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The development of Minoan tombs
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Featured March 15 , 2006
Minoan burials and tomb styles
Many Minoan tombs of various periods have been found and excavated, although sadly like their Egyptian counterparts most have been thoroughly robbed, which means they don't afford as much insight into Minoan life as one would like! They do however provide a good pattern for developments in burial customs and maybe a few clues to point towards their religious beliefs.
Early Minoan burials were mostly in collective tombs, which were used over several generations and located close by the settlements, and nearly all of them were inhumation burials. Cremations seem to have been rare and may have been the graves of foreigners from places where that was the norm. It was more usual for the body to be trussed and placed directly into the tomb, or into a large storage jar before that was placed into the tomb. Where geography allowed, these early tombs were carved into the limestone rock, and often had several connecting chambers, but in places where the rock was too hard for carving caves or built tombs were used. In southern Crete, tholos tombs, circular, thick-walled, above-ground structures, were usual. Some of these tholoi must have been pretty impressive structures: the Kamilari tomb near Phaistos (c. 2000 BCE but in use for several hundred years) was a circular construction which still stands to a height of some 3 meters and may have had a high vaulted roof originally. These tombs often had other chambers built onto them, either cult rooms or ossuaries. The mortuary complex at Phourni, one of the richest and most extensive prehistoric cemetaries in the Aegean and in continuous use from 2500-1250 BCE, has several tholoi, and although most of them have been robbed, it was here the first untouched high-status Minoan burial was found, that of a woman surrounded by a wealth of grave goods and gold jewellery. Round tombs were not known in Crete before 3000 BCE, and the suddenness of their appearance has been attributed by some to the arrival of immigrants from Anatolia - and in turn they may have influenced the developement of the beehive tholoi at Mycenae later. Several so-called "Royal" tombs have been found. One of them, the Temple Tomb, is very close to Knossos and is fairly unique. It is a square chamber cut out of the hillside and lined with gypsum slabs, originally with a blue-painted ceiling. Unfortunately it has been extensively robbed, but the burial of an old man has been excavated there which is interesting both for the apparent hastiness of the burial and it's significantly late date of c. 1380 BCE. Sinclair Hood (The Minoans, 1970) is inclined to believe this was the royal burial chamber, but there is no certainty about who was buried there. The Great Tomb at Chrysolakkos, close to the Minoan town of Mallia, has been thought (again by Sinclair Hood) to have been the burial place of the Mallian royal family and is a large rectangular building with many small chambers inside and a colonnade to the East (this may have had significance: many Minoan tomb entrances face east, in the direction of the rising sun). Again, the tomb has been extensively robbed, but the local name of "the Gold Pit" suggests it was very wealthy and there is reason to believe the Aegina Treasure now in the British Museum originated from there. Though they continued to be collective, over time the size of the tombs dimished, and by 1470 BCE they seemed to have been family tombs holding at most four people with a collection of small personal grave-goods, and again sadly robbed soon afterwards. In the Late Minoan period a new burial style came in, the larnax burial. The larnax was an elaborately decorated sarcophagus, usually made of clay although wooden ones which haven't survived may have been used too. The most famous larnax is the plaster-covered stone Agia Triadha Sarcophagus, which is especially valuable as the scenes depicted on it afford us the greatest insight we have into the Minoans' beliefs about mortality and the afterlife. |
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