Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality (Ashmolean, April 2023)

Theseus and the Minotaur: Roman copies of Greek originals, National Archaeological Museum, Athens (although you won't find Theseus in this exhibition) 

“Labyrinth” is a good word to describe this exhibition. For anyone like me, coming to Knossos for the first time, the exhibition does not clarify much. By the end of the exhibition, just three or four rooms, I felt more in a muddle about Knossos than when I started. Now I have bought the guide, and I am reading the Wikipedia entry, and I hope to have a better idea of the subject at some point. But I don’t expect exhibitions to push me back to the literature to try to establish what was going on. The exhibition lacked: 

• a chronology of main events 
• a comparison of how Minoan civilization related to other ancient societies such as ancient Athens or Egypt 
• a full assessment of what Arthur Evans did at the site that was controversial, and how archaeologists might do things differently today 
• detail about many of the locations and objects. 

For example, the throne room of the palace is the subject of many debates, but these were barely mentioned in the exhibition. This was a show that left you wanting more. You could say the exhibition was trying to cover too much, but it wasted some of the resources it had. There was a looping video that purported to be an account by curators to manage collections, but that seemed so tendentious that I skipped it. It was by Elisabeth Price, and is listed in the Exhibition catalogue but without any description. There was a video of the computer game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, but no explanation of why this might be relevant to the myth of Knossos (apart from it being set in a mythical palace resembling the Minoan city). All in all, this was a paradox: an exhibition about a topic that the Ashmolean could cover better than any other institution (given that Arthur Evans was keeper at the Ashmolean for many years, and many of the notes from the excavation are held by the Ashmolean. Yet the exhibition left you wanting more information. Perhaps what was lacking was an overall theme. Was this the story of Arthur Evans? Was it the story of Knossos? Was it the fascinating of a myth (the bull and the labyrinth) even in the modern world? Was it a comparison of how archaeological techniques have changed in the last 125 years? The combination of all these simply caused confusion. 

The Exhibition Catalogue 

I didn’t find the catalogue very helpful. It begins with an irrelevant paragraph about Arthur Evans as Ashmolean director, rather than excavator of Knossos, and then goes on to state “hundreds of thousands of visitors … [will] know Knossos as the location of the Labyrinth” [introduction, page 16]. Is this established? Was Knossos really the site of labyrinth? I thought this was by no means certain. The next section of the guide, “Introducing Knossos” begins with a chapter on the conservation of the site – what happened to the background and overview of Minoan civilization? We have to piece together for ourselves that Evans studied one small part of Knossos pre-history. None of the essays in this section introduce Minoan Knossos; they are all about conservation and museology (despite the Ashmolean’s director asserting on page 7 that “museum organisation and management … is not the stuff of exhibitions” – it certainly seems to be more important in this catalogue than anything telling you what Minoan civilization was. Typical of the catalogue is the statement: Regardless of the various interpretive approaches followed over the course of time [ref 34], the material remains of the Minoan world and the masterpieces of its art continue to enchant and fascinate all who visit. [Catalogue, p33] Quite what the “interpretive approaches” might be are relegated to a footnote – not worth discussing here, clearly. Even the depictions of the Minotaur cause confusion. Picasso’s etching La Minotauromachie “seems to represent the artist’s own inner turmoil” - what is meant by this? Later, the description of the impressive sculpture of the Minotaur, by Despina Ignatiadou, from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, replicates word for word her own text on the NAM website. However, on the NAM website, both the Minotaur and Theseus are illustrated, while in this exhibition, the text refers to both figures, but there is an illustration of only one.