Octopus dreams: Japan, Stonehenge, Knossos ~ by Lesley Downer

takotsubo ya                 Octopus pot
hakanaki yume o          Fleeting dreams
natsu no tsuki               Beneath the summer moon
                                                    Matsuo Bashō (1644 - 1694)

Minoan octopus vase,
around 1500 BC

Husband (in octopus tee
shirt) meets dogū at the
Heraklion Archaeological
Museum

Cultural echoes spring up tentacle-like in the most unexpected of places. Japan and Stonehenge, Japan and Knossos - who would have thought it?

This summer there have been exhibitions at Stonehenge and the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete, celebrating the parallels between the marvellous Jōmon culture of Japan and these two very distant yet in surprising ways not dissimilar island cultures. I was lucky enough to visit both.

Jōmon flame pot at 
Heraklion Archaeological
Museum (3000 - 2000 BC) 

Jōmon - prosperous hunter-gatherers and the world's first potters
Fifteen thousand years ago the world was engulfed in an ice age. Much of the earth’s water had solidified into ice and sea levels had fallen by several hundred feet. What are now the islands of Japan were part of mainland Asia, connected to present day Siberia and Korea by vast tracts of countryside, plains and hills. It was cold and stormy. Huge long-tusked long-haired ‘Naumann’s’ elephants lumbered around, along with giant deer, horses, tigers, brown bears and wolves, trailed by hardy nomadic people looking for animals to hunt and fruit and vegetables to forage.

Around 14,500 BC, long before anyone else thought of doing so (except possibly the Chinese), some of these people took to moulding the clayey soil and making it into small pots, useful for carrying grain. This was a quite extraordinary development; pots are heavy to lug around when you’re on the move. Millennia later these nomads came to be called Jōmon - ‘rope design’ - after the patterns they impressed on their pots.

 

Jōmon flame pot at
Circles of Stone
exhibition at Stonehenge

Then temperatures began to rise. The ice melted and the sea levels rose, turning what had been the extreme edge of the Asian continent into a string of islands. The weather turned balmy. The descendents of those hardy nomads found themselves in a Garden of Eden, enjoying a lush temperate climate. Most lived not far from the sea where fish and seafood could be snatched straight from the water, collected or speared. 

There were mountains where animals roamed and forests overflowing with roots, fruits, leaves and berries. The Jōmon knew about farming; their neighbours across the water in Korea were farmers. But they themselves didn’t need to break their backs hoeing the soil day and night, for they had abundant food all around them. Most peoples didn’t settle down until the advent of farming; but these hunter-gatherers were so prosperous that many stopped wandering and formed communities.

dogū at Heraklion
Archaeological
Museum

Life was so easy that they didn’t need to send everyone out hunting and foraging. Specialist trades developed. Artisans stayed home and built houses or made pots. By now they were using the pots for cooking and serving large communal feasts. And the pots they made became bigger and bigger and more and more gloriously elaborate.

One settlement, at Sannai Maruyama in the far north of the main island, present day Honshu, made up of 700 large thatched houses built around fire pits, was occupied for 1500 years, from 3500 to 2000 BC. The inhabitants dined on mackerel, yellowtail, tuna, salmon, shark and shellfish from the sea, rivers and lagoons, and deer and boar which they hunted with dogs and with stone arrowheads glued to wooden shafts. They ate chestnuts, acorns, walnuts, wild grapes, kiwi fruit, gourds and beans and hunted rabbits and flying squirrels for their warm fur.

Ōyu stone circles

And from 2500 BC to 300 BC they also made amazing figurines - dogū. These were mostly female and may have represented an earth goddess or were used in fertility or healing rituals.

Some 2000 years down the line, these communities began to break up. Some of these smaller communities built stone circles. Around 2200 to 1700 BC, at Ōyu and Isedotai, not too far from Sannai Maruyama, people carried stones from nearby river beds and laid them out with great precision in concentric circles. 

Ōyu stone circles

Most were laid flat with standing stones in the centre that aligned with pillars at the outer edges to mark the sunrise at the summer solstice and made it possible to calculate the winter solstice and the spring equinox and the movements of the sun. Here people gathered to carry out seasonal ceremonies, conduct rituals and bury their dead.

Stone circles: the Stonehenge builders and the Jōmon
Around the same time, 3000 to 2500 BC, on another small island, Neolithic farmers were dragging massively heavy bluestones 180 miles, 290 kilometres, from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain. 

