Crete IIIB: Herakleion Museum

After that we went to the Herakleion museum, which was under renovation. This meant two things for us. One, we had to go into the back door, off of some alley, like we were breaking in or something. Two, the museum was keeping one room open, but instead of doing one regular room they just did a 'greatest hits' gallery with all of their coolest stuff in it. So for once we got to go to a museum without having to pretend to care about all 40 examples of 6th century funerary amphorai displayed inbetween the cool one with the gorgons and the cool one the size of a volkswagon, or whatever the appropriate example for their full collection is.

Here's a neat display. The picture in the back is a copy of a wall painting from Egypt, showing a bunch of Minoans bringing trade or tribute to the king. The actual remains in the case are all examples of the same kind of stuff the Minoans in the picture are carrying.
Minoan pottery. After the end of the bronze age it takes a good five hundred years for pottery to look this good again.
A giant decorative axe. Traditionally the Minoans have this reputation as gentle, happy, carefree flower children who got beaten up by the big, nasty Mycenaeans. What this view neglects to mention is that they liked putting big double-axe heads on everything for decoration.
Probably the nicest rhyton you'll ever see. A rhyton is a vessel used for pouring libations, which are liquid sacrifices of wine or oil or some other fluid. Basically you pour a bunch into the back end and it dripples pleasantly out of the front somewhere. For some reason, probably that you don't have to actually drink out of them, the Greeks and other libating cultures got really creative with them, and they tend to be some of the coolest artifacts.
Here's another one. This one is a lioness' head, and the eyes and nose most likely had insets of polished stone.
A big vase. If you look closely you can see the decoration: a Minoan palace, complete with horns of consecration. Evans based a lot of his reconstruction on the assumption that Minoan architecture actually looked like this and other pottery.
The original bull-jumping fresco. The darker, rougher looking patches are the original fresco, collected off of the walls and floor of a room in Knossos. The rest is an artist's reconstruction of what the fresco actually looked like.
The Phaistos Disk This is famous, mostly because nobody has any idea what it is and the usual assumption (religion) isn't convincing. It's a disk found in a storage room in Phaistos (though it may have been from a floor above it that long-since collapse) and carries symbols that look frustratingly like pictograms (like in Chinese or, more relevantly, ancient Egyptian) but don't match any known system of writing or art. The professors didn't mention this, but I'm willing to bet that there are a bunch of wacky UFO conspiracy theories about it.
Prehistoric bling. One of the unsung virtues of this museum is that it was easy to get photos of the exhibits without the glass in the display cases getting in the way.
A Mycenaean boar tusk helmet. Theseare mentioned in Homer, but people were a bit fuzzy about what they actually looked like until archaeologists started pulling them out of the ground.
Here we've got a coffin depicting funerary rites. This is particularly impressive since the Minoans didn't use coffins. It's very well decorated on the back and on both sides.
Generally people stop talking about the Minoans as if they all suddenly dropped dead as soon as the Mycenaeans landed on Crete. While that's not that far from the truth, later Greek sources mention a non-Greek-speaking people called Etiocretans ("true Cretans"). There's also a handful of examples of Dark Age Cretan art that seems to depict the Minoan snake goddess/priestess character from Minoan art. The museum also has a dark age Athena, ready to aid some mythological heros in their monster-slaughtering adventures.

The museum also had some later pieces out. Here's one of the Egyptian goddess Isis, who spread throughout the Greco-Roman world after Alexander conquered Egypt, eventually becoming the most popular goddess until the Roman Empire converted to Christianity and she was replaced in art by Mary. And here's one of her Greco-Roman era husband, Serapis, famous for being the only popular god created by committee. You'll notice that those statues, like most of the ones I'll post pictures of, are marble. The Greeks did a lot with marble when they were starting to get into sculpture, but after a few centuries of that they discovered the big problem with marble, namely that any bits sticking out of the torso are going to fall off. So they switched to bronze and their statues got much more interesting. Here's a Roman-era bronze, which is why I brought that up. Anyway, fast forward a few hundred years to the time when the Romans rule Greek and rich Italians just can't get enough Roman sculpture. For whatever reason, the Romans really like marble and so they have a lot of copies of Greek bronze statues done in marble, which usually requires the sculpter to add staves or trees or something to keep the statue's arms from falling off. During the dark ages, a lot of ancient marble gets burned to make lime, but a fair amount of it, particularly in rural areas, survived long enough for people to find it and put it in museums. Meanwhile, almost all of the bronze statues that aren't underground or underwater get melted down, because bronze is really useful and nobody's going to go without tools just so they can have an ancient statue in their yard, especially since the local clergy hates the pagans so much.

After the museum we left town for the rest of the afternoon. First we went to the site at Malia, which looks something like this. Archaeologists thing it used to look something like this, but because they are justifiably paranoid about getting it wrong they've kept actual reconstruction of the site to a minimum. While this is intellectually honest, we'd spent the morning looking at really cool stuff and suddenly being thrust back into the world of knee-high rocks baking in the Mediterranean sun didn't put us in the best of moods. This is an unusual Minoan site in that it has walls. Or rather, it only has one wall, the one on the seaside of the settlement. You can't see it in these pictures, but Malia is much closer to the coast than most Minoan settlements. The theory about the wall is that Minoans didn't usually built them because they were exclusively a naval people with no idea how to fight on land. Even if they weren't a unified people, they can't attack each others' settlements from the water and nobody else can get past their navies, so they live happily undefended until the Mycenaeans show up and completely dismantle their civilization in about 20 minutes. Since Malia is close enough to the shore to be open to raids from the sea, they built a wall between them, but apparently didn't comprehend the enemy's ability to walk around it.
This is a kernos. It's used for grinding stuff, usually olives or grapes, in order to make other stuff, usually oil or wine.
The alter. I think but am too lazy to confirm that I mentioned earlier that the Minoans have "old palace" and "new palace" periods because all of their stuff was wiped out by earthquakes around 1400. This alter is actually old palace, and rather than built a new one the Minoans just left it there and built the new courtyard around it.
Crete is so pretty that it makes most of mainland Greece look like some guy's front lawn that hasn't been watered in five years.
Mud brick remains. These are pretty rare, since even when they do survive they melt in rain if left exposed to the sky. Fortunately it doesn't rain much in Greece, and they got a protective covering over this spot.
It wouldn't be Minoan if there weren't stairs leading to a courtyard.
I found this sitting on a ruined wall while walking back. It might be ancient! Or it might be a bunch of rocks some kid was playing with because he was bored out of his mind.
Er war frisch. Er war als sehr teuer. I had to ask the guy for orange juice in German because his English sucked, but it turned out to be prohibitively expensive.

This is Agios Nikolias, where we ate lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon. It's name is basically Santa Claus in Greek, so this must be where he takes the Mrs. and the elves for summer vacation. The beach was a significant improvement over the one we went to the day before. And the water was clear as crystal.

Around seven we got back on the ferry for the trip back to Athens. Unlike the trip over, the weather was a little chilly and very, very windy, and we were all exhausted and a few people were getting seasick. All in all I think we were all in bed between nine and ten, which left us rested enough to get through another two sites before our day off.