Minoan Kingship and the Solar Goddess: A Near Eastern Koine (review)

Nanno Marinatos, Minoan Kingship and the Solar Goddess: A Near Eastern Koine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 263 pp. Of all ancient civilizations, the one we might most cheerfully assign to invasion from outer space is the Minoan. It had no obvious antecedents in Greece and no real following, except for the short period of Mycenaean takeover. Arthur Evans, who discovered the Minoans at Knossos, drew the more obvious comparisons with the arts and religions of the East and Egypt—none terribly close and wholly overworked by a culture that viewed its arts and their messages in a way quite unparalleled elsewhere, and intelligible to us only because its practitioners were not little green men but a rather special breed of Homo sapiens. Their religious apparatus was peculiar to them (double axes, horns), and the personnel humanoid, but for a demon that owes a little to Egypt. Religious scenes bear slight resemblance to those of southern or eastern neighbors, and the strongly individual style of figure and animal drawings as well as scene composition is particular to them. Nanno Marinatos, daughter of the most vigorous Greek explorer of the Minoans, has worked this area before, but her new book places them more persuasively in the context of their neighbors, as well as of their own idiosyncratic view of the world, than as forerunners of the classical—which is quite inconceivable. Yet to include them in a “Near Eastern koine” stretches the idea of a koine almost to bursting point. They were the children of their age, as were their neighbors, but more dependent on a strong individuality of approach and vision, perhaps promoted by their physical remoteness from the Levant and Egypt—a remoteness they bade to reduce by travel, as had all occupants of Greece’s relatively sterile land, and in this respect alone foreshadowing the behavior and achievement of their successors there. —John Boardman doi 10.1215/0961754X-1544995 Common Knowledge 18:2© 2012 by Duke University Press 355 L IT T L E RE VIE WS ...