Blue monkeys, bull-leaping and child sacrifice: why were the Minoans so weird?

Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford does not take the idea of a labyrinth too literally. It does not lead you through galleries to dead ends, nor are you left searching, like Theseus, for a ball of thread to find your way out again. The real enigma of the exhibition revolves around the Bronze Age civilisation at its heart.

The Minoans, who occupied Crete between about 3,000 and 1,100 BC, remain some of the most mystifying people ever to have been stumbled upon in modern times. It is uncertain where they came from, what they believed, how they were governed and why they chose to paint things the colours they did in their dynamic works of art. They traded widely, including with Egypt, but the direction of cultural influence is not always clear. When I put it to Dr Andrew Shapland, curator of the exhibition, that the Minoans throw up more questions than answers, he assures me that bewilderment is often the prevailing emotion among scholars of the period as well. Not even their principal writing script, Linear A, has been deciphered fully.

The material the Minoans left behind inspires deep, obsessive wonder. Figures of bare-breasted women with snakes writhing around their arms and elaborate headpieces accompany pots painted with massive octopuses and frescoes filled with blue monkeys, crocuses and long-haired, red-skinned men. Many of the paintings were heavily restored in the early 20th century, with heads and sometimes entire figures recreated controversially from scratch. Most were copied from more complete examples, but it has been observed that in some instances, the women look peculiarly modern. One of the best-preserved ‘original’ panels shows a lithe man with his face still intact and full of life, his neck extended as he leans back upon himself, waist cinched, arms akimbo.