Terracotta Krater, ca. 750 - 735 B.C., Terracotta
108.3 × 72.4 cm (42 5/8 × 28 1/2 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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Terracotta Krater, ca. 750 - 735 B.C., Terracotta 108.3 × 72.4 cm (42 5/8 × 28 1/2 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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Unknown Necklace representing Isis and Horus, 1050–900 BCE, Faience Archaeological Museum of Eretria, Evia The collapse of Mycenaean civilisation in Greece was sudden and catastrophic. The complex, sophisticated culture with its high-status artefacts, written records, widespread trade relations and palatial hierarchy disappeared around the 12th century BCE. Was it the eruption of Thera which led to the downfall of mainland Mycenaean culture? Or the arrival of invaders from the north? As yet, no-one knows.
The traditional historical narrative of the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces has Greece falling into a four- to five-hundred year Dark Age – an era in which so few archaeological remains exist, and little to no writing, that there is little to illuminate it. The lack of large-scale palatial structures, writing systems, and high-status objects in the record led historians to conclude that this period, from around 1200 to 750 BCE, must have been characterised by centuries of economic, political, and social depression. The inhabitants of Greece, perhaps due to the pressure produced by waves of invaders, were seen as turning to a nomadic lifestyle, living in temporary settlements without the social and artistic structures – trade, bureaucracy, art and architecture – which had distinguished Mycenaean Greece. Then, in 1980, everything changed. The object above is one of many finds discovered at the archaeological site of Lefkandi on the island of Evia (ancient Euboea), just off the northern coast of Attica in Greece. It was uncovered by a group of Anglo-Greek archaeologists who excavated the site from 1980 on, along with a tomb complex containing the cremated remains of a man, contained in a bronze amphora; a woman buried and adorned with jewellery; and four horses – as well as an entire settlement which, remarkably, showed evidence of constant occupation from the Mycenaean period right through the so-called Dark Ages. What's special about this necklace – and what it represents about the site of Lefkandi as a whole – is the remarkable evidence it portrays of both continuous artistic practices, and continued trade, throughout the 12th to 8th centuries BCE on the island of Evia. The necklace, made of faience (a type of glazed ceramic ware we came across earlier), is made up of 53 consecutive oblong beads representing seated, lion-headed figures, while the central (and largest) figures depict the Egyptian goddess Isis with her son, Horus. Excavated along with other precious objects imported from Cyprus and Phoenicia (the modern Levant), and likely itself an import from the island of Cyprus, it provides an important testimony to the fact that Lefkandi, at least, remained a flourishing urban culture throughout the 'Dark Ages', trading across the Mediterranean and investing in art and jewellery. Objects like this one continue to challenge our conception of the Dark Ages in Greece – suggesting that it was, in fact, a far richer period with many more historical secrets to reveal than previously thought. Unknown Flotilla Fresco, Plaster 44 × 400 cm National Archaeological Museum, Athens We are going to finish our tour through the Bronze Age civilisations of Greece with a visit to the ancient island of Thera. Thera (modern Santorini) was long thought to hold the key to the sudden collapse of Mycenaean civilisation around 1200 BCE. The island was created by volcanism as the African tectonic plate collides into the Eurasian plate – and in around 1600 BCE, that volcano erupted in one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever recorded on earth. It devastated the island, creating a huge submerged caldera (or crater) in the centre and burying the Minoan town of Akrotiri in volcanic ash.
