such as Dionysus and Cybele, included orgiastic or ecstatic dancing. The female devotees of Dionysus who succumbed to this dance mania were often called 'maenads' or 'bacchantes'." It's possible that these happened on Crete as elsewhere: on the mountains. (Dance in Ancient Greece)
  - animal dances (the most important in later Minoan culture were the bull and cow dances)
    (Dance in Modern and Ancient Greece)
- The origin of dancing is attributed to Rhea in Greek mythology. It is said that She taught this art to the Kouretes in Crete.
- "..The dominant formation in all ancient Greek dances seemed to have been the circle, open, closed or spiralling..."
- "Many archaeological findings show that the rich Cretan dancing tradition undoubtfully influenced Mycenaeans, who passed these dances, along with other elements of their cultural and traditional life, to mainland Greece."
- "Cretan dances were performed in open or closed circles. Cretans were usually dancing around a tree, an altar, or mystical objects.... Later on, they used to dance around a singer or a musician. Cretan sculptures illustrate dances in a circle around the lyre player, couple dances connected with cults, and the close swaying dance performed by large choruses of women in front of all people. Similar sculptures have been found in mainland Greece and Cyprus and are dated around 1400 - 1050 BC."
- "As a rule, men and women danced separately, rarely together."
- "Women danced women’s dances among themselves and dionysiac dances in the course of orgiastic bacchic festivals."
- "...the music accompaniment of the dance plays a very important role ... there was a single word ... for song, dance, and instrumental music; the evidence suggests that they never chanted without moving their bodies. Known instruments of the ancient times were pieces of wood, metallic cymbals, bells and shell instruments which used to keep the rhythm of the dance. They also used sistron and tympani. Minoans used string instruments, such as the kithara and the lyre, and wind instruments such as the avlos and the syrigs."
  (History and Evolution of Greek Dance)
Sports -- the primary two are boxing and bull-leaping; women and men participate equally in each
Rituals -- see the Minoan Religion page
Absence of War -- "According to Homer, Crete had 90 towns, of which Knossos was the most important one. Archeologists have found palaces in Phaistos and Mallia as well. The island was probably divided into four political units, the north being governed from Knossos, the south from Phaistos, the central eastern part from Malia and the eastern tip from Kato Zakros. Smaller palaces have been found in other places. It is remarkable that none of the Minoan cities had city walls, and few weapons were found." (Wikipedia)
Burials -- "At Knossos, [in the Neolithic] there is no evidence for adult burials, but infant and child burials are found in pits under house floors in the Aceramic, EN II, and MN levels. During the Late Neolithic period, caves and rock shelters served as burial places in other parts of Crete." (The Neolithic Cultures of Thessaly, Crete and the Cyclades)