Stereotypes are ideological (one-sided) tools born of power struggles. Crete was conquered by opportunistic force. In 200 years, its new masters turned 2000 years of achievement into a Dark Age. So it's no surprise that Crete was bludgeoned and buried with stereotypes. The Achaians needed them, conquering a culture worlds beyond their own and then watching its "mysterious" virtues run like blood through their hands. Western libraries of glory for these heroes are the playground of naive bookworms exhilarated by fantasies of slaughter, which in turn help to lower our standards---of truth from history, of freedom itself. The West owes Mycenae's "great kings" nothing but role-models for psychotic greed that, "ideally" for a few, make most people slaves.

      The bards of Achaian Mycenae changed Minos, a priest and judge amid women of knowledge, into a man-eating monster. After ages of their own elders' learning from Crete, a new manly generation of Achaians sacked Crete and turned queen Pasiphae (a leader of many powers whose name means "She Who Shines For All") into a bestially-oversexed warning against women in public office. Read it yourself and notice how Pasiphae just drops out of the story once she has served her function. Crete's visionary daughter Ariadne was spun into a naive victim. She "fell in love" with the supposed captive Theseus (being Cretan, she'd never seen a real man before), and helped him destroy her world for a blink of his attention. Without him, it was best for her to die.

      That's how Achaians wished it was. The reality was deemed too much for the public. These are choice specimens of founding-fatherly rubbish with effects at every level of education. Change a few details and they're mainstream formula, publicity-posters for most "westerns" up through Indiana Jones: wolf in the sheepskin of victim, fantasy-female on his arm. This Minotaur has everything in common with many a stereotyped "inferior" onto whom invaders project needless fears and puerile appetites. Where did the ancient Cretans go? Most of all, "under" the stereotypes that serve to police Western being to this day.

      The Achaians must have actually confronted some mighty "disturbing" qualities in Crete's people, and took steps to prevent their social reproduction. Their traditions became The West's until The Earth spoke again in buried treasure. As George Thompson's Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and other inquiries find, we lack no trace of a trans-generational program for change from one way of life toward another:

     Kekrops, the first king of Athens...was credited with the invention of matrimony. Before his time there had been no marriage: intercourse was promiscuous....The children were named after their mothers.....Athenians would not have fabricated a story that represented their ancestors as savages. The Greeks once lived as the barbarians live now. But...the reaction had set in. [The idea of social evolution, based in comparison] was irreconcilable with the doctrine fostered by the growth of slavery, that Greek and barbarian were different by nature. If such things as primitive communism, group-marriage, and matriarchy were admitted into the beginnings of Greek civilization, what would become of the dogma on which the ruling class leant more and more heavily as the city-state declined, that its economic basis in private property, slave labor and the subjection of women rested on natural justice? [Aristotle] knew that the Greeks had once lived in tribes, and he must have been familiar with the tradition that they had once been without slaves. He was presumably aware of the part assigned to Kekrops in the history of matrimony, and in any case he had before him the example of contemporary Sparta, where the rule of monogamy was so little binding that half a dozen brothers might share a wife between them and adultery was not punishable or even discreditable. Yet, accepting the city-state as the only possible foundation for civilized life, he constructs a theory in which the original nucleus of society is identified as the married couple dominated by the male and supported by slave labor.....  (Studies in Ancient Greek Society: Greek Tribal Institutions 143)

 And yet, as Thompson adds, "in a number of Aegean islands including Lesbos, Lemnos, Naxos and Kos, matrilineal succession to real property was the rule at the end of the 18th century AD." He cites English traveler John Hawkins, who at the dawn of "Enlightenment" helped to revive the observation of "other" cultures:

 At the close of the year 1797 I transmitted...the result of those enquiries in my power to make: that in a large proportion of the islands of the archipelago, the eldest daughter takes as her marriage portion the family house, together with its furniture, and one third or a larger share of the maternal property, which in reality in most of these islands constitutes the chief means of subsistence; that the other daughters, as they marry off in succession, are likewise entitled to the family house then in occupation and the same share of whatever property remains; finally, that these observations were applicable to the islands of Mytilin, Lemnos, Scopelo, Skyros, Syra, Zea, Ipsera, Myconos, Paros, Naxos, Siphnos, Santorini, and Cos, where I have either collected my information in person or had obtained it through others. (203)

      "I am not in a position to explain this remarkable survival or revival," Thompson notes: "That could only be done by embarking on the unexplored subject of Greek land-tenure under the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires." Indeed, we have some explaining to do. As Robert Graves remarked, once we admit that The West began in Crete, we are compelled to "an historical confession you will be loth to make."

