One aspect of ancient Egyptian archaeology that I've always enjoyed is that the dry climate of the Nile valley and the surrounding desert preserved biodegradable items like clothing and baskets (and mummies!). Unfortunately, the Aegean isn't dry - it's a portion of the Mediterranean Sea dotted with islands. So sadly, on Crete and Thera (modern Santorini) most of the biodegradable artifacts have long since rotted away.

But that doesn't mean the situation is hopeless. There are other ways to discover what kinds of biodegradable objects the Minoans had.

Clothes and shoes are easy; they show up in just about every art form, from frescoes to seal stones and rings to figurines. But what about baskets? Those show up in the frescoes, too.

Look at the image at the top of this post. It's a photo of a fresco from the building called Xeste 3 in Akrotiri, on the island of Santorini - that's Thera, the one that blew up in a volcanic supereruption during Minoan times. If you look closely at the photo, you can see that the girl on the left is pouring saffron from a small basket into a larger one. And the monkey has just taken some more saffron from another basket to offer it to the goddess (the griffin tells us that this goddess is Therasia).

Other frescoes from the same building show other styles of baskets being used to harvest and carry saffron. There are even a few stone pitchers carved to look like they're woven baskets and a few actual basket fragments from Akrotiri, preserved in the ash fall from the eruption.

We even have some tantalizing evidence that the Minoans used papyrus. It would have been easy enough for them to import it from Egypt, their biggest trading partner. Part of the process of receiving offerings into the temples involved marking the identity of the donor on clay nodules that were then attached to the item via a cord embedded in the clay. Usually these nodules just have a seal impression on them and maybe a sign or two of Linear A script, or later on, Linear B.

But in addition to the nodules with cords pressed into them, archaeologists have found a few that appear to have been used as the Bronze Age version of sealing wax on a letter. The letter itself, of course, has long since disintegrated, but the clay shows impressions of multiple layers of a thin folded material that looks like paper. The most likely material here is papyrus, though it's possible the folded sheets were made of vellum, which is attested as far back as the Fourth Dynasty in Egypt (2600-2400 BCE).

Either way, it's interesting to think about what kinds of organic, biodegradable materials probably filled the homes, temples, and lives of the Minoans. When you look at images of the temples and towns, try mentally adding clothing, curtains, rugs, baskets, fabric and leather bags, leather boots and sandals, and the occasional papyrus or vellum missive or accounting sheet.