Representations: Material and immaterial modes of communication in the Bronze Age Aegean

By John Bennet

This volume presents a series of reflections on modes of communication in the Bronze Age Aegean, drawing on papers presented at two round table workshops of the Sheffield Centre for Aegean Archaeology on ‘Technologies of Representation’ and ‘Writing and Non-Writing in the Bronze Age Aegean’. Each was designed to capture current developments in these interrelated research areas and also to help elide boundaries between ‘science-based’ and ‘humanities-based’ approaches, and between those focused on written communication (especially its content) and those interested in broader modes of communication. Contributions are arranged thematically in three groups: the first concerns primarily non-written communication, the second mainly written communication, and the third blurs this somewhat arbitrary distinction. Topics in the first group include use of color in wall-paintings at Late Bronze Age Pylos; a re-interpretation of the ‘Harvester Vase’ from Ayia Triada; re-readings of the sequence of grave stelae at Mycenae, of Aegean representations of warfare, and of how ritual architecture is represented in the Knossos wall-paintings; and the use of painted media to represent depictions in other (lost) media such as cloth. Topics in the second group range from defining Aegean writing itself, through the contexts for literacy and how the Linear B script represented language, to a historical exploration of early attempts at deciphering Linear B. In the third group Linear B texts and archaeological data are used to explore how people were represented diacritically through taste and smell, and how different qualities of time were expressed both textually and materially; the roles of images in Aegean scripts, complemented by a Peircian analysis of early Cretan writing; a consideration of the complementary role of (non-literate) sealing and (literate) writing practices; and concludes with a further exploration of the color palette used at Pylos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Aug 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789256420

Book preview

SHEFFIELD STUDIES IN AEGEAN ARCHAEOLOGY

ADVISORY EDITORIAL PANEL

Professor Stelios ANDREOU, University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Professor John BARRETT, University of Sheffield, UK

Professor John BENNET, University of Sheffield, UK

Professor Keith BRANIGAN, University of Sheffield, UK

Professor Jack DAVIS, University of Cincinnati, USA

Professor Peter DAY, University of Sheffield, UK

Professor Paul HALSTEAD, University of Sheffield, UK

Professor Caroline JACKSON, University of Sheffield, UK

Dr Jane REMPEL, University of Sheffield, UK

Professor Susan SHERRATT, University of Sheffield, UK

Published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by

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© Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2021

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Front cover: The Harvester Vase. Block steatite rhyton with relief of a procession of twenty-seven men carrying and winnowing implements. A group of men sings to the accompaniment of the sistrum. Hagia Triada, ca 1450 BC. Archaeological Museum of Heraklion (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harvester_Vase,_steatite,_

Agia_Triada,_1450_BC,_AMH,_145141.jpg); The clay tablet KN Fp 13, dated to 1450-1375 BC, is Minoan and was found at Knossos by Arthur Evans (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clay_Tablet_inscribed_

with_Linear_B_script.jpg)

Contents

List of contributors

Introduction

John Bennet

1. Image, context and worldview: Peak sanctuaries, tripartite buildings and the palace at Knossos

Matthew Haysom

2. Representations of palatial staple finance in the Late Bronze Age southern Aegean: The ‘Harvester Vase’ from Agia Triadha and the gold sheet with relief procession from Peristeria

Paul Halstead and Valasia Isaakidou

3. Re-presenting in colours at the ‘Palace of Nestor’: Original polychromy and painting materials

Hariclia Brecoulaki, Andreas G. Karydas, Vassilis Perdikatsis and Maria P. Colombini

4. Representation and hidden technologies

Sue Sherratt

5. Materialising culture: Images of violence and their media as status symbols in the Late Bronze Age Aegean

Angelos Papadopoulos

6. Resurrection: The depiction of martial culture at LH IIIB Mycenae

Kate Harrell

7. The colourless narrative: Some thoughts on the Mycenaean colour palette and the art of Pylian diplomacy

Mark S. Peters

8. ‘Representations of time’ in Linear B documents from Knossos and Pylos

Angeliki Karagianni

9. Representing people through taste and smell: Social status and sensory experiences in a Mycenaean palatial feasting context