So was the eruption of this supervolcano the cause of the collapse of Mycenaean civilisation? Probably not. Recent radiocarbon dating has shown that the eruption most likely happened around the end of the 17th century BCE, a good four hundred years before the evidence for widespread fire begins to show up in the archaeological record at the Mycenaean palaces. But the eruption had another important side-effect, at least for us today as historians of the classical world: because it buried the Bronze Age town of Akrotiri for thousands of years, perfectly preserving an entire city to an unprecedented level of detail – including its wall paintings. Akrotiri has been called the Pompeii of the Aegean, and it's no secret why when you look at the brilliant, vibrant wall paintings like the one above. The flotilla fresco is almost four metres long and forty-four centimetres high: a scene in miniature, it depicts a flotilla of seven large ships, six canoes and one rowing boat. The colours, painted on white lime plaster using mineral-based pigments, are still remarkably bright: on the close-up detail above, you can see a Minoan town by the shores of the sea with a hill rising up behind it; a pair of stags run through the trees, chased by a lion. The depiction of the ships in the foreground, in particular, provides rare evidence for an artefact which rarely survives the test of time. For a Cycladic island, ships must have lain at the very heart of their culture, and it is remarkable here to see details which we have described in Homer's Odyssey, for example – rigged masts, steering paddles, raised steering decks, and a combination of oars and sails – corroborated in a three and a half thousand year old painting. So what does this scene depict? Previous theories have suggested that it shows a naval voyage within the Aegean from a "Departure Town" (on the left) to an "Arrival Town" (on the right: often assumed to be Akrotiri itself). But a recent article has put forward the idea that, in order to understand the painting, we have to reconstruct the island of Santorini as it would have looked before the eruption. Mapping the landscape depicted onto the geography of the pre-eruption island, we can, in fact, imagine this as a nautical procession between two headlands on the island: a recreation of Thera as it might have looked, before the volcano erupted and this civilisation disappeared beneath the ash forever. Unknown Plaster reproduction of a clay Linear B tablet from Knossos, Plaster 14 × 8 cm The British Museum, London (original held in The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) We have come across Linear B before in this series – the script used by Mycenaean scribes which was deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s, after they discovered that it was, in fact, an early form of ancient Greek. Now, we're going to be looking close-up at one of these tablets, which are among some of the most important objects surviving from the Mycenaean era. At first glance, this small piece of baked clay (the photograph above shows a plaster reproduction) looks utterly unremarkable – but each fragment, discovered in their hundreds in the palaces of late Bronze Age cities like Pylos and Knossos, in fact holds the key to our understanding of some of the most intimate and complex details of Mycenaean society.
This tablet is just one example. You can see immediately that the Linear B script is made up of at least some ideograms – small signs or pictures representing objects, never pronounced phonetically but instead used as semantic identifiers. You might be able to spot the chariot wheels dotted throughout the text above, giving us a clue as to its meaning: and indeed, the translation of the text shows that this is an inventory of chariot wheels. Other signs represented on the tablet are syllabic – that is, they have a phonetic value; each of them would have been pronounced aloud when read. What's fascinating about Linear B tablets like this one is that, contrary to the hopes of classical scholars before their decipherment, they do not give us epics or high poetic texts: more often than not they are lists, inventories – testaments to a massive and highly efficient bureaucracy which operated out of each of the Mycenaean palaces. And, as such, they testify to a central aspect of Mycenaean civilisation which would otherwise have been entirely lost to us. Written on clay, they were preserved by an accident of fate when the Mycenaean palaces and their cities all across the Greek world succumbed around 1200 BCE to torching and fire – heralding the end of the Mycenaean Greek civilisation, but also, miraculously, preserving these tablets for posterity. Unknown Cast Pendant, c. 14th century B.C., Glass 2.5 cm (1 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles So far in this series, I've been focusing on objects like the golden death mask from Mycenae and the marble figurine of the harp player – objects which tend to draw our eye by their artistry, the precious materials with which they are made, or the hidden story they seem to tell. Today, however, we are moving to one of the very smallest objects, one you might quite easily walk past if you saw it on display in a museum: a single glass bead.
