Rethinking the Minoan Past. Two Archaic-Cretan ethnical retrospectives on primitive Crete

The article examines two Cretan genealogies of the archaic period, which offer different reconstructions of Minoan Crete: the first one is pronounced by Idomeneus, the leader of the Cretan force in the Trojan War, and considers Minos as a son of Zeus, father of Deukalion and grandfather of Idomeneus (Hom. Il. XIII 449-453); the second one can be read in a fragment of the Spartan poet Cinaethon and considers Rhadamanthys – who, according to Homer, is a brother of Minos – as a son of Phaistos, grandson of the king Kres, eponym of Crete and king of the Curetes and of the Eteocretans (= “true Cretans”) (Cinaethon, fr. 1 West). The first genealogy represents the Minoan past as closely linked to the Greek, “olympic” world, while the second one highlights the connection with the autochthonous Cretan world, with the island inhabited by the Curetes long before the birth of Zeus. They are two conflicting versions, which aspire to represent Crete, already in the archaic period, respectively as a Greek land or as a “purely Cretan” land.