Rachel Fox

10. Icon, index, symbol: Language notation in the Cretan Hieroglyphic script

Silvia Ferrara

11. ‘Picture-writing’ and phoneticism after Scripta Minoa I

Artemis Karnava

12. Minoan seal-use and writing: From a functionalist to a more social approach

Ilse Schoep

13. Redefining writing in the Bronze Age Aegean

Sarah Finlayson

14. Mycenaean scribes and literacy

Cynthia W. Shelmerdine

15. Mycenaean scribes and Mycenaean dialect: Interpreting linguistic variation in the Linear B documents

Rupert Thompson

16. Arthur Evans and Linear B: His efforts towards an understanding of the script

Jörg Weilhartner

List of contributors

JOHN BENNET

British School at Athens &

Department of Archaeology

University of Sheffield

HARICLIA BRECOULAKI

Institute of Historical Research

National Hellenic Research Foundation

MARIA P. COLOMBINI

Dipartimento di Chimica e Chimica Industriale

University of Pisa

SILVIA FERRARA

Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies

University of Bologna

SARAH FINLAYSON

Institut für Klassische Archäologie und Byzantinische Archäologie

University of Heidelberg

RACHEL FOX

Sheffield, UK

PAUL HALSTEAD

Department of Archaeology

University of Sheffield

KATE HARRELL

Virginia Museum of Natural History

MATTHEW HAYSOM

School of History, Classics and Archaeology

University of Newcastle

VALASIA ISAAKIDOU

Institute of Archaeology

University of Oxford

ANGELIKI KARAGIANNI

Ephorate of Antiquities of Heraklion

Hellenic Ministry of Culture

ARTEMIS KARNAVA

Department of History and Archaeology

University of Crete

ANDREAS G. KARYDAS

Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics

National Centre for Scientific Research ‘Demokritos’

ANGELOS PAPADOPOULOS

College Year in Athens

Greece

VASSILIS PERDIKATSIS

Technical University of Crete

School of Mineral Resources Engineering

MARK S. PETERS

Independent Researcher

CYNTHIA W. SHELMERDINE

Department of Classics

University of Texas at Austin

SUE SHERRATT

Department of Archaeology

University of Sheffield

ILSE SCHOEP

Department of Archaeology

University of Leuven

RUPERT THOMPSON

Selwyn College

University of Cambridge

JÖRG WEILHARTNER

Department of Classics

University of Salzburg

Introduction

John Bennet

Representation

Representation – making something absent present, in a form different from its original; or, in other words, ‘visual representation is a second-order activity in which the surface that is used is made to be or to signify something more, or other, than itself’ (Baines 2007: 8). Originally two Sheffield Centre for Aegean Archaeology (SCAA) Round Tables (henceforth ‘SCAA RTs’) were devoted to this issue. The first, entitled ‘Technologies of Representation’, focused on non-written forms, while the second, held the following year, was called ‘Writing & Non-Writing in the Bronze Age Aegean’. The idea to combine both in this volume is both intellectually coherent, for reasons I explain below, and also a virtue of necessity, since a number of papers originally delivered at each SCAA RT were published elsewhere, or were not intended for publication, thus making for an appropriately substantial single volume.

Our intellectual and disciplinary traditions encourage us to separate the written and the material as forms of both expression and evidence (for us, about the past). In fact, one can argue that both sit on the same sliding scale, depending on the degree of formalisation or convention of their expression. We tend to think of written expression as clear in meaning, because it ‘speaks directly to us’ as a result of its systematic relationship to spoken language. However, such direct communication is easily subverted when the language is unknown, especially when a process of decipherment is required, as was the case with Aegean Linear B (and remains the case with so-called Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A). Those forms of expression conventionally termed ‘art’, on the other hand, are less easy to interpret because their conventions are looser, or more strictly tied to non-discursive ideas shared by a particular society within which they belong. A good, but simple, example of the latter are the myriad forms of ‘icon’ that guide our behaviours in the modern world, from photocopiers to toilets, which sometimes become opaque, particularly across international boundaries. I would like, therefore, to think of the two general topics of these SCAA RTs as sharing in the same continuum of efficacy.

Writing and reading of course share with other forms of expression the fact that they are material practices: writing demands a physical medium, or it is simply ephemeral oral expression. Even the oral expressions captured in writing and by early field recording technology by Milman Parry and Albert Lord among Bosnian bards in the early 20th century depend on a medium (Lord 2000: x–xi), as do streaming services in the contemporary world. Reading, too, depends on access to that medium, whatever it is. It is often considered a primarily visual practice, but examples like Braille, which depends on touch, or the types of recording just mentioned, suggest that sight is not the only sense required and in fact the ability to interpret and understand lies in our brain, mediated through a range of senses ultimately rooted in a material engagement. Some of the contributions here seek to explore non-visual representation and we should, of course, be sensitive to the importance of oral and performative representations, which are lost to us now (e.g. Peters, this volume; Bennet 2007; Thaler 2015).

