I was obsessed by Greek and Roman mythology as a child. While my peers delighted in Barbie dolls, dinosaurs or Matchbox cars I could recite the 12 labours of Hercules and pretended to be a priestess of Vesta with my imaginary sisters. As you can imagine, this was not a recipe for childhood popularity, though I’m pretty sure it did lay the foundations for a career that turned out to be, ultimately, all about story telling.
One of the greatest of those Ancient Greek stories is that of the Minotaur, the fierce half-man, half-bull creature imprisoned in a maze in Crete and fed on the war booty of young Athenians until the hero Theseus navigates the Labyrinth and kills the man eater. The brilliance of the current exhibition on the topic at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is that it’s all about the story.
An unprecedented loan from the museum at Heraklion, modern capital of Crete near the ruins of Knossos, means you’ll probably never see this many top-quality Minoan artefacts in one place without getting on a plane to Greece. One hundred of the objects on display have never left the country before. And I doubt anyone has done a better job of untangling the fact and fiction archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans twined together early in the 20th century. There are even arresting video installations that pull parts of the show into the realm of modern art. But the Ashmolean doesn’t major on any of this highbrow stuff. Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality pulls you in with the legend and keeps visitors of all ages interested with solid story telling. The art, history and learning come by osmosis.
You’re plunged into the story from the ticket desk, when designs covering the walls and a dog-legged path to the exhibition’s start make it feel like you’re in the labyrinth itself, stepping through a door and into a dark room to be confronted by the monster himself. This version is a near life-sized statue, a Roman copy of a Greek original.
Over his shoulder runs a series of films that tell the whole set of stories surrounding the Knossos monster, with typography, graphics and pacing that will satisfy even the shortest attention span. Dig deeper, and this room emphasises the tale’s enduring grip on the imagination, from ancient vase decoration through a Picasso print and a labyrinth-inspired London Underground art installation, with plenty of detours into early Christian maze design, Renaissance painting and Baroque gardens.
Like Troy, one of the most compelling features of Knossos was a “real or imaginary” debate. Did the cities actually exist, are had they simply been made up as settings for fantastical tales. Both showed up in ancient writings, but there was no trace of them in the modern world. After Heinrich Schliemann found and excavated Troy in the 1870s, the archaeological world fixated on Knossos, and found it soon after. Up until very recently, you would have learned that it was discovered and excavated by an Englishman named Arthur Evans. He’s still the first answer Google gives you to the “who discovered Knossos” question.
But that’s not quite right. The appropriately named Minos Kalokairinos should have the credit. The wealthy businessman and Knossos enthusiast, whose family owned part of the site suspected to hold the lost city, did the first excavation in 1878 and was confident of what he’d found. But politics got in the way. At the time, the Ottoman Turks owned Crete and treated the locals poorly. Any treasures unearthed would probably get transported to museums in Istanbul.
But the Turks liked the English, and were happy to do a deal with Evans, who was the curator of this same Ashmolean Museum. As concerned as the locals by the possible removal of treasures, he didn’t start digging until after the Ottomans left in 1898. That, and the fact that Evans made sure a museum in nearby Heraklion was built to house the greatest of the treasures he unearthed, is probably why the Greeks don’t hate him in the way they loathe Lord Elgin for his legal (at the time) purchase and transport of the Parthenon marbles.
But whether he meant to or not, Evans did steal something from Greece: Kalokairinos’ credit for discovering Knossos. Which is why it’s particularly appropriate that the museum he once directed is the one putting on this show, and working so hard to set history straight.
Just as when I saw these treasures for the first time in Heraklion, I was stunned by a mastery of colour and design which makes these 3000+ objects almost modern. Colours and patterns might comfortably grace a set of linens today. The octopus and other sea life swirling across pottery wouldn’t look out of place in a chic kitchen store. The wall painting of olive trees is so close to William Morris’ willow pattern you have to wonder if the late Victorian designer saw and copied.
And then there are other things that are profoundly alien. While the naked bull jumpers might just turn up in a death-defying YouTube stunt, and beg a connection to Spanish bull fighters, the bare-breasted priestesses holding wriggling, live snakes aloft in their gripped hands are undoubtably from a very different world.
There’s enough of the odd and the exceptional here to keep viewers of all ages interested. Unusually for me, I was in the company of three young people, all of whom found items to interest them here. The curators’ most obvious play for that audience, beyond the focus on storytelling itself, is to include one of the Assassin’s Creed games. Designers Ubisoft included a quest through the ruins of Knossos to slay the Minotaur in their Odyssey installment. In the exhibition, an enormous screen follows an ancient Greek heroine through the ruins to her confrontation with the monster while a display panel explains just how seriously the designers took the history and architecture, actually working with the Ashmolean to get things right.
Not only is this gallery a compelling and vivid bit of world building after seeing all the bits and pieces that would have furnished it, but it’s a real talking point for families. This was the part of the exhibition where my 13-year-old godson was most engaged, showing off his knowledge of the Minotaur and explaining details he’d taken in while playing the game. His mother had the revelation, for the first time, that gaming might be educational and not a complete waste of time. A win for everyone.
While the curators don’t pound the point home, the Ubisoft inclusion is also appropriate because this mix of history and imagination, with some artistic liberties taken to engage audiences, is exactly what Evans did 120 years ago. He rebuilt and restored the site in ways modern archeology would no longer tolerate, and made conclusions about the people and functions of the palace that were based as much on guesswork and personal preference as fact. Even the name we give to this culture … the Minoans … was made up by Evans rather than drawn from history. In my experience, one of the reasons that Knossos is so spectacular to visit is precisely because Evans’ world building gave us a colourful, tangible portal to a vividly imagined past. Whether it’s any more accurate than wandering through in Assassin’s Creed is still a matter of hot debate.
The final parts of the exhibition contain a gallery on newer discoveries in areas around the original excavation, and a video installation inspired by Evans’ fanciful restorations. The 18-minute ramble by Elizabeth Price is narrarated by imaginary, robotic curators who have been asked to clear up the hard drives of the Ashmolean and the neighbouring Pitt-Rivers museum. They draw unexpected, beautiful but often completely wrong conclusions from their mash up. Though meant, at its 2016 creation, to be a comment on what the restoration may have gotten wrong in Knossos, the automated voice prompted me to think about how AI might interpret and curate our artefacts of a world suddenly stripped of humans. It was very weird, but it’s now the thing from the exhibition I’d be most keen to see again.
I suspect I may indeed get back for a second viewing. While Labyrinth was great for a family outing, there’s a second layer of discovery I’d like to make with a longer, quieter visit. Like all great stories, multiple tellings reveal new things.
Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality is on at the Ashmolean until 30 July.
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