Don't be fooled by its size, though: it has quite a story to tell. This bead, about two and a half centimetres in length, would have formed the pendant of a necklace made of similar beads (you can see another one here). It's made of glass, coloured blue by the addition of substances like cobalt or copper. Across its surface you can see spiral-like decorations, typical of Mycenaean art: we often see similar geometric patterns painted on clay vases surviving from the period. It isn't hard to imagine the effect of a necklace of blue glass beads like this one: it must have been both striking and highly colourful, corroborating the evidence we have from Mycenaean wall paintings of the bright colours (blue, red, and yellow predominate) and elaborate fashions prevalent in late Bronze Age Greece. But that's not the only interesting thing about it. Recent scientific discoveries have analysed the pigments present in the glass that were used to colour it blue. By analysing the chemicals in beads like this one, and comparing them to chemicals present in both ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian glass, scientists have been able to deduce that at least some of the glass used for the manufacture of beads like this one was imported into Greece from as far away as Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and Egypt. It's some of the first evidence for the trade and transport of raw glass across the Mediterranean, and gives us a vital picture of Mycenaean society – as not only wealthy, intricately adorned and imbued with colour, but also, importantly, as integrally connected to the vast, interlocking trade networks of the Mediterranean. Unknown The snake goddess representing the mother goddess, 1650 B.C., Faience Height: 34.3 cm (13 1/2 in.) The Heraklion Archaeological Museum For our next object we're travelling a few centuries back in time, and moving away from mainland Mycenae across the ancient Greek world to the island of Crete. The Minoan Snake Goddess, as she is often known, is one of the most striking objects remaining to us from a civilisation which flourished on Crete from around 3500 to 1450 BCE. We saw yesterday how the German excavator Heinrich Schliemann came upon the citadel of Mycenae, and how its palace, city walls and rich tombs demonstrated for the first time the presence of a Bronze Age civilisation as described in the Homeric epics, which came into being around 1600 BCE and collapsed around 1100 BCE. Schliemann, and many historians after him, saw Mycenae and the many other Bronze Age cities discovered in mainland Greece as emblematic of a specific late Bronze Age culture – dubbed, after its major city, Mycenaean.
But to focus on 'Mycenaean' Greek culture – in spite of its obvious appeal through its connection to Homer – is to miss half the story. Because the Mycenaean cities of mainland Greece were, in fact, preceded by a magnificent palatial society on the island of Crete which originated an incredible five and a half thousand years ago, and flourished over two thousand years. Ruins of its palaces, houses, and roads were uncovered by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans between 1900 and 1903. Following Schliemann's lead in connecting his archaeological discoveries to Greek myth, Evans called the civilisation he had discovered 'Minoan' – after the legendary Minos, king of Crete and father of the Minotaur. The Minoan Snake Goddess is one of the most well-known artefacts from the Minoan era. She is made of faience, a type of glazed ceramic ware; dressed in a flounced skirt with a girdle around her waist and a bodice which exposes her breasts, she is holding a snake in each hand. Evans labelled this figure a 'snake priestess' – he dubbed another, larger figure the 'snake goddess'. Yet there is a significant problem with the identification – one which we will come upon again and again as we continue through the series. As we saw with Schliemann's Agamemnon, it is tempting to want to ascribe a story to an object – particularly to an object which draws us in as compellingly as this one does. Why is she holding snakes in her hands? Is she a goddess or merely a priestess? Why are her breasts bared, and is this a reflection of the dress worn by Minoan women or merely a cultic symbol, perhaps a connection to fertility? And this is where we come upon one of the greatest difficulties of all: the fact that we have, as yet, been unable to decipher the written records of Minoan civilisation. Whereas the Mycenaean script, known as Linear B, was deciphered between 1951 and 1953 by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the Minoan language (Linear A) remains, as yet, unreadable. So, to me, perhaps one of the most interesting questions raised by the Minoan Snake Goddess is: how do we go about interpreting objects in the absence of other evidence – and in particular, texts? The usual recourse is to identify unknown or hard-to-interpret artefacts as having religious significance – perhaps because