The manner, or content, of representation is highly variable. One way to approach it is through Peircian semiotics, which identifies three ways in which a viewer perceives the relationship between an original and its representation (e.g. Barrett 2013: 6–8). The first is an ‘iconic’ relationship, in which the representation bears a visual resemblance to its original. Second, is an ‘indexical’ relationship, whereby the representation ‘points to’ something about the original: size, for example. Third is a ‘symbolic’ relationship, in which the representation alludes to, or invokes, a quality of the original. An example I have used previously is the composition that appears on the right-hand wall of Room 6 – the so-called Main Megaron – in Late Bronze Age Pylos. Here, when a person places themselves on the throne, they become part of the scene on the wall either side of them which contains iconic representations of griffins. Griffins, by Aegean artistic convention, are large beings, so the scene indexes the implied stature of the seated figure. Finally, through their combination of feline and avian (raptor) elements the griffins symbolise the power held by the seated individual (e.g. Bennet 2018: 67).

I find this framework helpful in thinking about representation. Robertson (2004) similarly used the framework to elucidate how writing works as a practice. But there is one further intriguing point about representation in its broadest sense: it does not depend on an existent, true or real original. Griffins did not exist in the Mycenaean world, notwithstanding Adrienne Mayor’s ingenious explanations of the basis for their creation in later Greek representational practice in encounters with fossil skeletons (Mayor 2000). Representations can be false, as well as true, and it is convention that defines whether they are accepted or not – as griffins (and other fantastic beasts) apparently were in Mycenaean thought. Language and its representation in writing is subject to similar possibilities: ‘for it is written’ is no guarantee of truth or accuracy, as we were reminded in one of the unpublished contributions to the SCAA RT on writing by Paul Halstead and Michele Forte on 19th/20th-century agricultural statistics from Greece and Italy.

Two further points are relevant by way of introduction to this volume. Firstly, the term ‘technologies’ used in the title of the first SCAA RT meeting. I was anxious at the time to emphasise how representation itself could be seen as a ‘technology’ (in the broadest sense), but also to foreground the use of technology (in its narrow, modern sense) to help us understand Bronze Age Aegean representation. The potential of that approach is well illustrated by the contribution of Hariclia Brecoulaki and her colleagues. At the original SCAA RT, however, Richard Jones also offered a masterful overview of the contribution of science-based archaeology to the study of representation, and Ann Brysbaert spoke about technologies in Aegean architecture. It was not possible to include either contribution in this volume.

The second sense, as will be obvious to many, of course, is the very notion of ‘art’ as a technology of representation and here I was explicitly drawing on the late Alfred Gell’s book Art and Agency (Gell 1998), which had appeared a decade before the first SCAA RT meeting. One of the terms Gell used was ‘enchantment of technology’, which described the way in which a viewer engaged with a work of art, enchanted by the skill involved in its creation. An early chapter by Gell, entitled ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, explicitly linked the two processes – creation and viewing (Gell 1992). I have found this concept useful, for example, in thinking about the terminology applied in a set of Linear B documents (the so-called Ta series) from Late Bronze Age Pylos to a collection of highly specialised objects assembled in preparation for a major event (cf. also Shelmerdine 2012). But a further feature of Art and Agency was its insistence that distinctions between modern western ‘art’ and other forms of indigenous, folk, or – even more pejoratively – ‘primitive’ art were artificial and that the same processes are at work in their production and appreciation. It was my hope that the SCAA RTs would contribute to such an approach in Aegean archaeology. For a recent attempt to theorise approaches to Aegean Bronze Age art, going well beyond the scope of this short introduction, see now Knappett (2020: esp. 1–31).

An overview of the volume

Contributions have been arranged to start from those primarily concerned with non-written representation, through a group, starting with Mark Peters’, which combines written and non-written, to a final set, beginning with Sarah Finlayson’s, whose focus is predominantly on written representation. These are not hard-and-fast categories and I hope that readers will not focus solely on one group, guided by their own academic interest, since the spirit of both SCAA RTs was to stimulate discussion across disciplinary boundaries.

