Current Approaches and New Perspectives in Aegean Iconography Edited by Fritz Blakolmer Printed with financial support from the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna and the Institute of Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP). # Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2020 http://pul.uclouvain.be Registration of copyright : D/2020/9964/29 ISBN : 978-2-87558-968-2 ISBN pdf version : 978-2-87558-969-9 PrintedinBelgiumbyCIACOscrl– printer number 100758 All right reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, adapted or translated, in any form or by any means, in any country, without the prior permission of Presses universitaires de Louvain Cover design : Marie-Hélène Grégoire Cover image : model of polythyron hall 3, Xeste 3 in Akrotiri, Thera, by Ute Günkel-Maschek (based on the drawing in A. Vlachopoulos, The wall paintings from the Xeste 3 building at Akrotiri, in Horizon. A Colloquium on the Prehistory of the Cyclades, edited by N. Brodie et al., Cambridge (2008), 458, fig. 41.19. Courtesy: A. Vlachopoulos – Akrotiri Excavations / Drawing : Maria Kriga) Volume set in Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher by Roman Jacobek, Vienna, Austria Distribution: www.i6doc.com, on-line university publishers Available on order from bookshops or at Diffusion universitaire CIACO (University Distributors) Grand-Rue, 2/14 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium Tel:+3210473378 Fax:+3210457350 [email protected] Distributor in France: Librairie Wallonie-Bruxelles 46 rue Quincampoix 75004 Paris, France Tel:+33142715803 Fax:+33142715809 [email protected] Narrative in Aegean Art: A Methodology of Identification and Interpretation* John G. Younger Abstract: This study continues previous work on identifying narratives and myths that are illustrated in Aegean Bronze Age art. The study first details its aim and evolution; second, it lays out a general metho- dology for identifying narrative; and, third, the parameters for doing so. I take up the parameters that de- fine Aegean narrative in the following order: In what artistic media will narratives appear?: all examples of state/formal art: sealstones, fingerrings, wall paintings. What themes can we expect to appear in these state/formal media?: in the Minoan, woman-centered culture, narratives focus on the successful childbirth and survival of the mother; Mycenaean art focuses on the history and the early foundations of the palatial kingdoms. How do we identify a narrative?: by identifying “strange and unusual” images with people and then linking these images with others whose details overlap. And what is the expected chronological range for Aegean narrative?: from MM II, when people become central in Aegean art to the end of the 14th century when sealstones and fingerrings are no longer being manufactured. For the above discus- sions, I first summarize my articles on “Minoan bull-games” as examples of a successful identification of narrative. I then append four more examples of Aegean narratives, two Minoan and two Mycenaean, as departure points for future discussions by future scholars. The Aim and Evolution of this Paper For much of my career, I have focused on the iconography of Aegean art, especially that of glyptic (sealstones and fingerrings) and its relationship to the other Aegean art forms. A larger goal has been to detail the range of Aegean art’s subject matter and its basic chronology and development (Younger 2018). For sealstones and fingerrings, there are two basic periods: EM/EH II to MM I (mostly patterns and some animals); MM II–LM III A: 2/B:1 (mostly animals in stock poses, and some people in both simple and complex narratives). The difference between the two periods is strik- ing (Younger 2015). Until April 1994, I had concentrated on cataloguing the glyptic iconography, deliberately avoiding the subject of their interpretation and “meaning”. At the 1994 Politeia conference in Heidelberg, however, the van Effenterres threw down a challenge. In the morning session of the last day of the conference, I read my paper summarizing 20 years of work compiling an extended string of bull- game images (Younger 1976; 1995). At the end of my presentation, Henri and Micheline van Effen- terre stood up and asked a simple question, “But John, what does it mean?” Caught off guard, I gave a simple answer: “Idon’tknow.” I had compiled a series of images of people capturing bulls, training them, leaping them (Figs 1–2), and finally butchering them (Younger 1976; 1995; cf. Stock- er & Davis 2004): these images could have been strung together to form a kind of flip book to show bull-leaping in action (Wikipedia 2018). At the end of our morning’s session there was the usual discussion period, and by that time I had contrived a partial reply: “To set the bull-games in some kind of social context, we have to