History of Western Art 7: Prequel to Ancient Greece, The Origin of the Aegean Sea and the Disappearance of the Aegean Civilization

This article is the seventh episode of the series of voice programs produced by Captain Reading Painting "Ten Minutes to Understand Western Art". You're welcome to listen.

About 300 kilometers north from the mouth of the Nile is Crete, the largest island in the Aegean Sea. Geographically, this island is about 260 kilometers long from east to west, 60 kilometers wide from north to south, and only 12 kilometers narrowest, like a huge aircraft carrier that straddles the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, and it is in a ring with Asia Minor in the east and the Peloponnese Peninsula in the west, surrounding the Aegean Sea, and this vast ocean and land centered on the Aegean Sea is the place where the myths and stories of Homer's epic poems take place.

Through the previous episode, we learned that the artists of the Greek island of Crete, at least until 1450 BC, had left us with a lot of exquisite works of art.

Archaeologists refer to this civilization as the Minoan civilization, and it was part of the ancient Aegean civilization.

Why is it called a Minoan civilization? Where did the name Aegean come from?

Let's start with this painting of Bacchus and Ariadne.

Illustration: Part of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne

The painting was by Titian, a representative of the Venetian school of the Italian Renaissance, by Alfonso I de Este, Duke of Ferrara. Completed around 1522-23, it is now in the collection of the National Gallery of England in London.

Although the painting is crowded with a large number of characters and animals, the core plot of the story takes place on the right side of the picture, this blonde beauty in a blue coat and a man in a red cloak, jumping up in the air and looking at her are the real protagonists of the painting, the beautiful woman is Ariadne (Ariadne), the male protagonist is the dionysus Bacchus, known in ancient Greek mythology as Dionysus Dionysus.

In terms of generations, Ariadne should be regarded as the granddaughter of Zeus. Zeus turned himself into a white bull and forcibly brought the Phoenician princess Europa to the island of Crete, and Titian also painted a painting by King Philip II of Spain, which is the subject of "Plundering Europa". Stories about Zeus turning into cows, smoke, swans, golden rains, etc., and the secret affairs of human women are the subjects that artists in the West have often expressed since the Renaissance, and if this part of the content is withdrawn, a considerable part of the wonderful sculptures and painting classics will be missing.

It is said that after Zeus united with Europa in Crete, he gave birth to the future king of Crete, Minos, and Ariadne was one of Milos's many children.

Poseidon, the god of the sea, gave Minos a white bull, and Minos' queen Pasiphae and this bull gave birth to a minotaur-headed monster, Minotaurs. In order to cover up the ugliness of the family, Minos designed a labyrinth, imprisoned the monster in it, and ordered the Athenians to pay tribute to the boy and girl every year to feed the monster.

The king of Athens at the time was named Aegus, and his son Theseus Tè volunteered to go to Minos to assassinate the monster. The old king Egus made a pact with Theseus to hang a white sail on the returning ship if he succeeded, and a black sail if he failed.

When Theseus arrived in Crete, he met the princess Ariadne, who gave Teesus a golden thread, let him calmly enter the labyrinth, killed his half-brother Minotauros, and successfully walked out of the labyrinth.

Ariadne then followed Theseus and eloped by boat to a desert island. Theseus had a dream at night that the goddess of fate told him not to unite with Ariadne. When he woke up from his dream, he threw ari adne, who was still asleep, and sailed away.

Titian's paintings show the embarrassing situation of Ariadne after waking up. She was waving to the ship that was heading off into the distance, hoping to save Theseus. And just then, her true son, Bacchus, the god of wine, arrived. Wearing a crown of flowers woven from ivy and grape leaves, Bakus jumped from his car.

The two looked at each other, and time seemed to have passed ten thousand years.

And theseus, who abandoned Ariadne, was still thinking about Ariadne all the way back from the ship, so he was in a trance, forgetting the agreement with his father Egoth, and the ship still had black sails. Since Theseus set out, the old king had been waiting on the shore every day, when he finally saw the returning ship, but with black sails hanging on it, thinking that his son was dead. Egus was suddenly desperate and jumped into the sea.

Since then, this seaside has been called the Sea of Ego, pronounced Aegean:[i:'d i: n] in English, which translates to Chinese, or Aegean Sea.

Although people were already familiar with the myths and stories about ancient Greece such as Crete, the Aegean Sea, the Labyrinth of Milos, etc., until the second half of the 19th century, it was considered that these were only ancient myths passed down by word of mouth, and the poems of Homer's epic poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey" could not be used as credible historical materials.

Just as I introduced the Spanish girl Maria and her father Sotura in the third episode to find prehistoric murals dating back 20,000 years in the Cave of Altamira, at the same time, Europeans also began to make archaeological discoveries on the islands in southern Greece, trying to find more evidence for the history of European civilization.

The German Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), one of the first to work on these archaeological works, was fascinated by Homer's epics. The frescoes of the Altamira Cave in Spain were shown almost a decade ago, when Schliemann came to Mount Hisalik near the Dardanelles, where he discovered the fabled Trojan civilization; in 1876, Schliemann went to Mycenae in the Peloponnese Peninsula on the other side of the Aegean Sea and excavated the tomb and palace of King Agamemnon, thus discovering the Greek Mycenaean civilization.

According to Homer's Odyssey, "There is a place that stands in the purple waters of grapes, her name is Crete, and there are 90 towns." The largest of the cities is Knossos, and a Minoan king ruled over that place from the age of 9."

Schliemann was convinced that Crete was the legendary minoan kingdom. Shortly after his discovery of the Mycenaean civilization, Greek archaeologists discovered part of the storage of pottery vases in Crete in 1878 and began to call it the Minoan Palace. Schliemann then made several expeditions to Crete, but did not gain anything new until his death in 1890.

Ten years later, the British archaeologist Arthur John Evans (1851-1941) came to Crete in 1900, and after five years of archaeological work, he and his assistants successfully excavated the ruins of the Milos dynasty's royal palace, the Palace of Knossos, thus revealing the existence of the Minoan civilization.

From the above archaeological results, it is proved that the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" of Homer's Epic are not only myths and epics, but also a history of faith, which pushes the history of Greek civilization and European civilization forward by 1500 to 2000 years.

In our minds, the impression of Greek civilization composed of familiar ancient Greek philosophical ideas, architectural complexes, outstanding human sculptures, rich theatrical and aesthetic ideas, etc., should refer specifically to Greece from 800 BC to 146 BC, and before that she had already had such a long civilization that disappeared into the years.