The contribution by Hariclia Brecoulaki and her colleagues in many ways exemplifies the approach to representation embodied in these two SCAA RTs. Originally delivered as three separate papers, each focusing on one aspect of their approach, preceded by a short introduction to overall archaeological context by Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, overall directors of work at Pylos, the co-authored version presented here brings together analysis and interpretation. We come to understand the techniques used to create the Pylos wall-paintings – both those on the walls of the final palace and those already deposited in dumps outside its walls – and how pigments would have originally appeared on the palace walls; how pigments were used selectively – diacritically, even – in different spaces; and we are offered possible interpretations of the meanings associated with different colours and colour schemes. At the original event, this contribution was preceded by an overview by Richard Jones, ‘Representation in the Aegean: The Input of Archaeological Science’, which effectively contextualised the Pylos research within a broader range of analytical techniques applied to Aegean representation. The contribution was complemented – and in some ways contrasted – by Ann Brysbaert’s paper ‘Technologies and Representations in Bronze Age Aegean Architecture’, on the technique of wall decoration within a broader view of the overlapping skills involved in both wall construction and decoration. Although not published here, Ann’s views are reflected in her then recently published work on wall decoration (Brysbaert 2008) and in her further collaborative project on craft interaction (Rebay Salisbury et al. 2014) and a recently completed ERC Consolidator Grant project SETinSTONE.

Wall paintings also figured large in contributions by Matthew Haysom and Sue Sherratt. Matthew’s penetrating study, with a nod to Knappett’s recent book mentioned above (Knappett 2020), goes behind the surface representations on a carved stone vessel from Zakros in east Crete and a wall painting from Knossos, suggesting, against prevailing scholarly opinion, that both depict similar cult places, but in different periods, when different historical circumstances prevailed. He also makes an important, if perhaps controversial, suggestion about the chronology of a well-known painting at Knossos. Sue Sherratt argues that wall paintings are the surviving substitutes for rich textile wall hangings – reminiscent of those in elite residences of medieval Europe or of the contemporary Egypt or Syria – and that ceramic decoration also drew heavily on textiles during the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean. Her contribution enriches our view of a particularly vivid form of representation – skeuomorphism. At the original meeting, Eleni Hatzaki also explored textile skeuomorphism in her paper ‘Pots, textiles, frescoes and people: the social life of ceramic motifs & styles at Late Bronze Age Knossos, Crete’. She argued that textile motifs were applied to fine ware ceramic vessels at the same time as the Knossos state was investing heavily in the production of high-quality textiles, as documented in the Linear B tablets. Her contribution has now appeared elsewhere (Hatzaki 2018).

Reading behind the actual surface representations and thus reinterpreting familiar objects is the goal of Paul Halstead and Valasia Isaakidou, who reinterpret the so-called ‘Harvester Vase’, from Agia Triada on Crete, as depicting not harvesters, but winnowers, although the scene may possibly be ‘synoptic’ in conflating different stages in the sequence from reaping to winnowing, both requiring significant mobilisation of labour. The depiction thus alludes to a key element in agrarian societies, they argue, and a key moment, when the product is both visible and divisible between different parties. They offer the same reinterpretation of the figures on a decorated gold sheet found in Tholos Tomb 1 at Peristeria on the Greek mainland.

At the first SCAA RT, John Baines helped set the scene with a comparative view from Egypt entitled ‘Displaying and Communicating the Integration of Elite and Other Social Groups in Third and Second Millennium Egypt’. Although not published here, his thoughts on these issues are embodied in a collection of essays that had recently appeared at the time (Baines 2007). Other more general approaches to representation across different media, with a specific emphasis on martial imagery, are exemplified by the contributions included here by Kate Harrell and Angelos Papadopoulos. Kate seeks to establish an archaising use of such imagery – the ‘past in the present’ – at the site of Mycenae, a practice she argues links the late palatial inhabitants with their predecessors, while Angelos, drawing on a then recently completed Liverpool doctoral thesis under the late Christopher Mee, attempts a systematic overview of Late Bronze Age Aegean modes of representation of conflict and aggression, with which we might compare Barry Molloy’s similar overview of martial depictions in Minoan Crete (Molloy 2012).

