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Labyrinth, review: this study of the Minoans is a near myth

The restoration of the Ladies in Blue fresco from Knossos by Émile Gilliéron - Ellie Atkins/ Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
The restoration of the Ladies in Blue fresco from Knossos by Émile Gilliéron - Ellie Atkins/ Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

At the heart of the Ashmolean’s enthralling new exhibition, there’s a scintillating story. But, like all good yarns, it plays fast and loose with the truth.

In 1900, Arthur Evans, one of those rich Victorian worthies nowadays accused of an imperialist mind-set, began his famous excavations at Knossos on Crete, determined to uncover the notorious labyrinth in which, according to Greek myth, Theseus had slain the Minotaur (a monster with a man’s body and the head of a bull).

Assisted by Cretan workmen, Evans slowly brought to light the remains of a vast Bronze Age settlement, which he called a “palace”, destroyed by fire around 1350 BC. The “mysterious complication” of its passageways, he argued, were surely the labyrinth’s maze-like, half-remembered source. When evidence turned up that youths at Knossos had engaged in bull-leaping, he considered the case closed. Proudly, he named the people who had lived there “Minoans”, after Crete’s legendary King Minos.

It was a sensational discovery, and Evans’s vision of a peaceful, nature-loving, technologically advanced society has endured. For Evans, Minoan civilisation was a sort of utopia, and certainly on a par with ancient Egypt – with which it co-existed centuries before the emergence of Classical Greece.

Zealously, he gave grand names to the settlement’s chambers (a “throne room” here, “lustral basins” there), and began reconstructing the monument by installing reinforced-concrete columns, as well as versions of its fragmentary frescoes depicting an ancient Aegean arcadia populated by bejewelled, bare-breasted women and dancers beside blue-leafed groves. Yet, one historian, RG Collingwood, compared the concreted effect to that of “garages and public lavatories”, and subsequent scholars accused Evans of over-interpretation and turning Knossos into a tourist attraction. Some of his “reconstitutions”, as he called them, proved shaky: a fresco of a blue-skinned “boy” gathering saffron turned out to be a monkey likely kept as an exotic pet; Evans insisted on identifying two white-skinned attendants in the celebrated Taureador Fresco as women, despite evident codpieces.

Sir Arthur Evans at the Palace of Knossos, 1901 - Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Sir Arthur Evans at the Palace of Knossos, 1901 - Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Moreover, according to the Ashmolean’s curator, Andrew Shapland, it’s even possible that Knossos wasn’t a palace at all, but a sprawling storage complex for the island’s lucrative textile industry. The exhibition’s final section foregrounds work undertaken since Evans’s day, some of which has challenged his findings: it turns out that the supposedly non-violent Minoans (who, of course, never went by that name) practiced human sacrifice. In one sense, Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality is brilliant, because its subject is so captivating. As an exhibition, though, despite an imaginative design that neatly evokes meandering Knossian architecture, it can feel bookish. Much of the material on display is archival, documenting aspects of Evans’s digs.

Moreover, the antiquities lent by the museum’s partners in Crete, some of which have never left the island, are stimulating but not spectacular – which is a shame given the sophistication of Minoan art, which also depicted, with astonishing naturalism, an undulating, underwater world of goggle-eyed octopuses with tentacles as sinuous as hair. Painted plaster replicas represent the well-known “Snake Goddesses”, a pair of faience figurines too fragile to travel.

Is this a show about Europe’s first great civilisation – or Evans’s imagination? Of course, it’s about both, but I, for one, could have done with less emphasis on the workings that fired the latter.


From Feb 10 until July 30; ashmolean.org