you wrote:
>If memory serves, the Minoan dig at Knossos (Crete) depicts a lot of female
>athletes, doing sorta gladiatorial stuff like jumping bulls and the like.
The problem with the Knossos murals is that there was a lot of, um, artistic license taken in filling out the fragments that were found. The Bull-leaper however is pretty well discernible. some images at <http://www.wisc.edu/arth/ah201/07.aegean.2.html>. pony-tailed (the leaper not the bull).
I don't believe bull-leaping was gladiatorical. gladiator games were an etruscan funeral rite which the romans appropriated.
>During the seventies, there was infact quite a bit of talk that Minoan
>Crete might have been a matriarchal society, but I can't remember a single
>cite.
M.I. Finley did a pretty devasting job on matriachy hypotheses based on archeological evidence in an essay entitled "Archaelogy and History" in (I believe) the collection of his essays The Use and Abuse of History.
>Oh, and while we're on matters historical, has anyone heard anything about
>a huge, almost humanity-ending cosmic or geological event around 540 AD?
>Apparently geological and archeological evidence agrees pretty compellingly
>that 'the dark ages' were introduced by a cataclysmic disaster of some
>sort. Heard it in a half-sleep, and then heard no more of it.
If you are thinking of the *Greek* Dark ages and the mysterious downfall of the palace culture, that's about 2 millennia before.
Anita