Minoan Crete

Knossos, the largest Minoan "palace"

Minoan Crete was a large, peaceful, and possibly matriarchal Bronze Age Mediterranean society that flourished from about 3000 BCE to 1100 BCE. Due to the predominance of feminine icons, a number of scholars have argued that Minoan Crete had a "matriarchal" society, which may have been egalitarian and consensus-based.

Mainstream scholars have been cautious about such characterizations, noting a paucity of evidence. In a similar vein, Social Ecologist theorist Janet Biehl has sharply rejected the interpretation of Minoan Crete as a utopia or matriarchy:

Minoan Crete was a Bronze Age civilization, and it would defy archaeological credibility to assume that such a highly developed civilization could have been anything but hierarchical, exploitative, and oppressive.

More recently, David Graeber and David Wengrow have argued that Minoan Crete was probably a "a system of female political rule - effectively a theocracy of some sort, governed by a college of priestesses." Graeber rejects the mainstream scholarly reticence to accept the existence of matriarchy in Crete. Responding to complaints about an absence of ethnographic data, he notes that scholars have been able to understand the Athenian polis without ethnographic materials. Scholars say female-oriented religion and art do not, by themselves, imply gender equality or matriarchy in actual social relations. However, Graeber points out, “[N]o one has ever managed to produce an example of a patriarchal society in which artistic representations focus nearly exclusively on images of powerful women, mystical or otherwise, either.”

Going further, archaeomythologist Joan Cichon argues that Minoan Crete was an egalitarian form of matriarchy, with a decentralized gift-based economy and consensus-based governance facilitated by a council of women elders. Likewise, Peter Gelderloos contends in Worshiping Power that the Cretans had a stateless and classless society.

Culture

Matriarchy

Arguing that Minoan Crete was a matriarchal theocracy, Graeber and Wengrow point out that there are Minoan depictions of female authorities but not of male authorities. Unlike the women, who are always dressed, most portrayals of men are of naked or nearly naked athletes or show the men acting subserviently before women. As further evidence, they note that Cretan traders, who were usually men, tended to overwhelmingly bring back sacred objects honoring female goddesses such as Hathor. Although they argue that Minoan Crete is a rare case in the historical record of actual female rule, they point out that matriarchy is more common in human history if matriarchy can be understood more broadly. They define matriarchy as a society that models governance on the mother's role in the household much as patriarchy bases governance on the father's domineering role.

The philosopher Heide Goettner-Abendroth also considers Crete to be a matriarchal society, which she defines as having “true gender-egalitarian relations” but symbolically centering female power. Peter Gelderloos interprets the art of Minoan Crete as inclusive of transgender priestesses: “[The Cretans] were, if not matriarchal, non-patriarchal, with almost exclusively female deities and female or trans priestesses.”

Play

Minoan art focuses on "scenes of play and attention to creature comforts," according to Graeber and Wengrow. They later add, "There are no heroes in Minoan art - only players. Crete of the palaces was the realm of Homo ludens. Or perhaps, better said, Femina ludens - not to mention Femina potens." While noting Minoan depictions of women dancing and bull-leaping for sport, John Younger reports that "Minoan women are rarely depicted at work."

Decisions

Cichon argues that Crete made decisions through "councils of consensus facilitated by women elders of the society." Her evidence includes:

"decentralized record keeping and administration; the lack of spatial separation between monumental buildings and ordinary ones; the lack of fortifications in general; the evidence of benches at Ayia Triadha and Knossos; the communal as well as sacred nature of the temple-palaces; the new understanding of the Minoan villas as the centers of settlements where manufacturing, administration, and ceremony took place, rather than as the dwelling places of the aristocracy; and the archaeological as well as mythological and iconographical evidence for matrilineality and matrilocality

Although Crete had large buildings sometimes referred to in the scholarly literature as “palaces,” these buildings actually served, according to Peter Gelderloos, “as warehouses, redistribution centers, collective housing for priestesses and administrators, archives, and religious sites.” Gelderloos writes that the Cretans were “in all probability a stateless people.”

