Effectively Ending a Culture

How do we know anything about a culture that once almost completely disappeared?  Limited sources of information make it difficult to define the culture with any accuracy.  It just so happens that the culture I am going to discuss today is such a culture: the Minoan civilization, which disappeared more than a thousand years before the beginning of the Christian era.

The Minoan culture was based in Crete, an island of Greece, and can be an especially difficult one to study, because when they disappeared, they did a good job of it.  According to archaeological studies, there was some kind of fiery catastrophe, caused either by invaders or a volcano or something else, near the end of the Minoan era.  Shortly thereafter, there was an invasion, which finished off the people and marked the end of the Minoan culture.  Further complicating matters, the bulk of the written records from the Minoans are in a language that has yet to be deciphered, which means there are no direct first-hand accounts of the life of this people.

So, how does one go about understanding a culture that has disappeared, and whose writings are in an incomprehensible language?  Well, it certainly isn’t easy, but we can learn a few things.  Most of what we know comes to us from archaeological finds.  Archaeologists have found several rather elaborate palaces, which, while small, show an advanced level of architecture for their time.  In these palaces, they have found evidence of a fairly sophisticated bureaucracy, a king, and several other important tidbits of the society of this people.  The Minoans had their own rites of passage and forms of worship (which fulfilled the requirements we discussed in class); from artwork and other evidences, we can see that they had a developed religious system that required worship at specified places (sanctified caves) and to specific deities.  These gods and goddesses are mostly deifications of nature; the bull and ‘Mother Nature’ herself being the primary among them. 

From what little of their language has been translated, it seems that they were a very wealthy people, as well.  At a certain point, they started writing in a form of primitive Greek, which has been mostly translated.  Interestingly enough, most of the writings that we have been able to translate have been inventories of some sort; from the items indicated, it seems that they were a very wealthy nation in their day. 

Now, for me personally, this was where the subject became interesting, and perhaps in a future post I will have the opportunity to dwell on what was uncovered about their economy(see here for both their economics and an interesting timeline of their history).  For those who may not know me, I am an accounting major with minor in economics; put more bluntly, I am a total nerd who enjoys the study of the business world.   I will limit myself to saying that they imported lots of precious stones and substances (gold, silver, ivory, etc.) and exported several kinds of timber, wine, cloths, and dyes, and exhibited a very high amount of trading for the time.  Okay, I’ve satisfied my nerdy urges, now I can continue.

There is one other source of information about their culture, which is, naturally, oral knowledge!  In his scholarly book on “Bacchae,” a play by Euripedes, William Wood presents the argument that because much of Mycenaean oral tradition includes older references to Crete, these likely are left over from the Minoan culture.  Despite disappearing, the Minoans must have passed some oral traditions to the Mycenaeans who inhabited the island which eventually became their folk lore.  There is debate (as presented in this book) about which and how much came from the Minoans, but at least parts of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and probably all of Euripedes’ “Bacchae,” come straight from the oral traditions inherited from the Minoans. 

In a previous post, we discussed the termination of a culture, and the resulting loss of folk knowledge.  Unlike folk knowledge, which seems virtually impossible to preserve after the death of a culture, it seems that oral knowledge can continue to be passed down after even such a violent ending.