Helen's Daughter

View from Akrotiri, the Minoan Pompeii.  In ancient times, the door and window frames would have been wood fitted together with wooden pegs; today, they are concrete, modeled after casts taken when archaeologists pumped plaster into voids in the compacted ash where organic material had deteriorated.

Minoan architecture made such liberal use of wooden tie beams, uprights, pillars, and door and window frames that some experts believe this practice contributed to the deforestation of Crete.  One reason the Minoans might have done this was that the wood construction helped reinforce buildings against seismic stresses.

As you can see, though, the Minoans managed some rather generous windows, when most contemporary windows elsewhere were small and narrow.  The people of Akrotiri must have enjoyed great natural light and views.

Minoan houses had stone foundations, and the visible sections of the ground floor walls would have been dressed with stone.  While the framework was wood, the upper stories were probably mud brick.  The Minoans used lime plaster to cover the walls and provide a smooth white surface for decoration, and they often plastered the floor as well.  In wealthier establishments, the floor might be bordered with flagstones, and with soft gypsum in the center.  Sometimes the floors were painted with spirals, colored rectangles, and aquatic life; the famous Dolphin Sanctuary fresco at Knossos might have been a floor decoration fallen from the level above.

Evidence from Akrotiri and Knossos indicates that the Minoans also utilized sliding wooden pier and partition doors, meaning the doors could be slid back to provide access and greater light, or closed to seal off a space for rituals, or simply to keep in the heat during the winter.


 

Mycenae's famous Lion Gate may be the oldest coat of arms in Europe.  It utilizes a common feature of Mycenaean architecture, the relieving triangle, which was the Aegean Bronze Age's equivalent of the Roman keystone arch, bearing the load of the surrounding masonry. 

The Lion Gate dates to roughly 1300-1250 B.C., to Mycenae's greatest period of renovation and expansion.  Supporting terraces enabled the builders to extend the circuit walls, and bring Grave Circle A within the citadel, while providing more area for workshops, housing, and storerooms.  The Lion Gate was part of a defensive system which included high Cyclopean walls and a bastion, from which defenders would have rained missiles down on attackers.

The lions on the gate might have been lionesses.  They stand upon an altar, with a pillar between them; the pillar was a sacred symbol in Bronze Age Aegean iconography.  Does the altar/pillar represent Mycenae itself?  Are the lions/lionesses goddess symbols, like the griffins one sees the frescoes from the cult sanctuary?  Part of the imagery is missing.  We don't have the heads.  These would have faced outward, due to spatial constraints, and would have been carved from steatite or some other stone, and bolted on.   

In the early nineteenth century, the infamous Lord Elgin passed through Mycenae.  He took the last remaining marbles and bits of carved alabaster from the Treasury of Atreus, and would have taken the Lion Gate, too, had he been able to move the twenty-ton edifice.