W. set himself an arduous challenge: to produce a book that would transcend the divide between ‘popularizing accounts and specialized treatments aimed at scholars’, while synthetising the ‘immense amount of new information … accumulated over the past two generations’ (p. 1). He should be congratulated for these ambitious aims. These are, however, only partly achieved: the book does synthetise a great amount of information but, despite its merits, contains flaws that hinder an understanding of Minoan Crete for many lay readers (and students), such as factual inaccuracies, inadequate maps, distorted images, incomplete captions, mistakes in bibliographical entries and innumerable typos (e.g. from the names of people thanked in the acknowledgements to the ‘Glossary’).
The book, dedicated to the people of Crete, presents a readable overview, enlivened by personal anecdotes: W.'s deep love for Crete (ancient and modern) shines throughout its pages. It is rich in good colour photographs (many by the author), which are, however, in contrast with other illegible and inaccurate illustrations.
The book attempts to place Crete in its broader eastern Mediterranean context, while showing the distinctiveness of Minoan culture, and presents a history of Minoan Crete punctuated by migrations – all trends that go back to Sir Arthur Evans and have many other predecessors. To make the subject more broadly appealing, W. often uses Homeric passages to illuminate Minoan Crete – another trait reminiscent of much earlier literature on Aegean prehistory (some parallels, though, are a bit overstretched: e.g. on p. 169 a Knossian fresco showing a landscape with anemones is likened to the Phaeacian orchard described in Odyssey 7.114–35).
A short introduction sets out the aims and structure of the volume, divided into chronological and thematic chapters, but does not really explain the reasons for the latter. Chapters 1 and 2 are also introductory. Chapter 1 discusses the natural environment of Crete and ‘traditional life’, i.e. the agricultural life of Cretan villages that could be observed before modernisation, since this can help to understand some aspects of Minoan culture likewise dependent on the cycle of seasons. There are lively discussions of agricultural and husbandry activities in relation to religious events in the Orthodox calendar; the olive harvest, however, pace W., does not start after 6 January (Epiphany) (p. 17), but around late October–December. Chapter 2 is a succinct survey of the history of research on Minoan Crete in three sections: first, W. discusses the myths on Minos and his family derived from various Classical texts (since these represent what most scholars knew about the distant Cretan past before archaeological explorations of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century); second, the history of archaeological research on Minoan Crete; and third, a brief section on ‘visions of Minoan Crete in the twentieth century’. If brevity is a virtue and may explain omissions, it is not an excuse for factual inaccuracies: for example, the intervention of some European powers in Cretan matters occurred in 1898, not in 1894 (p. 23). Duncan Mackenzie worked at Knossos from 1900 until 1910 and in the 1920s, not for the first four field seasons only (p. 23); J. Pendlebury's Archaeology of Crete (1939) is not ‘the first to present a description of the archaeological evidence of Crete … systematically period by period’ (p. 25) since, besides Evans's Palace of Minos (1921–1935), there are R. Dussaud's Les civilisations préhelléniques dans le bassin de la mer égée (1910; 2nd edition 1914), D. Fimmen's Die kretisch-mykenische Kultur (1921) and G. Glotz's La civilisation égéenne (1923), among others. Evans did not attribute Minoan cultural developments to diffusion above all, let alone espouse the idea of ex oriente lux (pp. 26, 28–9): evolutionism had, arguably, a greater influence on Evans, who largely rejected the notion of ex oriente lux. He always stressed Minoan originality, even suggesting that the Phoenicians had derived their script from Crete (see e.g. his ‘“The Eastern Question” in Anthropology’, British Association for the Advancement of Science, Liverpool, Sept. 1896). Michael Ventris did not discover that Linear B represented an inflected language (p. 27): others had observed this before (e.g. Alice Kober).
Chapters 3–5 and 9 follow a chronological order, whereas Chapters 6–8 are thematic. Chapter 3 covers the Palaeolithic up to the early Prepalatial (Early Minoan II); Chapter 4 from the Late Prepalatial (Early Minoan III–Middle Minoan IA) to the end of the First Palaces; Chapter 5 the Neopalatial period; and Chapter 9 the Final Palatial period (and a short ‘epilogue’ on ‘Minoan heritage’, which seems limited to possible Minoan survivals in later Greek religion). The calendar dates used by W. (p. xv) are taken from a seminal work published in 1985. Yet, given the significant works on Aegean chronology produced subsequently, more up-to-date references would not have gone amiss. Chapter 6 focuses on Neopalatial overseas connections, while Chapters 7 and 8 are on ‘religion’ and ‘art’, respectively, in the Proto- and Neopalatial periods. These are readable summaries, but one feels that those matters could have been as easily incorporated into the chronological chapters. One also feels that W. sometimes skates over rather contested issues (e.g. the Late Minoan IB Mycenaean ‘invasion’ of Crete, p. 113; the Minoan military conquest of Cycladic islands, p. 121; the divinity of the ‘Snake Goddesses’ from Knossos, p. 131). Similarly, some statements seem insufficiently supported by evidence (e.g. on p. 58 the notion that ‘large amounts’ of Protopalatial pottery reached the Anatolian coast, since some sites have yielded only a handful of fragments).
Although this will not inconvenience specialists, it is remarkable that an introductory volume is provided with such poor maps. When sites are mentioned, readers are often referred to maps where these do not appear: for example on p. 32, for the site of Preveli (misspelt as Prevali) readers are referred to Fig. 3.1, which shows a map of Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean, but not the site in question; ditto for the site of Vasiliki (p. 41). Similarly, readers will not find the hill of Kastri (misspelt as Kastro) near Palaikastro in Fig. 1.5 (p. 99), a lovely picture of the Lasithi plain. Several maps and plans are unsatisfactory in other respects. For example, Figs. 1.1 and 4.1 are basically the same (with some additions in the latter) but site names are barely legible. Fig. 3.1 includes many mistakes (e.g. the dot puts Palaikastro out to sea; Kythera is misspelt Kythena; Alalakh is misspelt Alalakah) and is needlessly duplicated in Fig. 6.1 (though attributed to a different creator). Fig. 4.15 (plan of Protopalatial Phaistos) comes from a 1961 publication, though more up-to-date plans are available (e.g. I. Schoep et al., Back to the Beginning [2012], p. 237). Other images too are problematic: Fig. 6.2 shows Middle Minoan, not Late Minoan IB pottery as suggested on p. 121, and Fig. 7.13 has completely distorted the image of the gold ring from Archanes.
I suspect many specialists and serious students may not find this volume as rewarding as other publications. Regarding non-specialists, with mistakes corrected and some illustrations improved, this could become a useful addition to the available archaeological literature aimed at them: as it stands, it is a missed opportunity, and one wonders how a publisher such as Cambridge University Press could allow so many mistakes to slip through. The volume clearly went to press without systematic copy-editing and proofreading or, if corrections were made, an old (and wrong) file was sent to the printers.