Mark Peters’ contribution should be read against that of Hariclia Brecoulaki and her colleagues, since it investigates some of the same themes about the deployment of different colours throughout the so-called Palace of Nestor at Pylos and what their intended effect might have been on the viewer in different locations. In addition to the archaeological data, Mark also draws on the Linear B documents to support his arguments. Two further contributions – those by Angeliki Karagianni and Rachel Fox, both Sheffield doctoral students at the time of the SCAA RTs – use Linear B documents to explore representation in a less literal sense. Angeliki uses the documents to explore the construction of time by administrators in three cyclical areas of palatial activity – rations, taxation and religious offerings – contrasting these with the ‘monumental’ time associated with the palatial structures themselves. Rachel draws on the Linear B documents together with the architectural layout and material culture, particularly ceramic vessels, of the Palace of Nestor to evoke a distinctive world of the senses associated with palace-sponsored commensal events, a form of representation that goes beyond the visual into areas of smell, taste and sound.

The second SCAA RT covered in this volume coincided with the centenary of the publication of Arthur Evans’ first synthetic publication on the Aegean scripts, known as Scripta Minoa I (Evans 1909), and some contributors explicitly took this work as their starting point. Evans’ contribution at the time, and how our understanding of Aegean scripts has moved forward since then, formed the basis for my introductory presentation ‘Looking Back – Looking Forward: Scripta Minoa I a century on’. Jörg Weilhartner, in a contribution commissioned after the event, offers insights into Evans’ continuing attempts to understand the Linear B script. Evans made much of the image-based nature of the earliest (in his scheme) Aegean scripts, particularly in Scripta Minoa I, and this feature informed several presentations that appear in this volume. Artemis Karnava addresses this directly in her contribution that explores the tension between the notion that meaning resided in the pictures, as opposed to being tied through the essentially arbitrary images to the phonetics of the spoken language, charting the role of pictographic signs through the three Aegean scripts. At the time of Scripta Minoa I, Evans clearly wanted to have his cake and eat it too on the issue of pictography versus phoneticism.

The issue of image versus sound, of pictographic representation versus phonetic writing, is crucial to the origins of writing on Crete. Although Silvia Ferrara presented a paper at the SCAA RT itself on Cypriot Bronze Age scripts, with which she was much concerned at the time – ‘Multilingualism in LBA Cyprus? The Cypro-Minoan scripts in context’ – she chooses here to explore, using a Peircian framework, the complex and puzzling interplay between image and script in the earliest Cretan writing system(s) and particularly the importance of seal imagery in the development of writing (Ferrara 2018). The origin of Cretan writing is a topic currently much under discussion by Silvia herself (e.g. Ferrara 2015) and others, such as Roland Decorte, Maria Anastasiadou and Anna Margharita Jasink (e.g. Jasink 2009; Anastasiadou 2011; Decorte 2018). A related topic is explored by Sarah Finlayson in her synthetic contribution that seeks to develop a broader definition of ‘writing’ as a system of communication in the Bronze Age Aegean, drawing in parallels from other traditions, and allowing the possibility of differing (or no) relations to language. Sue Sherratt delivered a paper with a similar, if narrower focus at the SCAA RT, not published here, ‘Pondering Potmarks’, that explored other forms of marking that did not necessarily represent language.

The first Cretan writing appeared early in the 2nd millennium BC on seals that survive in elite burial contexts and seals, and their counterparts, the variety of different shapes of clay sealings they produced – some with added writing, many without – remain an important part of the para-literate world surrounding palatial centres in the Aegean throughout the remainder of the millennium. Their use was the topic of two papers at the original SCAA RTs: Diamantis Panagiotopoulos spoke on ‘Minoan Typewriting: Seals, Script(s) and the Emergence of Cretan Bureaucracy’, emphasising the ability of (early) Cretan seals to ‘create’ texts by impression alone, while John Baines offered a comparative perspective from Egypt: ‘Sealing practice and the spread of writing in Middle Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1950 – 1650)’. For this volume Ilse Schoep, who originally spoke on ‘Revisiting Tablets and Territories’, returning to an earlier study of hers that used Linear A documents to delineate territorial zones around key sites (Schoep 1999), has chosen to explore the relationship between seal use and writing. She offers an overview of seal use throughout the 2nd millennium BC Aegean and its relationship to written forms of recording, situating it within a shifting social context, and also examining the different ways in which sealings were deposited.