under- stand when, where, and for whom they occurred”: when?, in the late Spring after bovine mating sea- son; where?, Knossos primarily if not exclusively; and for whom?, “if indeed bull-games took place annually, the undeveloped bodies of bull-leapers of both sexes might imply that the games were part of some coming-of-age ceremony, and if the long hair of the leapers is indeed aristocratic * I gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce the drawing by T. Ross of the fingerring from the Pylos Griffin Warrior tomb (Fig. 12; Davis & Stocker 2016: fig. 10), courtesy of The Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati. For all other drawings of sealstones and fingerrings I am grateful to the CMS. All other sources for the illustrations are given in the captions. 71 John G. Younger Fig. 1. Evans’s Schema for bull-leaping (drawing adapted Fig. 2. Diving Leaper Schema (drawing by by A. Watrous from Evans 1930: 223, fig. 156, commis- A. Watrous commissioned by the author) sioned by the author) (Koehl 1986), then the ceremony is palatial” (Younger 1995: 521–523, “Bull-Games as Ceremony”). In other words, bull-games, especially bull-leaping, would have been an annual event at the “capi- tal” (in the Neopalatial period) when a small group of young men and women performed a coming- of-age ceremony on behalf of all adolescents in Crete with the grander goal of maintaining social sta- bility and predicting and predicating the perservation of the state. In the twenty-five years since 1994, I have been trying to see these relationships between Aegean art and society (Aegean art and the state) not just in theory but in detail, in the specific details that only individual artifacts supply. And recently, I have come to realize that Aegean art details many narra- tives, not just the extended one involving “Bull Games” as a generalized coming-of-age ceremony. My goal here, therefore, is to lay out my method for identifying such narratives in Aegean art, pro- vide some plausible examples, and suggest what some of them might be doing “for” Minoan and My- cenaean societies. In doing so, I avoid religious explanations for Aegean narratives since these explanations usually avoid the societal need for narratives. Nor do I appeal to religious concepts im- ported from other cultures to explain what Aegean art portrays: Aegean art should elucidate Aegean concepts to be received by Aegean peoples. Parameters for Identifying Narratives in Aegean Art Media The major iconographic media in the Aegean that convey narratives include glyptic (sealstones and fingerrings [e. g., Krzyszkowska 2005], and stone relief vases [e. g., Kaiser 1976; Fig. 3]), wall painting (Immerwahr 1990), and pictorial vases (Vermeule & Karageorghis 1982). Most human fig- ures in Aegean art, however, appear on sealstones and fingerrings, and even then they constitute a minority. While the majority of wall paintings and some vases, especially of the pictorial class, fea- ture people, in terms of sheer numbers these occurrences pale against the thousand people on seals and rings. Stone vases with carved scenes in relief (featuring only men) seem not to have survived the LM I B destructions (Rehak 1997) and the rest of glyptic vanishes with the destruction of the pa- lace at Knossos at the end of the 14th century (Younger 1981). Themes The classical Greeks populated their “grand narratives” (Lyotard 1971) mostly with the heroes and events of the “Trojan War”; I accept that some kind of Trojan War happened in the early 13th cen- tury (say, ca. 1250 BCE; Herodotos 2.145). But I would not expect that war and those heroes to be 72 Narrative in Aegean Art the subject of Aegean art. It had once been as- sumed that the seeds of Classical myth and reli- gion would be found in Minoan and Mycenaean art and texts (Evans 1925: esp. 29–32; Nilsson 1968), but this assumption has proven difficult to demonstrate in detail. The Linear B texts do confirm the presence of Olympian gods but they also confirm other divinities that must be earlier, Minoan (like everyone’s favorite, Pipituna). However, the texts say nothing about the stories that must have circulated around any of these gods. After the decipherment of Linear B as Greek, in 1952, scholars therefore turned to Aegean art to discern the origins of Classical narrative (Banti 1954). Early results were not encouraging. There are two problems with this goal to find the seeds of Classical myth in Aegean art: the goal is too specificintryingtofind a one-on-one match (Vermeule 1958: 99–100, wonders if the Athens ring, Fig. 6, depicts the Minotaur or Fig. 3. Fragment of a stone relief rhyton from Knossos Hermes Psychopompos) and scholars usually as- (HM 426) (drawing adapted from Evans 1930: 65, fi sume that the grand narratives of the classical g. 37) world must have been similar to the grand narra- tives of the prehistoric Aegean.