Could the destruction of the Minoan civilization have influenced the Book of Genesis?

by [deleted]

[deleted]

XenophonTheAthenian

It's all there - Eden, the Snake, the Original sin, the Exile, the blaming of women, the Great flood and the destruction it caused.

No it isn't. Much of what you've described is purely conjectural and I some of it isn't even conjecture that I've seen suggested by scholars before. There is no such civilization called "Minoa," we conventionally call the Palatial Period in Crete "Minoan" because Arthur Evans connected the palace at Knossos to the mythical figure Minos. There is no nominal form of the adjective. The Palatial Period did not last thousands of years at all. The Old Palatial Period is about 300, from approximately 2000-1700, and the New Palatial Period ends around 1400. I have never heard of the Cretan Palatial Period described as "Eden"--if such a connection is made in any text it must be a modern one, as Bronze Age Crete is largely absent from texts at all (the Greeks knew pretty much nothing about it) and to my knowledge no Jewish text knows about Crete.

Nor do many Classicists or archaeologists take seriously the suggestion that Atlantis has any basis in fact, much less that it is based on the eruption of Thera. It's simply implausible, the wishful thinking of people who have not read Plato thoroughly enough. In Plato Atlantis is quite obviously a metaphor for Athens, and the way Plato frames his story with his assurances that it derives from an ancient tradition is a typical vehicle for Plato to point out that he is not in fact describing anything but an allegory. It's a literary device he employs often, and in antiquity Atlantis was, without exception, treated as a purely literary device--no author before Plato mentions it, and no author after Plato knows of any tradition independent of Plato. It is highly unlikely that Plato is basing Atlantis on anything but the Peloponnesian War. Moreover, if he is, almost nobody but geologists thinks that Thera had much of an effect at all on the Palatial culture. The evidence is pretty overwhelming that Thera erupted sometime in the seventeenth century, just after the end of the Old Palatial Period and at the height of the New Palatial Period. Even late estimates place the eruption a good century before the destruction of the palace centers. There is in fact fairly little evidence that Thera's eruption caused any social stress at all on Crete, the material evidence simple isn't there. Instead we see a pretty unbroken sequence in the material evidence that seems largely unaffected by the eruption, until the abrupt arrival of mainland material in the fifteenth century.

The most important thing, however, is that your picture of Cretan society in the Bronze Age is total conjecture. We know pretty much nothing about society before the introduction of Linear B during the Post-Palatial Period. We cannot read Linear A, so we are forced to make conjectures based on imagery and material evidence. Despite the truth in the title of the great book, The Mute Stones Speak (about Roman archaeology), the mute stones on Crete tell us very little, and it's notoriously difficult to construct an idea of a complex society without writing. What we have at Crete is the palaces, pottery, paintings, and votive figurines. From this we must work, and it's frankly not enough to tell us anything concrete at all. Cretan women may have been relatively equal, but that's simply conjectured on the basis of the large number of frescoes apparently depicting women, not a very good basis for conjecture. I say apparently because most of the frescoes that we have are horribly damaged, and reconstructions can vary quite wildly. The votive figurines of a snake woman, usually thought to be a goddess, not a priestess, suggest a place in cult for women (though there is no material evidence for a falling-out of female status, nor is there evidence that the status of religious figures declined at all), but this means very little (there's no difference there with later Greek society) and we don't know what we're looking at. The italicized bit is critical--we have a decent amount of material evidence, but we have no way of knowing what it is or what it represented to society. The much-discussed "priest-king" figures of our frescoes appear to be rulers, but we don't actually know that, and our guess that they had some religious nature is only conjectured on the basis that no Bronze Age form of kingship was entirely separate from ritual--a decent guess, but you can see how shaky its foundations are. Moreover, a great deal of what we "know" about Bronze Age Crete was basically made up by Arthur Evans. It's hard to know how much impact Evans had on our views of Bronze Age Crete, but what is certain is that Evans had a vision of what his Minoans must have been like and altered the evidence to support it. Evans destroyed thousands of items of pottery and, most importantly, the Linear A tablets. His reconstructions of the palaces at Knossos and elsewhere were not based on any evidence but were constructed from his own imagination according to the vision that he wanted of Bronze Age Crete. Interpretations of frescoes and figures that seem increasingly implausible now stick around because Evans first suggested them, and in some cases we cannot overturn him--some frescoes were reconstructed in a way that makes them impossible to work on now, or were damaged during Evans' work.

In short we know pretty much nothing about the Palatial Period on Bronze Age Crete. Indeed, our best knowledge of Crete is to be found outside of Crete, in the evidence for trade links with Egypt and the mainland and the cultural connections there. We certainly do not have the evidence to conjecture a link to Hebrew scripture, because so much of what we, or rather, pop history, pretends we know about the Cretan Bronze Age is guesswork, and usually pretty poor guesswork at that