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Why Star Trek Owes A Debt To Ancient Crete
The ruins of the ancient Minoan Palace at Knossos, Crete
A stone's throw from Heraklion's ancient city walls, a modern-day McDonald's stands at the crossroads of a busy urban thoroughfare here on the Greek island of Crete. Four thousand years ago, however, Crete was also a crossroads dominated by a mysterious and largely still poorly understood Bronze Age culture that predated classical Greece.
For those familiar with Star Trek: The Next Generation, it's hard not to compare Crete's ancient Minoans with the Ferengi, the fictional 24th century traders so savvy in dealing across space, time and civilizations.
Not only were the Minoans adept at trade, but they were likely well ahead of their time when it came to celestial navigation. It's even arguable that their celestial prowess paved the way for the same sort of stellar navigation still in use at sea and now even in space.
According to at least one researcher, the Minoans were using stellar navigation to trade with partners via all four cardinal points of the compass.
I hypothesize that the Minoans employed a form of sidereal navigation similar to traditional Polynesian techniques—using star paths as directional guides across the sea, Alessandro Berio, an independent archeoastronomer, who holds a masters in cultural astronomy from the University of Wales in the U.K., told me via email. This is supported by archeoastronomical evidence of Minoan palatial alignments toward the rising or setting points of key stars, corresponding to trade routes to major Bronze Age port cities across the eastern Mediterranean, he says.
In a new paper that Berio is preparing for journal submission, he argues that his most significant finding is the proposition that Arcturus—one of the brightest stars in the northern hemisphere—may have served as a primary navigational anchor in a Bronze Age sidereal system. That is, one that linked some of the most important cultural and political centers of the Aegean and the Mediterranean.
I argue that the palace of Malia—one of Crete's major Minoan complexes—had a deliberate alignment with the rising of Arcturus, guiding seafarers along a star path toward Miletus, the principal Minoan outpost on Asia Minor's Anatolian coast, says Berio.
Arcturus, the fourth brightest star in the night sky is an aging red giant only 36.6 light years away. It's also the brightest star in the northern constellation of Bootes, a constellation known to be used for navigation by the ancient Greeks.
Berio wonders whether Arcturus functioned as a celestial beacon across multiple cultural spheres—Minoan, Mycenaean, and Egyptian.
In a 2022 paper published in the journal Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, Berio argued that the Minoans aligned their palaces with the stars Spica, Castor, Betelgeuse, Markab and even Sirius to navigate on imaginary lines to all points around the Mediterranean, including the Greek mainland, Asia Minor, Cyprus, the northeastern Nile delta, and even further west along North Africa.
The Minoans were cosmopolitan people who traveled across the Mediterranean exporting olive oil, wine, cereals, textiles, and leather goods while importing precious materials like gold, silver, and ivory, Kostis Christakis, an archeologist and director of the Knossos Research Center of the British school at Athens, told me in his office on Crete.
The Minoans knew how to trade and produced various goods for the Egyptian, Levantine, and Cypriot markets, Sue Sherratt, an archeologist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., told me via email. In the Early and Middle Bronze Ages silver from further north in the Aegean destined for the east may have been channeled through Crete, she says.
How did the Minoans use celestial navigation?
Similar to traditional Polynesian and Micronesian navigators, the Minoans may have mapped the rising and setting of stars to specific angles on the horizon, says Berio. By following these 'star paths'—linear constellations rising at known azimuths—and combining this with seasonal knowledge of winds and currents, they could reliably sail to distant ports across the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean and expand their trade network, he says.
Berio used OpenCPN, an open-source software, to plot likely Minoan navigation routes between two distant points. The correct altitude at which a star was visible on the horizon he determined by using Stellarium, a free software planetarium, as noted in his new paper. To mimic the naked eye observations of the Minoans, Berio limited the stars he plotted to only a magnitude of six.
To achieve this kind of navigational accuracy, the Minoans would have needed to calculate course angles across hundreds of kilometers of open sea; we don't know how they did it, says Berio. The possibility exists that they developed some form of proto-coordinate system, perhaps using celestial zenith stars for latitude, and/or comparing simultaneous lunar and solar eclipses for longitude, he says.
They likely first arrived on Crete from what is today southwest Anatolia in Asia Minor.
Even though this civilization has been dubbed Minoan, in truth, no one knows what they called themselves, much less what they called the island of Crete.
The myth of King Minos came later from Greek culture, but the Minoans were not Greek, says Christakis.
A model of the ancient Minoan palace at Creek as it may have looked around 1800 B.C. pictured here ... More inside the Heraklion Archeological Museum.
Yet the center of their society was clearly their palaces.
Used over six centuries from roughly 2000 B.C. until 1450 B.C., the Minoan palaces were the main administrative, economic, religious and ideological centers of Crete, says Christakis.
Standing atop the ruins of the palace at Knossos, I'm surrounded by semi-arid, wooded mountains that envelop this complicated maze. It's hard to imagine what it must have looked like in its full glory, but clearly this was a very sophisticated civilization that predated classical Greece by some five hundred years.
On the muggy afternoon I was there, a real-life peacock perched on a much-degraded stone wall seemed to perfectly fit this place in time. My first thought was that great ancestors of this peafowl must have paraded their plumage when the palace itself was in all its splendor; delighting the residents with their haunting calls.
A peacock on an ancient ledge at the Palace of Knossos, Crete
At present, we simply know too little about the Minoans to determine whether they had a more philosophical and esoteric side, but like Star Trek's Ferengi, they were all about accumulating wealth. The upper echelons of their society, at least, seem to live in high style.
As for their celestial prowess?
The biggest enigma is whether we're seeing evidence of lost mathematical knowledge, or a navigational system so embodied in ritual, architecture, and oral memory that it never needed to be written down, says Berio. What puzzles me most is how the Minoans could have measured the angle of a sea route between two distant locations with such precision — especially without known instruments or a documented system of trigonometry, he says.
The author inside part of the Palace at Knossos
