WOMEN ATHLETES; WOMEN WARRIORS: No B∅YS Allowed!

Toreador Fresco, Knossos, Crete; c. 1550-1450 BC

This episode: NO CHINA SHOPS ON CRETE!

The Toreador, or Bull-Leaping, Fresco in the Palace of Minos at Knossos, Crete is one of the most famous pieces of art in the world.  And no wonder!  It is a color-saturated, exuberant – almost cartoonish – fresco that conveys both fluidity and movement.
And it boasts a subject matter that no one has ever been able to agree upon.  What are these people doing?  Are they ancient matadors?  Bull-baiters?  Suicidal primitives?
Was this a sport?  Maybe an archaic ancestor of the original Olympic Games?  Or something more arcane?  Like a religious ceremony?
What is immediately apparent – if this was an actual exercise or ritual and not some hypothetical representation (like "Initiates Dance with the Great Bull God": Film at 11) – is that the two women (and one man) in the fresco were tremendous athletes and that the bull held a place of enormous importance in Minoan society.
The Minoans were named for a theoretical ancestor, Minos, whose wife, Pasiphaë, slept with a bull and produced the hideous half-man, half-bull monster, the Minotaur.  (He is also famous for inventing the labyrinth in which to keep her: a disciplinary action directly correlated to her cuckolding of the ancient king.  There is more than that to the story - isn't there always? - but no need to get into it here).  No one knows if Minos really lived or not, or what the Minoans called themselves; this name was assigned them much later in life by archaeologist extraordinaire, Sir Arthur Evans.  But decades of archaeological work have laid bare the Minoans’ undoubted reverence for the bull.
For centuries, the bull has been a religion-related animal.  At the Neolithic site of Çatal Huyük, Turkey, archaeologists found altars shaped like bull’s horns.  From the Bronze Age Aegean occupied by the Minoans, no labyrinth is extant, but bulls are everywhere.  More altars like those in Turkey inhabit what might have been either a palace or temple complex at Knossos.  There are Bull-Head rhytons (drinking horns).  And there is that fresco.
(I mentioned in an earlier blog that there is another one much like it, also done by the Minoans, at a settlement in the Nile Delta.  So, whatever else it might have been, this was a widespread, recognized activity or motif to the Bronze Agers, otherwise known as "Generation -00000000").
To judge from their art and literature, the Greeks who inhabited the Aegean Islands long after the Minoans had evaporated into myth considered the Amazons to be both warriors and athletes.  By the same lights, the bombastically colorful Minoan frescoes boast women who are clearly both high-ranking and athletic, playing a dangerous and strenuous sport alongside male competitors of great prowess.
Tuesday: The Ass-Kicking Amazons.

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