      We cannot doubt that hundreds of Cretans, from trophy-wives to master-artisans, became slaves to mainland powers. Zeus---once he tears himself from his Cretan origins as the dying/reborn god whose face we see in Mount Juktas---is rape and/or forced marriage. Most Cretans as colonized labor had to stay where they were and, somehow, they married in age after age of increasingly patriarchal newcomers. Eastern districts retained the ancient Eteo-Cretan language, and customs of world-famous hospitality for the maybe-divine stranger. Crete's proudly independent wasp-waisted people and their conscious continuities (for ex. the display of ceramics from that day to this) are living survivals.

      It is possible that the very end of Cnossos---its fiery total destruction---was part of some kind of civil war between conservative Cretans and those more cooperative with invasive Achaian influences. Its destruction may have been a vengeance-raid, by Cretans driven into the mountains, against the occupied power-center and those who thought they possessed it. Or, Achaia's new prestige found a visibly-superior Cretan past so uncomfortable that they had to torch the place. Cnossos with its half-buried splendor became "uncanny ground" to be avoided. Recent studies confirm a widespread continuance of "Minoan" ways outside the "historic" centers of power---hence a new split between city and country that, in time, produced the pejorative pagan: "people of the land" who resist conversion to new official creeds.

      There is no excuse for a dull curriculum and no cure for students smart enough to be bored by one. We are born migrants toward hope, and the boat we build will decide most of what we bring and what leave behind.

      Cnossos was and is the center of a sacred universe: a residence and house of learning between past and future, a craft-shop, trade depot and court of justice. An objectivity that keeps us mired on a road to self-extinction is academic in the worst sense. We've learned enough from history to repudiate it; to begin again with a knowledge that does not separate feeling from intellect. Rape is no necessary part of understanding or true control. We can have no real idea of progress without the facts and courage to define the goal---out loud, in words. If we won't do that, and we haven't yet ("All men are created equal..."), there must be something to hide. To heal.

      Celebrate instead what we gain as we face our historical confession.

      If you want to experience "what's left of the 'Minoans,'" chew slowly the salt-bread of academics. Defending their jobs with endless new spins that explain everything, they teach us to dismiss Crete's differences and continuities as romantic reinvention. You'll find few of them so confident as to demonstrate this to the faces of Crete's living people. How could church-going grandmothers spinning village-pots know more than a trained pro? In fact, neither "knows more": each are indispensable toward a whole conception.

      The more time you spend off tourist-tracks, the more time dissolves and reconfigures itself. Climb a mountainside with a Cretan family and spend the December day whacking olives from the trees. It doesn't take much to get even their tired bones into a Kyklos or refreshing Round-dance. Speak the language, touch and be touched, and you find yourself invited to dance The Lily or Krinon, the Votrydon or Bunch of Grapes. In a village rite of spring called the Klithonas (The Turning of the Key that unlocks all the goodness of Nature, and is frowned upon by churchmen), young women dance their way to the local well, bearing a jar. In reaching down into the well's depths---where still dwell You-Know-Who---they each "by chance" retrieve the name of a young man with whom they might make a good life. Each gender's dance has its own fire, and the elders give out prizes of symbolic first-fruits from the fields: "imposing ideology" with jokes that encourage them to strive "for the big cucumber.

      Spring in Crete is still the high-point of its spiritual calendar. Easter means travel and visiting, bonfires on the beaches at night, drinking and food and, pun intended, raising hell. Families and groups of them return to their mountain villages and socialize in the courtyards of their churches, waiting into the night for priests inside to carry on the Liturgy. The most dramatic and ancient moment comes when the chief priest "impersonates the deity" (in this case Christ), in his post-crucifixion journey through the Underworld to fetch out its lost and malingering souls. He pounds and pounds on the door of the church and so reenacts the loving journey also of a Goddess older than Crete---Inanna. It was she in Western letters who first bellowed, If you do not open, I will smash the door, I will break the lintel...