Literacy was a popular area of interest at the SCAA RT itself and also here in this volume. In the former category is Torsten Meißner, who explored the extent of literacy in the Linear B-using communities of the Late Bronze Age in a paper entitled ‘Who used the Linear B script?’. This is nicely complemented by Cynthia Shelmerdine’s contribution published here, that covers similar ground, as well as considering the status of ‘scribes’, the most frequent users of the Linear B script.

The notion of writing as a potentially misleading, certainly imperfect, means of representing ‘reality’ alluded to above, formed the basis for two papers at the original SCAA RT. Paul Halstead and Michele Forte, then a doctoral student at Sheffield, explored the spurious reliability of economic statistics that came to be written down and are often used with little interrogation in seeking to extrapolate to ancient practices in ‘Unreliable Evidence? Gathering and Interpreting Quantitative Data for Ancient Economies’. Lisa Bendall, in ‘Not Living on a Budget: Literacy, Oral Tradition and Expenditure Records in the Mycenaean Palace Archives’ argued that the documentary record failed to capture much of the Mycenaean polities’ economic activity, which, she argued, must have been transacted orally (cf. Bennet and Halstead 2014, for similar arguments from a different premise). Appearing in this volume is Rupert Thompson’s contribution in which he brings a new perspective to an old question in the study of the Linear B documents – the existence, or otherwise of different ‘dialects’ within the language behind the written texts – arguing that careful reading allows us to see behind the texts to a linguistic reality that varied over space and time in the Late Bronze Age.

What I hope the contributions collected here offer is a range of approaches to representation in its broadest sense. The conventions of representation are very much contingent, tied to a particular historical situation and to a particular society. We were vividly reminded of this at the first SCAA RT by John Moreland, whose paper ‘Giving Vision a History – Seeing Images in the Middle Ages’, drew on the work of Michael Camille (1996) to make the point clearly that we could not assume that those in the past ‘saw’ in the same way that we do (see now Moreland 2017: 226–31). We need to be sensitive to the fact that the text and images explored in this volume were not produced as ‘sources of evidence’ for us to read off; rather it is only by exploring how they were created and deployed in their specific spatial, temporal and social contexts that we might hope to understand how they operated. Equally, I hope this volume demonstrates that the term ‘representation’ is a more helpful way to encompass a series of practices that, as I and others have previously argued, defined the institutional identity of Aegean palatial entities. Crucially, I think it is important to move beyond the categories ‘literate’ or ‘illiterate (oral)’, or ‘image’ and ‘text’, and would suggest that we need to accept that elite social actors in these Late Bronze Age societies were knowledgeable across a range of interconnecting palatial practices; they possessed ‘literacy’ (so to speak) in visual, textual and material cultures, that is, all types of representation.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deep gratitude to all of the contributors, both to the original SCAA RTs and to this volume, for their patience. I am grateful to Mark Peters and Katy Soar, former colleagues in Sheffield, who both put in many hours on earlier versions of the papers from the first SCAA RT in support of my efforts to bring them to publication, and especially to Valasia Isaakidou who finally ‘delivered the goods’. All my colleagues in Sheffield were supportive of the SCAA RTs, which were an annual event. I particularly single out Paul Halstead, John Moreland and John Barrett for productive and insightful discussions on the topic of these meetings. Outside the department, I would like to mention John Baines, a former Oxford colleague, who delivered papers at both SCAA RTs and participated in discussion, with whom I have discussed issues of writing, material culture and representation frequently over the years. Ann Brysbaert may not wish to be reminded of this, but the seed of the idea for the first of these two SCAA RTs was sown on a shared train journey back from London. Last, but not least, I thank all those who assisted with the creation of sensorial memories of the events through the commensality offered at both meetings: Keith and Nong Branigan, Debi Harlan, Valasia Isaakidou and many others, especially students in the department.

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Chapter 1

Image, context and worldview: Peak sanctuaries, tripartite buildings and the palace at Knossos

Matthew Haysom

In comparison to most prehistoric archaeologies, the archaeology of Bronze Age Crete offers an unusually rich seam of imagery. It presents a great opportunity to develop a distinctively archaeological approach to images in the absence of complementary texts. The outline of such an approach should be fairly uncontroversial. Just as Gell (1998) argued an anthropological approach to art should be like other anthropological approaches only applied to art objects, so an archaeological approach to images should be like other archaeological approaches only with imagery at its centre. Images should, in other words, be placed in patterns of association, distribution and change; patterns that encompass not only other images but also the full body of the material record. These patterns should be interrogated through comparative perspectives, making use of the full arsenal of modern archaeological theory.

