Zominthos

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Preserved walls of Zominthos from the northwest
(outer wall of the ceramic workshop)

Zominthos ( Greek Ζώμινθος ) refers to an archaeological excavation site in the center of the Greek island of Crete . It is located in the municipality of Anogia in the Rethymno regional district on the northeast flank of the Psiloritis massif or the Ida mountains. The Late Minoan remains of Zominthos were discovered in 1982 and have been excavated intermittently since 1986 .

location

The archaeological site is 1187 meters above sea level on the lightly wooded Zominthos plateau between the 4.5 kilometers north of Anogia (Ανώγεια) and the Nida plateau (Oροπέδιο Νίδας) 5.5 kilometers in the southwest. The road that connects Anogia and the Nida plateau passes the Zominthos archaeological site about 80 meters northeast. This is near the source of Agia Marina (Αγία Μαρίνα) and is surrounded by a fence. In ancient times, the main route from Knossos on the north coast of Crete to the cult cave of the Cretan Zeus , the Idean Grotto , ran across the water-rich plateau of Zominthos with its extensive pastures .

description

The name Zomi [n] thos is of pre-Greek origin. This naming of the plateau by the local shepherds prompted Jannis Sakellarakis , the then director of the archaeological museum in Heraklion , to conduct investigations on site in 1982 , and discovered the site at the end of August of the same year. A first small excavation in a limited area began in 1983. From 1986 to 1990, major excavation campaigns took place under the direction of the discoverer. After an interruption, the excavations continued from 2005 and are still ongoing. Since the death of Jannis Sakellarakis in October 2010, his wife Efi Sapouna-Sakellaraki has been leading the excavation campaigns.

North side of the central building

After only a few rooms in the central system of the site were examined in the 1980s, after 2005, under the patronage of the Archaeological Society of Athens , from 2005 to 2007 in cooperation with the Institute for Classical Archeology of the University of Heidelberg , over 55 rooms on the ground floor were able to so far of the monumental main building will be exposed. The building, erected in an east-west orientation, took up an area of ​​around 1360 m² and had at least one upper floor with a floor made of thin slabs, which would result in a total of more than 100 rooms for the building. The building, conventionally referred to as the “central building” of Zominthos, was smaller than the Minoan palaces of Crete, but larger than any known Minoan villa. It was part of a settlement covering an area of ​​at least 3,000 m² (0.4 hectares ) including a cemetery.

"Entrance" with corridor

The central building with its asymmetrical facade is 54 meters long from east to west and 37 meters wide. The preserved massive walls made of stone from the area reach up to a height of 3 meters. There are cutouts for a door and two windows in the 2.2 meter high facade of the northern outer wall. From the “entrance” there, a 11.55 meter long and 1.35 meter wide corridor leads south, dividing the building into two wings . The steeply sloping walls of the corridor indicate that the central building was destroyed by an earthquake . Traces of a fire can also be seen on the walls of the ruin. The rubble of the former upper floor was up to 3 meters high inside the facility. Undisturbed culture layers were located under a thin surface stratum.

Zominthos appears in the 19th century BC. To have been settled, a larger settlement existed since the beginning of the 17th century BC. The remains of several earlier structures have been identified under the central building from this century. The dating was based on the ceramic finds from the Neupalastzeit of the Late Minoan IA (SM IA) phase. The building was built in the same ceramic phase around 1600 BC. Chr. Destroyed. The information provided by the scientists relates to the " high dating " of the Minoan culture , which covers section SM IA for the period from around 1700 to 1580 BC. Begins. On many of the inner walls of the central building there was fine white lime plaster, partly with paint residues that indicate frescoes . Large storage vessels, amphorae , numerous smaller vessels, charred wooden parts as well as many vessel fragments and animal bones were found in the rooms . Water pipes were also discovered, which may have been part of a drainage system.

Ceramic workshop in the northwest

The north-west wing of the central building housed a ceramics workshop with a round clay sludge basin in which the clay was cleaned before processing. Here over 150 completely preserved clay pots were excavated in situ , which lay on two narrow benches on the north and south walls of the workshop room. The vessels, dated to a mature stage by SM IA, appear to have been freshly made shortly before the building was destroyed. The fact that the central building was not rebuilt, but abandoned, is a clue for a major natural disaster affecting the entire Minoan culture during phase SM IA. In the karst fillings of the region there are considerable amounts of tephra , which, given their geochemical and mineral composition can be assigned to the volcanic eruption on the Cycladic island of Thera , so that a volcanic ash rain can also be assumed in the mountainous regions of Crete. Scientists date the Minoan eruption on Thera to the time from 1627 to 1600 BC. Chr.