it is in describing something 'religious' that we find it easiest to explain away the difficulties of identification. And yet, to me, it is often in addressing the complexities and apparent paradoxes presented by an object head-on that we come closest to understanding it. With the Snake Goddess, then, I try to see her – not as either a goddess or a priestess – but as a woman who transcends both the mortal and the immortal realms; who connects the lived experiences of real Minoan women to an understanding of the connection between fertility (often represented by snakes) and femininity. Rather than being an absolute statement of the nature of divinity, to me, she's posing a question: how do humans relate to the divine? What does it mean to be a woman? How can we understand female fertility and its connection to the natural world? It's a question she is still asking us today – and still challenging us with. Unknown Gold death-mask, known as the ‘mask of Agamemnon’, 16th cent. B.C., Gold 17 × 25 cm (6 3/4 × 9 3/4 in.) The National Archaeological Museum of Athens The so-called 'Mask of Agamemnon' is one of the most enigmatic artefacts from the ancient world. It was discovered in 1876 by the German excavator Heinrich Schliemann, an enthusiast of the poet Homer whose determination to prove the veracity of the Homeric epics had led him to the discovery of the ancient city of Troy, along with the British archaeologist Frank Calvert. When Schliemann moved from Troy – site of the legendary Trojan War – to Mycenae, home of the mythical ancient Greek king Agamemnon and leader of the Greek troops against Troy, he could hardly have expected to discover more proof of a flourishing Bronze Age culture, akin to that described by Homer.
What he found, however, was almost more spectacular than his discoveries at Troy. At Mycenae, Schliemann uncovered an entire Bronze Age citadel, its walls and gates preserved, with several shaft graves and spectacular tombs. Within the shaft graves he found five gold masks, clearly intended to cover the faces of the deceased – in fact, if you look closely at the image above you might just be able to make out two holes near the ears, where twine was used to attach the masks over the face. Schliemann immediately dubbed it 'the mask of Agamemnon' – and so it is usually called, although in fact the dating of the shaft graves suggests that this mask was probably made in the 16th century BCE, a good three to four hundred years before the traditional date of the Trojan War. The mask is made of a sheet of gold hammered thin with repoussé details – that is, where the gold has been hammered into relief from the reverse side. It depicts the face of a bearded man with thin, well-defined lips, almond-shaped eyes and stylised eyebrows and ears created in a spiral pattern. Despite Schliemann's romantic labelling of the mask as Agamemnon's, it is highly unlikely that it depicts the legendary king described in Homer as the leader of the Greek army. But that doesn't mean it isn't fascinating in its own right. For the first time, we are looking into the face of a king from the Bronze Age of Greece: an era characterised by gigantic fortresses ringed by Cyclopean walls, forged bronze weapons, stunning art, and wide-ranging trade across the Aegean. The mask of 'Agamemnon' – whoever it really depicts – brings alive, not just the archaeological ruins of the period – which is often all we, as historians, are left with – but the image of the people who inhabited the palaces of cities like Mycenae. More than that, perhaps, it's also a timely and important reminder, as we embark on the history of the classical world in a hundred objects, of the allure – and, sometimes, the danger – of trying to piece together the parts of the ancient past to make a coherent whole. It's tempting, given the lack of evidence we have about the classical world, the gaps, the tantalising guesses we have to make, to want things to fit together neatly, as Schliemann did – connecting a golden mask to a mythical king. But the past – and, indeed, the present – is rarely like that. Appreciating the complexity of identifying objects – their role, their function, who they belonged to, why they were made – is part of what this series is all about. And if we can't, like Schliemann, see Agamemnon in this death mask, we can at least acknowledge what is, to me, a far more exciting truth: that in the overlap between the mythical king described by Homer, the historical king who ruled the ancient city of Mycenae, and the image of the man depicted here, we may be able to understand a little more, both about the society and culture of Bronze Age Greece, and about the persistent appeal of myths and stories to our understanding of ourselves. |
AuthorEmily Hauser is a classicist and researcher at Harvard and author of historical fiction recovering the lost women of the ancient world, including FOR THE MOST BEAUTIFUL and FOR THE WINNER. Archives
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