Minoan Frescoes at Tel Kabri: Aegean Art in Bronze Age Israel

Biblical Archaeology Review ^ | 6/21/2013 | Noah Wiener

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Over 100 years of excavations on Crete have exposed elegant Minoan frescoes that once adorned the walls of the island’s Bronze Age palaces. This distinctively colorful Aegean art style flourished in the Middle Bronze Age (1750-1550 B.C.). The nearby inhabitants of Akrotiri, a city on the Cycladic island of Thera (modern Santorini), painted numerous artworks in the style of the Minoan frescoes before the island was decimated by a volcanic eruption in the late 17th or 16th century B.C.

Until recently, there was no archaeological evidence of Minoan frescoes beyond the islands of the Aegean. Art exhibiting Aegean characteristics has been uncovered at recent excavations in Egypt, Syria and Turkey—and at the Canaanite palace of Tel Kabri in Israel. In the July/August issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Tel Kabri excavators Eric H. Cline and Assaf Yasur-Landau explore how Aegean art, architecture and painted plaster fragments, reminiscent of Minoan frescoes, ended up at Canaanite Tel Kabri.

Aegean art at Tel Kabri was first discovered in 1989, when Aharon Kempinksi and Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier uncovered a checkerboard floor with depictions of Aegean flora as well as 2,000 painted plaster fragments exhibiting characteristics similar to Minoan frescoes. The current Tel Kabri excavation, under the direction of BAR authors Eric H. Cline and Assaf Yasur-Landau,* has uncovered many more pieces of painted wall plaster. In addition to Aegean art, the team recently exposed an expensive building lined with Aegean-style orthostat blocks and dowel holes similar to those found in Aegean palaces.

Why would the Canaanite ruler of Tel Kabri want to adorn his palace with Aegean art reminiscent of Crete’s Minoan frescoes?

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Pereset/Peleset are the Persians, the conventional pseudochronology is wrong.

The Cherethites are Carians, who gave their name to Crete anyway. Corinth (Greece) means “Place of the Car”, i.e., the Carians. Herodotus reports that the Cretans said the Carians came from there, but that the Carians claimed to have come from the mainland. Herodotus also notes that the Caunians (? they lived in Ionia in Anatolia) spoke a tongue apparently related to Carian. It’s not unlikely that Herodotus could understand spoken Carian considering his birthplace. He states that the Lydians (Arzawans as they’re now called) and Mysians (both are mainland) claimed to also be related. The Carians or close relatives were the Minoans of Crete.

Herodotus writes that the Lycians / Lukka were originally from Crete. “The customs which these have are partly Cretan and partly Carian; but one custom they have which is peculiar to them, and in which they agree with no other people, that is they call themselves by their mothers and not by their fathers...”

They had a distinctive style of burial and Dr V notes that when the Athenians ‘purified’ the island of Delos by clearing all prior interments, most of them were found to be Carian even though, presumably, there was no remaining Carian population.

The late author of the Specialty Interests website pointed out that the excavation of Philistine sites have found loads of (if memory serves) Mycenaean pottery frags.

Philistine names that survive appear to be Hurrian (which yet another name for the Carians), but I haven’t got the file (I’ve got a hard drive to rebuild, probably should do that this summer); the info came from Specialty Interests, orrrrrr, it came from Bierling:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060815151342/http://www.phoenixdatasystems.com/
first edition online at the Wayback Machine
Neal Bierling
Foreword by Paul L. Maier

https://www.amazon.com/Philistines-Giving-Goliath-Marco-Monographs/dp/0971468354
Philistines: Giving Goliath His Due (Marco Polo Monographs, No. 7.) Paperback – January 1, 2002
by Neal Bierling (Author), Joe E. Seger (Foreword)

https://www.amazon.com/Giving-Goliath-His-Due-Archaeological/dp/0801010187
Giving Goliath His Due: New Archaeological Light on the Philistines Paperback – January 1, 1992
by Neal Bierling (Author)