      And then these families, each with a beeswax candle from home, light it from the chief priest's, or from each other's; and a marvelous night-procession full of singing, humor and tenderness begins to climb the local mountain under The Milky Way. Time is over, till you snake your way back to the world where a feast of new life is waiting.

      That cow among rushes tells us more. Egyptologists today study relations between monuments and the landscape, and find the land full of meaning. Egypt's kings and queens aligned their political powers and future lives with natural cycles and objects. In the massive cliffs above Deir el-Bahri, for example---a huge memorial temple to Queen Hatshepsut---scholars have finally noticed enormous rock-formations that resemble 1) a hooded cobra standing over a human or god-like form; and 2) visible above at left, another huge human form that seems to half-cradle a smaller one, shaped like itself. A mother and child.

      This was a place of power for 30,000 years before the temple. Hatshepsut reigned as Crete was falling, her own rule a rare turn toward diplomacy and trade. Something here spoke to the desire for rebirth and the Egyptians built on it to share in those powers. In the same deep concrete way, they understood the western horizon---the mountains of Libya---as the door to the world of rebirth; as "an embodiment of divine femininity which offered hope of rebirth for those who came to rest in its matrix" (V.A. Donohue, "The Goddess of the Theban Mountain": Antiquity 66 [1992]: 871-885). Their Book of the Dead tells the story of a cow, "really the Goddess Hathor, emerging from those western mountains and a thicket of papyrus to welcome the deceased's arrival at his tomb." Meaning Life. Hathor was guidance to the lost and her power changed the dead to The Transfigured. This is a comforting theme for a post-"Minoan" painter to brood in exile.

      The Achaians, the Hittites, and many minor kingdoms fell before them. Crop failures, disruptions of trade and cultural revolutions added to their impact. Even the mighty Egyptians had their hands full. We wonder whether "Minoan" descendants angrily remembered the early Achaian-Egyptian trading that cut out Crete the ancient middle-man. Records say that by 1190 or so, Pharaoh Ramses III was forced to adopt another strategy. He "settled" these Philistines---Pelasgian or island-people, Cyprian Pulesati and other blood-lines, peletim or "refugees" in Hebrew---where they already had kin and business, in towns and cities along the coast called Palestine. The more we dig in The Middle East the more we find ancient Cretan presence, trade and influence: Ugarit knew them as Kapturi, Egypt as Keftiu, the Hebrews as Caphtorim, Cherethites.

      The original name of Gaza was Minoa. The Cretans' extraordinary depth---what else sustained their flexible persistence?---offers us new understanding of another pillar of The West: the emergence of the Hebrews, Israel and The Old Testament.

      "They have no names, no faces," Chaim Potok's History of the Jews says of the Sea Peoples and Philistines. A curious suggestion in a field whose "problem" is the plenitude of names and eclectic cultural identities that filled "The Promised Land."

      A man wearing such a Cyprian "cropped-feather headdress" appears with many spiral-written signs on the famous Phaestos Disk from Crete. At right you see an unmistakably "Minoan" clay shrine found at Beth-Shan on the Jordan River. At least 50 years before the Philistines supposed arrival in Canaan, Pharaoh Ramses II built a garrison and temple there with bricks stamped with Cretan signs. Their alabaster and paintings already adorned the East. Aegean ties with the multicultures of Canaan sowed the ground, and diaspora drew the Sea Peoples toward opportunity.

      They solved two problems at once for Egypt, weak from war against the Hittites over a Middle East that belonged to neither. As these motley Aegean bands fully settled in and developed five pre-existing coastal cities---the "Pentapolis" of Gaza, Gath, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Ekron---the great sea-raids ended and the Philistines emerged as orderly middle-men in trade between Canaan and The Nile. Egyptians and Hebrews---back then, just two more groups of would-be landlords---paint the Philistines with the word mercenaries. Like the Cretans, they had a first-class military. But evidence is scant of a "warlike nature" that made them Pharaoh's enforcers, tyrants and slaves. It is far more accurate to say that they mix with, absorb and advance the locals. They'll do it again when they with others evolve into the Etruscans.

      Ashkelon had welcomed Cyprus' traders since 2000 BCE. Each city of Philistia had its own polyglot traditions and political independence within a web of ties that strengthened all: the old pattern, loose confederacy, meaning hegemonies cultural rather than military. After 3000 years of book-based certainty that Philistine command of iron made all the difference, the digs today prove iron so rare that it could not have dictated much reality until the last half of The Iron Age. The long-buried roots of the Philistines' actual power we're beginning to know in detail.