Stonehenge

These two cultures on opposite sides of the globe had no contact between them yet had striking similarities. Both made stone circles, used flaked stone tools, had huge feasts and made beautiful pots. Circles of Stone, a wonderful exhibition at Stonehenge which closed on September 3rd, spotlit these cultures.

While the Jōmon were fishermen, hunters and gatherers, in Britain the weather was far less clement and life as a huntergatherer was rough. Around 4000 BC people started farming. The Stonehenge builders cultivated wheat and barley and had cattle, pigs and sheep. They ate beef and roasted pigs over open fires including piglets, which they ate at midwinter. They also gathered wild foods like their Japanese contemporaries.

They used far bigger stones for their stone circles and stood them upright with lintels resting on the top, akin to the torii gate at a Shinto shrine. Like the Jōmon stone circles they were laid out with great care. 

Minoan and Jōmon figures

Both the Stonehenge builders and the Jōmon, it seems, followed and celebrated the passage of the sun, particularly during the summer solstice, and gathered at these stone circles at key times in the annual calendar for festival and rituals. But the Stonehenge builders did not make human figures like the Jōmon dogū.

島国 shima guni, island countries: the Minoans and the Jōmon
The Minoans developed their civilisation a few millennia later, between about 2000 and 1000 BC. They didn’t build stone circles but huge and splendid palaces painted with frescoes. But as an island nation they had much in common with the Jōmon, who were still thriving across the world in Japan. Legacies of Beauty: Archaeological Treasures from Japan, a wonderful exhibition at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum which closed on September 24th, celebrates the parallels.

Minoan and Japanese haniwa 
horses (6th century AD)

The Stonehenge builders, the Jōmon and the Minoans were all island dwellers. The Japanese call it shima guni, 島国. Wherever you are the sea is never far away. You are well aware of the rest of the world out there and of cultural developments outside your own small community. Both the Minoans and the Jōmon traded extensively. The Jōmon traded with Hokkaido, Korea and China while the Minoans were the centre of an extensive trade network crisscrossing the Eastern Mediterranean.

Both cultures celebrated the sea. Octopuses coil their tentacles across Minoan pots while the triton shell became an essential religious implement in Japan. And both created images of life-nurturing women, probably used in prayers for safe childbirth and fertility.

Minoan goddess

For all their creativity all these cultures died out, leaving ruins large and small, as will no doubt happen to us too.

For more on the Jōmon there’s a wonderful British Museum catalogue, The Power of Dogu, Ceramic Figures from Ancient Japan, edited by Simon Kaner. You can also see Jōmon pots at the British Museum.

The Jōmon also feature all too briefly in my The Shortest History of Japan, to be published next June.

Circles of Stone ran from September 30 2022 to September 3rd 2023 at the Stonehenge Visitors’ Centre

Legacies of Beauty: Archaeological Treasures from Japan was at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum from June 2nd 2023 to Sunday September 24th 2023

The pictures of the Ōyu stone circles are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. All other pictures are by me, taken at the two exhibitions, at Stonehenge and Heraklion.

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and an inveterate traveller. She is the author of many books on Japan, including The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death, out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Labyrinths and initiations by Elisabeth Storrs

Labyrinths have always been a source of fascination to me. None more so than the famous lair of the Minotaur in ancient Crete. According to Greek myth, this bewildering structure was designed by the inventor Daedalus (father of the doomed Icarus) at the behest of King Minos. The maze was built in the city of Knossos to hold the half man/half bull monster to whom 7 youths and 7 maidens were sacrificed each year as tribute owed by the Athenian King Aegeus to Minos for killing the Cretan king’s son. The minotaur was ultimately slain by Aegeus’ son, Theseus, who was sent as one of the sacrificial youths to Knossos. Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, fell in love with the prince and assisted him to kill the monster and then escape the labyrinth by giving him a ball of thread to enable him to retrace his path.

Classical pattern, medieval pattern, modern walking labyrinth and hedge maze

A seven course single path design known as ‘unicursal’ became associated with the labyrinth on Cretan coins as early as 430 BC, and became common as a visual depiction of the legendary labyrinth from Roman times onwards. In later religious tradition, large labyrinth designs set into floors were walked and used for private meditation or for therapeutic purposes based on the concept of a pilgrimage from the entrance to the centre where God awaits. In comparison, a maze is a complex pattern with branches and dead ends known as ‘multicursal’ which require a series of choices to be made in order to safely navigate. Medieval garden hedges are a fine example of these.