Crete is a profitable environment for such an approach, not only because of its wealth of imagery, but also because of the rich accompanying contextual information. Neopalatial archaeologists like to lament their lack of data as much as anyone, but it has been a long time since they could argue with any conviction that only palaces and the prestigious can be understood. Extensive portions of settlements at every point on the settlement hierarchy have been excavated and published. Archaeological survey encompasses almost every Cretan environment from mountainsides to the core of the largest settlement. We do not have to face the problems of northern European prehistorians whose most elaborate images, like the Gundestrop Cauldron, float more or less contextless in a generalised Europe-wide milieu (Davidson 1993: 25–31; Aldhouse-Green 2004: 117–21; Harding 2007: 224–7).

A recent major contribution to the study of Minoan ‘art’ has pointed out how scholarship on the Aegean Bronze Age, in common with other prehistoric archaeologies, has become increasingly compartmentalised into specialisms: a process that naturally hinders contextual analysis. It describes how, in the process, ‘art’ objects have dropped off the radar of many Aegean archaeologists, as a result of the impression that they require an approach that is ‘universalising and decontextualising, one which seems at odds with them existing in a multi-sensorial social world’ (Knappett 2020: 11). The historiography of the two images, which this paper concerns itself with, can be seen as an illustration of this compartmentalisation in action. The first image is that on a relief stone rhyton found in the palace of Zakros known as ‘The Sanctuary Rhyton’ and the second is the wall painting from the palace of Knossos known as the ‘Grandstand Fresco’. It will be my argument in this paper that these two images give us unique evidence of changing discourses around Minoan peak sanctuaries. This conclusion can, I believe, be readily and firmly established on contextual grounds, but it has been overlooked because of the fragmentation of the scholarship. Although, as we shall see, the affinities between these two images have been periodically noted, they have entered quite separate narratives within Minoan scholarship. The Sanctuary Rhyton was recognised early as being a potential depiction of a peak sanctuary and scholarship around it since has remained focused on debating this interpretation. The Grandstand Fresco, meanwhile, was identified by Evans as a depiction of the central court of the palace at Knossos and, while doubts have been raised about the reconstruction of the architecture in the central court that accompanied this interpretation, the wall painting itself is consistently seen as a depiction of something occurring within a settlement. It is regularly used as an emblematic image of the mass festivities that all scholars agree must have occurred in and around palaces (for a recent example see Lupack 2010: 256). As a result of entering two relatively distant narratives within the discipline, the questions raised by the similarities between these images have long remained insufficiently interrogated.

Knappett (2020: 28–30) accompanies his manifesto for a recontextualisation of Minoan ‘art’ with an argument that the analyst’s starting point should be practice and with a persistent suspicion of the preceding emphasis in scholarship on the interpretation of what is being depicted. Informing this perspective is his long engagement with the ‘material turn’. It brings with it an appreciation of the material dimension of iconography and a breaking down of artificial boundaries between ‘art’ objects and other types of material culture that both enriches the study of Aegean iconography and brings it in line with developments in other archaeological fields (see Jones and Cochrane 2018). But the underlying sense that a discussion of what is being represented is a false starting point because it seems more mental and less material, is a methodological misstep and arguably falls into the very pitfall of cartesian dichotomies that Knappett has so carefully delineated. The insight of the material turn, that no form of culture is immaterial is essential. In Knappett’s terms ‘thinking happens through practices and these happen through things’. The ancient images we look at were created, used and viewed, by people embedded in a material world. Any understanding various people had of them would arise from their material experience of being in that world. But the idea that as analysts we can simply replicate that schema in our approach, and thus should necessarily start our investigation from practices, does not give sufficient notice that our position with respect to the material is not the same as that of the ancient people whose society we hope to gain insight into. As archaeologists we have access to material things distributed in space. Sometimes these things have pictures on them or seem to represent something else. Sometimes they are found consistently with or in other things. Sometimes there are consistent patterns to where they are found or what combination of things they are found with. Such patterns of contextual association encompass and transcend any engrained disciplinary divisions between objects, excavated spaces and iconographic content. It is this, objects and patterns of contextual association, that are the materials most proximate to us as archaeologists. From this modern analytical starting point ancient ‘meanings’ and ancient ‘practices’ are equidistant, both requiring an act of interpretation to access. To privilege one over the other would be a mistake. It is a privileging of one which Knappett is correctly reacting to, but to replace this with a privileging of the other would be to replicate that error. As this article will attempt to put into practice, a complete analysis of iconography must integrate, as far as possible, consideration of material, practice and meaning. But the paths it must follow in doing so are the contextual associations of the images as preserved in the archaeological record, and the main obstacles it must overcome are not any more theoretical, but the empirical problems posed by that record.