The Zominthos site is unusually high at 1187 meters , over 400 meters higher than the current settlement limit of Crete of 740 meters near Anogia. Even the Minoan peak sanctuaries and refugee settlements, such as Karphi , only reached up to an altitude of 1,100 meters. In the cold and snowy winters on the Zominthos plateau, sub-zero temperatures sometimes prevail until the beginning of April. The complex construction and size of the central building of Zominthos, the ceramic workshop and the traces of settlement surrounding the building speak for a permanent settlement. A milder climate could have prevailed in Minoan times, but the fact that no other large Minoan buildings of the Zominthos type have been found at corresponding altitudes speaks against this.

The Zominthos plateau was and is well suited for cattle breeding in the summer months. Moderate slopes, sufficient water supply and mild summers influence the good soil formation for extensive grazing. The most important source of income in the region was already in Minoan times sheep breeding, which is still of central importance in this area today and at that time was especially important for the production of wool. Zominthos belonged to a network of about 50 country estates, which were located in economically or strategically important places in Crete. They were very likely part of a centralized administrative system with which one or more palaces controlled the island's economy and secured the traffic routes. The extent to which the location on the way to the Idean Grotto, the logging or the extraction of snow and ice played a role for the supply of the lowlands for Zominthos is not clear from the excavations so far. The excavation results were largely documented by the discoverer and excavation manager Jannis Sakellarakis, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos from the University of Heidelberg and Efi Sapouna-Sakellaraki, today's excavation manager.

  • Views of the archaeological site

  • Inside of the north wall

  • West of the corridor

  • Rooms in the west

  • Space in the southeast

literature

  • Jannis Sakellarakis, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos: Ανασκαφή Ζωμίνθου. In: Praktika tes en Athenais Archaiologikes Etaireias 2004, pp. 99–110 ( online ).
  • Jannis Sakellarakis, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos: Minoan Zominthos . In: Irini Gavrilaki, Yannis Tzifopoulos (ed.): Ο Μυλοπόταμος από την αρχαιότητα ως σήμερα: περιβάλλλον, αρλαρολογίον, αρλατο, γαωον, αρλατο, γανο, γαφοατο, γαφοατο, γαφοατο, γαλω ικλατο, γαλω ικλατο, γανσο, ρλατο. 2: Αρχαίοι χρόνοι . Rethymno 2006, ISBN 960-85801-9-6 , p. 47–75 (English, digitized [PDF; 17.0 MB ; accessed on January 13, 2018]).
  • Diamantis Panagiotopoulos: Minoan villa in the clouds of Crete. An unusually large building in the Cretan mountains is highly explosive for Minoan archeology . In: Ancient World . 38, 2007, No. 4, pp. 17-24 ( online ).
  • Jannis Sakellarakis, Efi Sapouna-Sakellaraki: Ιδαίο Άντρο. Το σπήλαιο του Δία και οι θησαυροί του. Militos, Athens 2010, ISBN 978-960-464-232-8
  • Efi Sapouna-Sakellaraki, Erietta Deligianni-Kotsi (eds.): Θά 'θελα αυτή τη μνήμη να την πω ...: Μνήμη Γιάννη Σακελλαράκη. Vikelaia, Heraklion 2012, ISBN 978-960-7970-54-1
  • Sebastian Traunmüller: The Neopalatial Pottery from the Ceramic Workshop at Zominthos. In: Archäologischer Anzeiger. No. 2 (2012), Hirner, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-7774-5831-1 ( online )

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Antonis Vasilakis: Crete . Mystis, Iraklio 2008, ISBN 978-960-6655-30-2 , Zominthos, p. 239 .
  2. ↑ a b c d Zominthos. www.minoancrete.com, accessed March 21, 2013 .
  3. ^ A b Interactive Dig Crete: Zominthos Project. Introduction. Archaeological Institute of America (interactive.archaeology.org), 2012, accessed March 21, 2013 .
  4. ^ A b Interactive Dig Crete: Zominthos Project. Excavation History. Archaeological Institute of America (interactive.archaeology.org), 2012, accessed March 21, 2013 .
  5. ↑ a b Zominthos. www.explorecrete.com, June 25, 2012, accessed March 27, 2013 .
  6. ↑ a b c Efi Sapouna-Sakellaraki: The Wealth of Psiloritis. Archeology & arts, November 12, 2012, accessed May 6, 2015 .
  7. ↑ a b c d e f Diamantis Panagiotopoulos: Minoan villa in the clouds of Crete. An unusually large building in the Cretan mountains is highly explosive for Minoan archeology . In: Ancient World . 38, 4th 2007, p. 18-23 ( online [accessed March 21, 2013]).
  8. ↑ Christoph Siart, Bernhard Eitel: Santorini-Tephra on Crete: a mineralogical indicator for environmental changes during the Bronze Age. Heidelberg University, November 9, 2011, p. 41 (43) , accessed on March 27, 2013 ( PDF file, 275.33 KB ).
  9. ↑ Newly dated - 100 years are missing from the ancient calendar. Scientists are well ahead of the Santorini eruption. Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, April 27, 2006, accessed March 23, 2013 .

Web links

Commons : Zominthos  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 35 ° 14 ′ 55.3 "  N , 24 ° 53 ′ 13.7"  E