In the ancient world, the feat of escaping a labyrinth was associated with a triumph of life over death. In some cases, navigating one was seen as a form of initiation where a boy was required to enter as a child and emerge as a man after surviving danger. One such initiation ritual was known as ‘The City of Troy’ in Rome and Etruria.

The City of Troy was a reference to the labyrinth of Crete. Yet what was the connection between the legendary cities of Troy and Knossos? An explanation comes from both archaeological evidence and the poetry of the Roman poet, Vergil.

Tragliatella Vase

In his great epic, The Aeneid, the Roman poet Vergil tells of the wanderings of Aeneas, the son of Anchises and Venus, following the fall of Troy. After fighting to defend the besieged city, Aeneas escaped carrying his father on his shoulders while leading his young son Ascanius (who later came to be called Iulus) to safety. According to Roman tradition, during the funeral games for his grandfather, Ascanius took part in a processional parade or dance called the Game of Troy (Lusus Trojae) while mounted on a horse given to him by the Carthaginian queen Dido. The young prince and his companions performed a complex weaving pattern by riding between and around each other as though threading their way through a labyrinth. Vergil drew a comparison between the tortuous convolutions of the rite to the twisting pathways within the Minotaur’s den at Knossos. He also referred to the manoeuvres of the game as mimicking the ‘Crane Dance’ performed by the youths Theseus saved from the Minotaur. From Vergil’s description it is clear that completing the game involved great skill to avoid injury or death.

The column split apart
As files in the three squadrons all in line
Turned away, cantering left and right; recalled
They wheeled and dipped their lances for a charge.
They entered then on parades and counter-parades,
The two detachments, matched in the arena,
Winding in and out of one another,
And whipped into sham cavalry skirmishes
By baring backs in flight, then whirling round
With leveled points, then patching up a truce
And riding side by side. So intricate
In ancient times on mountainous Crete they say
The Labyrinth, between walls in the dark,
Ran criss-cross a bewildering thousand ways
Devised by guile, a maze insoluable,
Breaking down every clue to the way out.
So intricate the drill of Trojan boys
Who wove the patterns of their prancing horses,
Figured, in sport, retreats and skirmishes                

(Aeneid, V. 5.580–593 Translation by Robert Fitzgerald)

Vergil conjured the image of the Lusus Trojae when writing in the 1st century CE, but there is archaeological evidence of its existence dating from the late C7th BCE. The Tragliatella Vase discovered near the Etruscan city of Caere (modern Cerveteri) depicts two horsemen emerging from a spiral marked with the word ‘Truia’. A line of marching warriors is also displayed on the wine jug which seems to suggest that the vase portrays a military ceremony similar to the one of legend. As the Romans were heavily influenced by the Etruscans, it is plausible that the equestrian ceremony that was later referred to by Vergil was in fact an Etruscan tradition.

Detail Tragliatella Vase City of Troy design

The Game of Troy was ‘revived’ by Julius Caesar who claimed to be a descendant of Iulus (Ascanius) and was performed by the young sons of high ranking families. It was not associated with any particular religious festival and was conducted at funeral games and in military triumphs. Suetonius and Tacitus also wrote of the Lusus Trojae which appears to have become more of a military review by the time of Nero.

With my love of all things Etruscan, I found the etchings on the humble Tragliatella Vase intriguing enough to inspire me to include an episode in my book The Golden Dice: A Tale of Ancient Rome involving the Troy Game. Yet what strikes me most about the Lusus Trojae is how legend, poetry and history are intertwined and held fast by a strong thread from two epic stories that inspired three great civilisations: Etruria, Greece and Rome. 

Elisabeth Storrs is the author of the Tales of Ancient Rome saga. Learn more at www.elisabethstorrs.com  

Images are courtesy Wikimedia Commons

"The King Must Die" - by Katherine Langrish

 

I can’t have been more than fourteen when, exploring the adult shelves in my local public library, I picked up a book called ‘The King Must Die’ – intriguing title! – opened it, and read the first paragraph:

The Citadel of Troizen, where the Palace stands, was built by giants before anyone remembers. But the Palace was built by my great-grandfather. At sunrise, if you look at it from Kalauria across the strait, the columns grow fire-red and the walls are golden. It shines bright against the dark woods on the mountainside.

I knew at once this was my sort of book.

The books we read and love in childhood often leave a lasting impression, but those we discover while navigating the awkward transition into adult life may be equally important. I remember how it felt to venture out of the children’s section of the library and wander among the labyrinthine adult stacks. So many books, so many unknown names! Uncharted waters, random landfalls. How do you choose? A title catches your eye, a spine. You pull it out, flick it open, read a little. It speaks to you or it doesn’t: often it doesn’t. You push it back, try again. It’s a little like starting up a conversation with a stranger at a party. Who is this person? Are they interesting? Dull? Dangerous? Will I fall in love? Will I find a friend? Will I run away? 