The Sanctuary Rhyton from Zakros (Fig. 1.1a) (Koehl 2006: 103–4, no. 204, containing bibliography to 1998) is a good example to think with about the degree to which our interpretation of the ancient practices and discourses around an ancient image is dependent on our interpretation of what is being depicted. And, how both interpretations, if they are to be firmly established, need to be dependent on an interconnected web of contextual associations. The contextual associations of the object, on their own, do reveal something about the practices related to it. It was found in the west wing of the palace at Zakros. This wing essentially consists of a series of storerooms and preparation rooms intercommunicating with a large hall (Platon 1971). The storerooms contain large numbers of drinking vessels. The formation processes by which the vessel’s fragments were scattered through the wing are not entirely clear. Koehl’s extensive studies of the rhyta (Koehl 1981; 1990; 2006; 2013) have revealed how an association between rhyta, drinking vessels and liquid storage is a very general phenomenon and how rhyta functioned (as they did elsewhere in the ancient eastern Mediterranean) as funnels and pipettes in the serving of liquid – ancient alcoholic beverages frequently needing filtering and flavouring to be appetising. The scale and elaboration of rhyta like the Sanctuary Rhyton would lend a theatricality to their use (Knappett 2020: 157). This would magnify the moment of serving, when liquid flowed from rhyton to receiving vessel, and the relationship between the server handling the unwieldy rhyton and the recipient. Moreover, the Sanctuary Rhyton belongs to a class of relief stone vases with a very striking distribution pattern (on the type see Logue 2004). Examples of the type are found most frequently at Knossos, where they are from secondary deposits. Outside Knossos, the type has been principally recovered from monumental central buildings, so-called villas and palaces. So far, then, contextual clues suggest practices around the vessel that elaborated serving, undertaken by a presumably privileged constituency associated with the palace, which had specific echoes in the practices of other similarly privileged constituencies, somehow orientated towards Knossos.

If we were able to confidently identify the structure depicted on the rhyton as a peak sanctuary, in line with its traditional interpretation, we could significantly enrich our understanding of the practices around the object, which otherwise have only minimal interplay with the image itself. We could, for instance, parallel this image’s recall within a settlement setting of extra-urban sanctuaries with similar phenomena elsewhere in the archaeological record. At house N in nearby Palaikastro (Sackett and Popham 1965: 256–68; 1970: 215–31), for example, the building’s drinking sets included rhyta in the form of an agrimi and a beetle. Both are common peak sanctuary images, and the latter is only rarely attested elsewhere. This situates the recall of peak sanctuaries in the context of elaborated serving practices by the constituency associated with the palace at Zakros within the context of similar practices attested by contemporary constituencies associated with much more humble buildings.

Fig. 1.1: a) The building on the Sanctuary Rhyton from Zakros; b) a stone rhyton fragment found on Gypsades hill at Knossos; c) a stone rhyton fragment from Knossos. Note the combination of horns of consecration and flagpoles with brackets consisting of concentric rectangles, common to all three (author’s drawings).

Another approach would be to contrast the depiction of the peak sanctuary on this vessel and others like it with the archaeological evidence from the sanctuaries themselves. The close affinities between the structure depicted on the Zakros rhyton and those on similar but more fragmentary vessels are well known (Fig. 1.1b–c) (Koehl 2006: 179–80, nos. 763 and 764). In the gaps and contrasts between these images and the archaeological record we might gain an insight into the nature of the discourse around peak sanctuaries enacted in the practices associated with the vessels. Comparing these images with the actual archaeological record of peak sanctuaries reveals inconsistencies. The terracing and temenos walls are reminiscent of Iouchtas or Petsophas, but the focus of the images is on the elaborately decorated architecture of the main building, yet to us peak sanctuary architecture is unremarkable. Much attention has been given to the tripartite form of the building in the depiction (Shaw 1978; Alušík 2003), yet no known peak sanctuary has a tripartite structure. While one of the altars on the Zakros depiction is reminiscent of the altar at Iouchtas (Karetsou 1981: fig. 5, fig. 11) the