One such building had a room that had been identified as a "throne room," with a chair and stone benches ensuring everyone can see each other, and with an adjacent bathing chamber. Originally considered the site of a monarch, it has since been likened to a similar room in Akrotiri which portrays a female initiation ceremony probably connected to menstruation. Graeber and Wengrow interpret the purported throne room as "not the seat of a male monarch but rather that of a council head and its occupants more likely a succession of female councilors."

Crete had a written language, but the decoded documents in that language do not mention laws, rulers, or other elements of statecraft. In almost all states, one of the primary functions of written language was to document laws and to chronicle the lives and careers of elites. By contrast, the writings from Crete seem to focus mostly on trade and a little on religion.

Economy

Crete had a trade-based economy with a large network of people that traded overseas. They acquired food from “multicrop agriculture, apiculture, silvaculture, aquaculture, fishing and hunting.”

The archaeologists Driessen, Jusseret, and Letesson have noted a "remarkable absence or scarcity of traditional indicators of land ownership . . . field boundaries, rock art, agricultural terraces or clear natural borders coinciding with differences in material culture." This finding suggests an absence of private land ownership.

Some archaeological evidence suggests that craftsmen and priestesses enjoyed more luxury goods than farmers and herders did. Moreover, Younger notes that at least one piece of Minoan art portrays different class stratification:

"The Grandstand fresco shows a crowd of women with their heads depicted in a band of white paint. A second class of women stands at the top of stairs dressed in a simple robe (heanos). A third class of women sits or kneels on the top of the stairs or on platforms. These last women are depicted twice as large as the other women in the fresco, and they are dressed in 'court' costume."

Still, there is evidence that Minoan Crete may have been a relatively egalitarian or even classless society. As Cichon notes, even the mainstream archeologist Robert Koehl "acknowledges that Crete appears to be a relatively egalitarian society where, even in Late Minoan days, LM I, 1580-1450 BCE, 'wealth was still widely distributed.'"

Cichon argues that Minoan Crete had an egalitarian, balanced, gift-based economy:

"I have proposed that the new studies investigating the archaeological evidence for clan dwellings; the new understanding of the Minoan villas as centers of regional manufacturing, administration, and ceremony; recent orks detailing the temple-palaces as communal buildings connected to their surrounding towns and countryside by ceremonial routes; the lack of archaeological evidence for private property, especially of privately held land; the archaeological evidence for feasting, drinking, and toasting; the provisions of the Law Code of Gortyn regarding the economic role of women; current archaeological literature investigating the nature of Minoan social systems, especially matrilocality and matrilinearity; the legends, as detailed by Witcombe, that reveal the matrilocal/matrilineal roots of Minoan Crete; and the iconography, particularly the frescoes that show women managing eating and drinking ceremonies, all plausibly support the hypothesis that Minoan Crete had a balanced economy in which women distributed goods and practiced economic mutuality

and gift-giving."

Gelderloos also does not think that there was class stratification. He argues that the farmers and herders enjoyed too diverse a diet and too high a standard of health to have been a toiling, exploited class. He also notes that there is no evidence of police force that could impose work:

On the one hand, the Cretan diet was too rich, too diversified to suggest a hyper-exploited, enslaved lower class. Put simply, enslaved workers do not have the resources for a healthy diet, and they lack the time to dedicate to multiple forms of subsistence. Nor is there evidence of a Cretan army or other mechanisms capable of imposing the sort of work-or-starve, blackmail economy so common in other city-states. The very diversity of Cretan food production (spanning multicrop agriculture, apiculture, silvaculture, aquaculture, fishing, and hunting, a diversity that would be impossible for a weak state to surveil and control), paired with the lack of evidence of a police or military structure makes the proposal of a coerced or dependent peasant population ludicrous. In the worst case, merchant-priests controlling the palaces might have been able to impose an unfavorable exchange rate making it difficult or impossible for the peasants to acquire luxury goods, but the peasants would still have been more or less self-sufficient, autonomous, and healthy."

Crime

There is no evidence that Crete had police.

Neighboring Societies

Crete was “a peaceful society with a minimum of defensive infrastructure and no record of involvement in offensive warfare.”