What I'd found and loved in children’s fiction was story, colour, richness, strength. At fourteen I wasn’t interested in reading about bored married couples having affairs or making brittle conversation at cocktail parties, I wanted books that opened magic casements on the foam of perilous seas – and ‘The King Must Die’ gave all of that, along with just enough of a gilding of sex and violence to make it flatteringly and unmistakeably not a book for children.  

Told in the first person, with all the immediacy of connection that provides, it is the coming-of-age story of the hero Theseus as he discovers his heritage, overcomes the robbers of the Isthmus, marries the Queen of Eleusis after killing the Year-King, takes his place as heir to King Aegeus of Athens, offers himself as one of the twelve captives paid as yearly tribute to Crete, becomes a bull dancer in the Palace of Knossos and lover of the Princess Ariadne, conquers the Minotaur and returns home to find himself King – his father having thrown himself from a cliff in grief at seeing his son’s ship approaching without the white sail that would have proclaimed Theseus still lived. It’s a wonderful mixture of myth, prehistory, and what was then pretty much up-to-date archeology, and it totally blew me away.

‘The King Must Die’ owes much to ‘The Golden Bough’, especially Chapter 24, ‘The Killing of the Divine King’ with its subdivisions of ‘Kings killed when strength fails’ and ‘Kings killed at end of fixed term’. It gave me a lasting interest in Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete. In the novel,  Theseus’s Aegean world is divided between the older religion of the great Mother, and the Sky Gods of the Hellenes. A king is the shepherd of his people, dedicated to the god, and must give his life as and when that god demands it. But Theseus rejects the fixed term reign of the Kings of Eleusis in favour of a personal dedication: he has grown up believing himself in a son/father relationship with Poseidon: he will die for his people when Poseidon asks it of him, not in mere accordance with some custom. 

Bull-leaping fresco from Knossos: Heraklion Museum

The most memorable parts of the book are those set in Crete itself, in the great palace of Knossos, where Theseus inspires the twelve girls and boys he has accompanied from Athens, who elect him their leader, to become an elite team of bulldancers: the Cranes. Renault wonderfully suggests the camaraderie and febrile tension of the bull-dancers’ quarters and training ground, where a great bull-dancer has the charisma and status of a Rudolf Nureyev or a prince. Here Theseus, still only a greenhorn, is given advice by the leading bull-dancer:

“Don’t know your odds yet?” he said. “You must keep your wits about you here. What is your name?” I told him all our names and asked his own. He said, “In the Bull Court, they call me the Corinthian.”

“Why?” I asked. “Are you the only one from Corinth?” He answered lightly, “I am now.”

I understood then his flourish and his load of jewels, and why when he talked no one broke in. Once, far away, I had wanted to be a warrior; to be a king. Now it was forgotten; only one ambition burned in me. No one I have told this to at home has understood it, not even Pirithoos, my nearest friend. As the saying is, only those the snake has bitten can tell each other how it feels. 

The Bull Leaper, an ivory figurine from the palace of Knossos

Whether or not life as a bull-dancer was truly anything like this, it's clear from the surviving artwork that the bull dance must have been a spectacular sight and the atheletes were risking their lives. Renault’s version is vividly convincing, and her Theseus is an attractive hero, light-footed, ambitious, quick to learn. 

The Great Court was empty under the moon. Tier upon tier rose the pillared balconlies, dimly glowing. Lamps flickered behind curtains of eastern stuff. The pots of lilies and of flowering lemon trees shed a sweet, heavy scent. A cat slipped from shadow to shadow, and a Cretan who looked as if his errand were the same. Then all was silent. The great horns upon the roof-coping reared up as if they would gore the stars. 

I stretched out my hands palm downward, and held them over the earth. “Father Poseidon, Horse Father, Lord of Bulls. I am in your hand, whenever you call me. That is agreed between us. But as you have owned me, give me this one thing first. Make me a bull-leaper."

This is lovely, atmospheric scene-painting, although as my friend and fellow History Girl Adèle Geras once pointed out to me,  Renault is wrong about the lemon trees: citrus fruit originated in Asia and did not arrive in the eastern Mediterranean until about the 5-4th century BCE.  So those flowering fruit trees might instead have been pomegranates.

