King Sarpedon gazed out over the sea toward his lost home at Malia, the seaside show palace of the Minoan Empire. On days like this, he longed for the days of his youth, and for playing blissfully with his brothers Minos and Rhadamanthus. Even so, on this day the king of the Lycians ordered his fleet to set sail for the Nile delta, and the seemingly endless conflicts with former Egyptian allies.
Perhaps this illusion portrays well how obscure our history still is. Today, scholars seem to unveil ever more frequently myth as fact, and fact as fiction, in the quest for understanding. The Minoans are our best example to date, of the mystery that still shrouds our beginnings and our development from the very beginning. In short, we still know literally nothing about even our most prestigious ancestors. By comparison to what is “to be” known, that is. Take A Sarapedon, for instance.
Myth has it that he and his brothers were born of the union of the god Zeus, and Europa, the princess for whom the continent of Europe is named. Though archaeology has yet to establish a realistic linkage such as this, it is not difficult to imagine such myths being formulated, about the founders of the Bronze Age’s most magnificent society. How else would the founders of Knossos, Phaistos, and Malia be described? Surely, mortal stories would never do. And what of Sarpedon and Rhadamanthus after Minos assumed dominance from Knossos? Perhaps the gods punished all the key characters of a failed Atlantis?
What we do know is that King Sarpedon led the Lycians, who were the earliest ethnic group to be associated with the infamous “Sea People” who plagued Egypt, an Egyptian hieroglyph on the Byblos obelisk tells us that the “son of Lukka, “the Lycian, from about 1700 BCE. And since the Lycians followed Sarpedon when he was banished from Crete, it seems fair to name him the admiral of Sea People fleets. We should not expect less, from a Minoan prince, after all.
We would be naive to assume that the ancients simply concocted this intricate history of humanity. And the stories of Scamander migrating from Crete, and the beginnings of the Kingdom of Troy perhaps dating to around 1546 B.C., these remind us of the chronological puzzle of the Thera eruption. Banished kings and gods like King Sarpedon, seen being carried by sleep and death as Apollo looks on (at left). These are immortal stories that only become richer with the passing of time. There are the linkages between the Biblical Philistines, as a people synonymous with the Cherethites (that is, Cretans).
It’s interesting too, that a gigantic earthquake struck the Aegean about the time Lycia came into being. This was also the time when the great Minoan palaces were destroyed by fire for the first time.
And if we trace further into the lineage of King Sarpedon, we find Dimodece, her son Scamander, and the colony from Crete that became Troy. The story of these “gods” of Crete, is biblical in its richness, and more probably fact fictionalized. There’s the legendary Teucer, son of the most legendary archer of the same name, who protected mighty Ajax in the Trojan War – and ten dozen other heroic figures.
We would be naive to assume that the ancients simply concocted this intricate history of humanity. And the stories of Scamander migrating from Crete, and the beginnings of the Kingdom of Troy perhaps dating to around 1546 B.C., these remind us of the chronological puzzle of the Thera eruption. Banished kings and gods, stories which only become richer with the passing of time. There are the linkages between the Biblical Philistines, as a people synonymous with the Cherethites (that is, Cretans).
And lest we forget, Idaea (Ἰδαία) which means “she who comes from Ida” or “she who lives on Ida”, who was the mother, by the river-god Scamander, of King Teucer. Can you imagine a monumental tapestry of tradition that transmits Idaea, the mother of the Kuretes (Κουρῆτες), the armed dancers who guarded the infant Zeus in a cave on Cretan Mount Ida, through space and time’s incongruent splotches of human existence? I, for one, cannot.
The story of Cres, the son of Idaea, who legend has it was the King of the Cretan autochthons who sprang from the Earth to become the pure Eteocretans (“true Cretans”), should not be discounted. I am reminded of the famous archaeologist J.D.S. Pendlebury here, and his excavations at Karfi (below left), perhaps the last stronghold of the Eteocretans high above the Lassithi Plateau. And there there is the legend of Atlantis. But what of Rhadamanthus, who was King at Phaistos?
Legend has it he was banished to Boeotia, which was one of the first official regions of ancient Greece. It was here the Minyans came into power, a people who probably became the Myceneans who eventually made their way back to the Crete homeland. Not much has been passed down about Minos’ other powerful sibling. He is said to have been the stepfather and tutor of mighty Herakles, and one of the three judges of the dead in the afterlife. The Mycenean age (1600–1200 BC) bears the mark of such epic leadership from its humble beginnings, as well. One tradition says Rhadamanthus lives on in the Elysian Fields (Odyssey iv. 564), the paradise for the immortal sons of Zeus. While Pindar tells of the Cretan king being at the right-hand of Cronus (now ruling Elysium) and the sole judge of the dead. But my point is easily made now.
Legend has it he was banished to Boeotia, which was one of the first official regions of ancient Greece. It was here the Minyans came into power, a people who probably became the Myceneans who eventually made their way back to the Crete homeland. Not much has been passed down about Minos’ other powerful sibling. He is said to have been the stepfather and tutor of mighty Herakles, and one of the three judges of the dead in the afterlife. The Mycenean age (1600–1200 BC) bears the mark of such epic leadership from its humble beginnings, as well. One tradition says Rhadamanthus lives on in the Elysian Fields (Odyssey iv. 564), the paradise for the immortal sons of Zeus. While Pindar tells of the Cretan king being at the right-hand of Cronus (now ruling Elysium) and the sole judge of the dead. But my point is easily made now.
Today, battalions of gifted archaeologists and scientists struggle to solve the majestic riddle of our existence. Armed with the most sophisticated equipment, satellite imagery, supercomputers and magnetometers, etc., they creep incremental inches forward rebuilding out past. When they can manage to secure the much needed funding and support of individuals and government, they provide us with a window into a world we could once only imagine.
What significant for me is that somehow, a handful of oral chroniclers and scribes managed to fabricate an intricate quilt of humanity’s custom, religion, and art across untraversable distance in space, time millennia ago. The gods, the epic encounters, the molecules of moving life of antiquity is now thought to be some great conspiracy plaid out to fool us. At least this seems so, as I ponder the lined face and furrowed brow of King Sarpedon, who’s about to launch an assault on Egyptian Pharaohs who defy the one God, who Akhenaten (1336 BCE) later elevated before his people.
Now I ponder definitions. Deities versus God and divinity as the Minoans saw it, in a form of animism we cannot understand. God is everything! Now that’s a notion as interesting, appealing, and romantic enough to pursue.
To be continued…
Acknowledgments: Karfi image courtesy Cretan Beaches