Minos Research Paper

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Assessment Task 4
Ancient Societies - The bronze age – Minoans Crete
Hosing/ the role of towns/ furniture/Gournia and Zakro

Research Presentation

While sailing about, the Greeks stumbled across a tribe of people living on the island of Crete. These people, the Minoans, were a very advanced civilization for the times. They had a strong navy, which is probably why the Greeks never succeeded in colonizing the Minoan people.

Housing and furniture

Houses were rectangular in shape, enclosing a courtyard. These houses were planned asymmetrically, usually agglutinative (added rooms). In earlier times these houses were joined together sideways to give the town terrace style houses. Eventually Minoan houses became two- three stories
These plaques show what houses in the the town of Knossos looked like in the 17th century BCE.On the roof there was a small room. This may have been used for sleeping in during the hot summer months. The rooms on the first floor had windows, but those on the ground floor did not, although some of them had doors on the ground floor. It may be that windows on the ground floor were avoided for simple reasons of security -- to avoid burglary.

The houses were built around a wooden frame -- wooden beams ran horizontally and were linked to upright beams. he most likely reason for the use of these beams was as protection against earthquake damage. Among the finds on the site are potters' wheels, a carpenter's workshop complete with saws and other tools, a coppersmith's forge and an oil press. The estimated population of the town was 4,000.

While settlements around palaces always existed, full blown towns did not begin organizing until the Neopalatial period (1700-1400 BC).

Minoan Furniture in
Some of the chairs and stools were crossed legs which could be folded down. Some ivory pieces discovered suggest that some of these furnishings were decorated with inlaid ivories.

Most furniture from the Minoan period has not survived, but from Homers (odyssey) it is believed that beds were very elaborate. An example of a bed was found at Thera. It had a wooden frame, laced with animal skin. Other pieces of furniture found were vessels; made from pottery. Evidence of furniture like these suggest most bed/tables would have been made out of wood, and therefore decomposed. Also pottery jars or pithoi were importafor storing goods.

Chests of many forms, and often finely decorated, were used also in Crete as could be read form the text of Odyssey: “Hellen went to the chest which contained her embroidered dresses, the work of her own hands, and most richly decorated robe, which had lain underneath all the rest, and now glittered like a star.”. In fact remains of wooden chests together with bronze hinges and loop handles have been found at Knossos, but never well enough preserved to give any accurate impression of their size or form. Also some chests were found containing written tablet