But Renault is right about so much else, the horns on the roof-coping 'goring the stars', for instance. This photo of a clay model in the Heraklion Museum shows just how the great, stylised horns were set along the parapets of the palace roofs. I travelled to Crete for the first time in June 2018, and of course we went to Knossos, making sure to get there early in the morning before the crowds arrived. It was wonderful; and though criticism has been levelled at Arthur Evans’ reconstructions, I feel you’d have to be a real purist not to appreciate the way he’s given the visitor a living sense of the beauty and elegance of this magnificent palace. After all, the site is huge: there are still ruins a-plenty.

Here I am standing in front of a reconstructed part of the palace: behind the red pillars is part of another fresco depicting a huge bull with gilded horns.

Just recently in a second-hand bookshop I picked up a little book called ‘Myth or Legend?’ It's a book of the texts of twelve broadcasts given by the BBC in 1953/4:

Various speakers were to examine well-known stories like that of the Golden Bough, or Minos and the Minotaur, or King Arthur, and decide, in the light of modern historical and archeological knowledge, whether there were any truth in them. 

The one entitled ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’ was written and delivered by Charles Seltman (1886-1957) a Fellow of Queens College Cambridge and an art historian and numismatist who specialised in early Attic coins and wrote a number of books on Greek art and history. His short essay reads like a crib-sheet for ‘The King Must Die’, and I feel sure Mary Renault must have heard or read it, perhaps even been inspired by it to write her own book, which was published just two or three years later in 1958. For after a brief resume of the myth, Seltman moves on to the various discoveries at Knossos, calling particular attention to three points or items. First, to a number Cretan seal-stones carrying ‘an engraved picture of a man with a bull-mask covering his head … who may be enacting a religious dance or ceremony’. (Renault makes wonderful use of this.) Second, to the frescoes of bull-dancers in which ‘athletic youths and girls acted as Toreros and Toreras’:

Here surely is the explanation of the strange fable about the annual tribute exacted from Athens of seven youths and seven girls destined for ‘the bull of Minos’. They were not given as fodder to a monster, but trained to disport themselves in the bull-ring at Knossos to make a Cretan holiday.

Thirdly, Seltman points out, the rich palace and city of Knossos had no walls. ‘At a time when residences and townships in every other Mediterranean land or island were heavily fortified, those of Crete alone remained open and undefended.’ King Minos, in other words, ruled the waves, and might well have been capable of enforcing some kind of a tribute. When Knossos was destroyed by earthquake and fire, perhaps some subject king (Theseus himself?) from the mainland saw his chance to rebel. Seltman concludes with a passage which has surely influenced Mary Renault's book:

As witness for the suddenness of the destruction, we have only to observe what has been called the most dramatic room on any ancient site – the Throne Room – where, between painted griffins on the walls, the Throne of Minos still stands.

When this room was first revealed by the spades of the excavators, overturned jars and ritual vessels testified to confusion and panic, as if the King himself had felt obliged to perform or suffer some final secret rite for the salvation of his people. Those ancient seal-stones suggest that at times a man might hve a ritual bull-mask over his face and head. Did the King, in these final moments, wear such a mask? Was it a king disguised as a Minotaur whom Theseus slew? 

Throne Room, Knossos

Renault writes:

I saw before me a rite scrambled up out of fear and wreck: priests and priestesses in their daily clothes with some rag or scrap as symbol of sacred raiment; rich pedestals bearing lamps of common clay … The white throne of Minos stood empty between its gryphons. The daggled crowd faced the other way, to the sunken earth court…

Down in the court a man was standing, naked down from the neck; broad-bodied, thick-legged, thatched with black hair on chest and groin and shins … His trunk glistened with the chrism a shaking old man and woman smeared on him with half-palsied hands. From the neck down he was man, and base; above the neck he was beast, and noble. Calm and lordly, long-horned and curly-browed, the splendid bull-mask of Daidalos gazed out through the sorry huddle with its grave crystal eyes. 

Definitely, one to read again.

Bull's head rhyton or libation vase

Picture credits

Bull-leaping fresco from Knossos; Heraklion Museum: photo by Zde - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
The Bull Leaper, ivory figurine from the palace of Knossos: photo by Wolfgang Moroder.
Clay shrine with bull horns: photo by David Gahan
Knossos: walls: photo by David Gahan
Katherine Langrish at Knossos: photo by David Gahan
Throne Room, Knossos: photo by David Gahan
Bull's head rhyton or libation vase, Heraklion Museum, wikimedia commons