      So far only Ashkelon shows clear evidence of burning in early Philistine times. Hardened by centuries of siege from Egypt, Ashkelon likely had a well-defined ruling class less than pleased to make the Philistines at home. (Ashdod was burned but clearly before the immigrants landed.) Conceptions of this transition and new growth are changing. Instead of crude invasion we find a body of evidence showing the Philistines busy planting new farmlands around those old cities, improving their walls and expanding their trade.

      Within two generations (and at many now-known smaller sites) we find them establishing themselves as craftsmen and merchants, metalworkers, horse-traders, producers of olive oil, wine and dyed textiles. Farming and enterprise supported a culture mixing ancient elements with those all around. Small open pillared temples, ancestral stones, sacred trees and posts (asherah), horned altars in the open air. Stone benches where cult meals were shared. Seated goddesses mingling with the Baal-gods of Canaan, a fish-tailed hero named Dagon, Cyprian doves, Egyptian scarabs. Women and men mingling likewise freely in their ceremonies. Only history considered this an impious outrage.

      At a new-found site called Tell Qasile (25 miles north of Ashdod) we find all this and more. Within 50 years of living there (circa 1150 BCE) the Philistines built a temple, this time round in shape, with all their traditional elements. Within 50 more years---as some kind of conflict began with the hapiru or "hill people," the temple was burned, and then more than rebuilt. It was expanded again within two more generations (1050); and then, around 1000 BCE, it came to a violent end. The site represents a reliable record of the Philistines' "fate" in general; for these are the two centuries of coexistence and then increasing conflict with the Hebrews, intent on turning Palestine into Israel. At the "bottom" (actually the top) of the Tell Qasile dig, archaeologists found a double-axe, dated to about 980 BCE.

      It is worse than backwards to call the Philistines important because against them the Israelites unified into a nation-state. By the same illogic we thank the Aegean as a lovely burning backdrop for Achilles. If there was no Israelite "war of conquest for The Promised Land," as we are told in flat contradiction to the same school, why was Saul appointed first king of the fractious Twelve Tribes? According to The Bible, Saul's "effective secular power" tried to accomplish nothing else and nothing less. He perished leading armies to defeats against the Philistines' seasoned skills. When these battles were through, the Philistines went about their lives. We have no trace of a Philistine strangle-hold on economics, no hint of an intent to annihilate irksome "hill people

      But at last---at the same time that Tell Qasile burned---Saul's successor David turned the tide. His single-combat victory over Goliath (itself an Aegean custom) is an acknowledged "awkward insertion" of retroactive heroism: in fact it's David's champion Elhanan who fights (2 Samuel 21:19). If this happened at all, it proves one huge thing overlooked in all the melodrama: when Goliath lost, the Philistines did not commence battle with an attack. The Israelites attacked, and "Philistine wounded lay all along the road" back to Gath and Ekron.

      Like "Indians" on the American frontier, the Philistines just "gather for war" and their very presence is "oppression." David maneuvered a temporary separate peace through his friend-across-the-lines, Achish of Gath; and this served to fracture Philistine unities as he solidified his own, with Jerusalem's conquest in 1005 BCE. Over time, always with specific cause that dispersed the programmatic "cultural reform," David's monarchy (1000-960 BCE) subjected the Pentapolis cities and dependencies, razing some, taking over others too useful to burn. Ashdod prospered for another 200 years: longer itself than the unified kingdom of Israel

      New complexities of analysis won't change the fact that in ultimate political and cultural terms, this is what happened. By their own accounts, one day before history the nomadic pastoralist Israelites looked over a hill and trembled at the urbanized diversity of Canaan: 200 years made it their Promised Land. If historians agree at least that early-Israelite ways of life were unlikely to seduce Canaan's peoples toward their own, what does account for the change? Western historical awareness seems to be missing the central driving motive that, in multicultural fact, made it what it undeniably is.

      Its beginnings are small and individual. Gideon, like Samson, was a man just before Saul's time, and an early type of nazirite: a charismatic individual whose "spiritual possession" (by Yahweh-God) brought about exceptional deeds. Where "inspired" deeds brought good things to the group, the Israelites conferred leadership-status on the doer and proclaimed his guidance by "the one true God." Such was Gideon, "called" by his god to drive off neighboring Midianite tribesmen who raided Hebrew camps on camels' backs. Before long (Judges 6: 25-32), Gideon was "inspired" to pull down his father's Canaanite altar, cut down "the sacred post at the side of it," and burn it as fuel for his own offerings to Yahweh. Bold with momentum, he did so.

     ...But since he stood too much in fear of his family and the townspeople to do this by day, he did it by night. Next morning, when the townspeople got up, the altar to Baal had been destroyed, the sacred post that had stood beside it cut down, and the fattened calf had been burned as a holocaust on the newly-built altar. Then they said to each other, 'Who has done this?' They searched, made inquiries and declared, 'Gideon son of Joash has done it....Bring out your son for he must die, since he has destroyed the altar.'

      The father defended his son: "'Would you plead for Baal?...If he is a god, let him plead for himself, now that Gideon has destroyed his altar'....That day Gideon was given the name Jerubbaal, because [the townspeople] said, 'Baal must plead against him, seeing that he has destroyed his altar.'"

     .Again the Israelites...served the Baals and the Astartes,and the gods of Aram and Sidon, the gods of Moab and those of the Ammonites and Philistines. They deserted Yahweh and served him no more. Then Yahweh's anger flamed out against Israel and he gave them over into the power of the Philistines...who from that year onward crushed and oppressed the men of Israel....Israel's distress was very great.... (Judges 10: 6-10)

      Samson's parents tell him to keep away from that Philistine girl. "Get this one for me, Get her because I like her," he shrugs. In Canaan, customs of beena marriage made the groom's social movement matrimonial. Baal marriage bonded the pair within the powers of tribal fathers and male gods. Even with such differences, Canaanites and Philistines married the Israelite people in. Their very names are built from all their languages. Inevitably, their ongoing culture was built from all of them too. Gideon's family's names and ways are themselves hybrids: this is what troubles him.

      There are no examples or details of these oppressions. As with Achaia's body of stereotypes, beneath them we sense that "oppression" is actually a kind of needless shame over how much help is needed from powerful "others" that "we" despise. To give in, to "go native" is to find oneself "in their power," and so betray the plans of the leading minority. Israel's leaders, the men who commissioned these harangues and writings, lose "power" wherever people are interested in more things than themselves.

     The ancient inhabitants of your holy land you hated for their loathsome practices, their deeds of sorcery and unholy rites, hated as ruthless murderers of children, as eaters of entrails at feasts of human flesh, initiated while the bloody orgy goes on....You determined to destroy them at our fathers' hands, so that this land...might receive a colony of God's children worthy of it. Even so, since these were men, you treated them leniently...to destroy them bit by bit....although you knew very well they were inherentlyl...and fixed in their cast of mind; for they were a race accursed from the beginning. (Wisdom 12: 3-11)

 Like the Cretans faced with Achaians who recognized no "outside" limits on behavior, the Philistines were up against rivals whose spiritual leaders defined themselves with a purge of disobedient people at the foot of Mount Sinai. In Exodus 32: 25-29, when "Moses saw the people so out of hand," the Levites proceeded with "killing one his brother, one his friend, another his neighbor" in the new cause; and this made them the priestly tribe. For these newcomers afraid of losing their pasts amid a splendorous present, "belief" or ideology became identity itself.

      In time there were many more like Gideon; zeal building numbers enough to "seek an occasion for quarreling with the Philistines, since at this time [they] had Israel in their power" (Judges 14:4; which says the plot was "The Lord's"). Short-term-effective results led to more momentum, more followers, more results. Time and increasingly rigorous discipline of the young produced a war of conquest dispersed across generations. That is why Philistine cities "fell" one by one by such obscure means; why we find huge heaps of people's Goddess-statues buried under Jerusalem's walls.

      "I will bring your seed from The East, I will gather you out of The West," promises The Kabbalah's mystic theology. "The East" is "east of the world, whence Israel came": the place of the never-flagging phallus, of righteousness and "transcendence," opposed to the merely feminine "radiant splendor" of The Earth. Above all in this driving school of thought and so of action, The East is not maarabh---"mixture." The West is Diversity: something to be "delivered" (somehow) from.