[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
The volume Representations: Material and Immaterial Modes of Communication in the Bronze Age Aegean presents 16 papers on a wide range of communication modes in the Bronze Age Aegean, based on presentations at two round tables held at Sheffield: Technologies of Representation (2008) and Writing and Non-Writing in the Bronze Age Aegean (2009). The themes fit well together as both dealt with aspects of representations, whether through art, technology, text, or a combination thereof. In the introduction, John Bennet as volume editor states that texts and images in the Bronze Age Aegean were not produced as sources of evidence for us to read off; instead the contextualized study of their production and consumption aid in understanding how they worked for their interactants. Papers are arranged in three categories: non-written, written combined with non-written, and written representations. The volume forms an innovative ensemble of papers in its approach to studying communication in the Aegean Bronze Age from both the material and immaterial perspective and is well-illustrated by these 16 case studies. Some, by their (im)material representations are more tuned towards discussing elements of communication than others (less so are the topics of Sarah Finlayson and Cynthia Shelmerdine) but all papers present an up-to-date account of their specialized field. The volume was a delight to read and will be for many Aegean Bronze Age scholars. Unfortunately, the list of contributors is without email contact details. Few spelling mistakes in references and typos are noted (e.g., Cooskey = Cooksey, pp. 77, 90; textual = textile, p. 180; number missing in list, p. 222). Some papers would have benefited from illustrations, especially for the descriptive sections by Kate Harrell and Mark Peters, and others from shorter sentences to aid easier reading (Finlayson); some missed earlier research on topics discussed, while it is impossible to be complete of course on everything (Sherratt).
Several papers deal with the imagery and/or materiality of Minoan and Mycenaean painted plaster. Matthew Haysom investigates the iconology (dance, ritual, storytelling, etc.) in absence of texts in order to understand meanings and worldviews laid out in people’s material and social worlds, and how change in society and people’s practices may mark changes in meaning-producing. Haysom shows how peak sanctuaries and their meaning changed between the Neopalatial versus the Final Palatial worlds through the Knossian Grand Stand Fresco and the Zakros Sanctuary Rhyton. Sue Sherratt analyses figured (representational) art in three media: painted plaster, pottery, and textiles. The latter seems to form the clue to her questions why figured imagery in both painted plaster and pots disappear at specific times, and why there are important changes in decorative patterns on pots between the Bronze Age and later Iron Age, while she sees no technical reason for this to happen. Sherratt essentially discusses cross-craft interactions between textile patterns — motives on painted plaster,[1] and on decorated pottery — and painted plaster,[2] and also the presence of murex dye on painted plaster.[3] That figured plaster is a cheap substitute to wall hangings is questionable since the cost of logistics and infrastructure to extract and work the raw materials of both are not discussed.
Hariclia Brecoulaki et al. provide a colour-palette overview of Pylian painted plaster. This shows chronological differences in terms of colour preferences and colour relationships which are then further explored (especially murex). They discuss colour alterations due to fire-damaged fragments from inside the palace. The 15-year long fresco-secco debate illustrates that Brecoulaki cannot accept al fresco evidence/traces beyond scientific analyses, despite such traces being clearly recognized by Lang, Cameron, and many others investigating painted plaster beyond/in the Bronze Age Aegean.[4] Analyses demonstrating al secco, combined with surface traces showing al fresco, including at Pylos, can only emphasize the representational richness of the Mycenaean painted plaster while highlighting the immense creativity of the artisans leaving the combined evidence behind in the plaster, pigments, and binders.
Artisans were the driving force to imbue true value in these paintings, as Mark Peters’ fascinating paper on colour analyses of the Pylian painted plaster griffin scenes emphasizes. His methodology outlines the meanings associated with the colours white (life), red (blood, conflict), and blue (transformation, rebirth). These three appear in iconography and Linear B evidence, through which he establishes their meaning. Through iconographic scenes with changing coloured-backgrounds and specific unifying figures, he sees narratives progressing towards the Pylos megaron. These scenes may have formed backdrops for oral performances in which ambiguous scenes allowed for flexibility in the stories narrated. As such, colour constituted a central actor in conveying meaning; it formed a medium that enhanced the narratives, whether of political or diplomatic nature, or both.
The papers by Angelos Papadopoulos and Kate Harrell each investigate bellicose imagery across the Aegean and the whole of the LBA (Papadopoulos) and more focused to Mycenae’s LBA (Harrell). Angelos Papadopoulos’ survey shows how many types of violent scenes and the wide ranges of media that receive them are strongly linked to context. He notes a particular shift at the end of the LBA when several more luxurious media, associated with the palatial elite culture, went out of use and were replaced by pottery as a canvas. It would have been interesting to see his thoughts on the processes of how (technically) and why the combat theme moved from glyptic art in LH I to the LH III painted plaster medium. Kate Harrell introduces the concept of martial culture which links the material culture of violence ‘to the social network that binds these objects to the human performances that give them meaning’ (p. 139) She places both objects and practices at an equal footing in order to better understand the power relations in the Mycenaean world. Power relationships linked to ancestors by current elites need explanations and are emphasized by expressing violence through archaic scenery and object usage/depictions. Such scenes and depictions form non-verbal ways to communicate legitimization of elite’s current presence through evoked or real past lineages.
Paul Halstead and Valasia Isaakidou analyse two agricultural scenes and arrive at identifying winnowing forks and additional tools in the hands of a large group of laborers of possibly elite background, depicted in (ritual) procession. The scenery of the “Harvester Vase” (the second scene on the gold sheet of Peristeria supports this), is compatible with textual and archaeological evidence. This is interpreted as representing very large-scale harvesting of grain crops as surplus by the Minoan palaces through sharecropping and herding systems. Likely similar to Mycenaean practices, they argue, the Minoan palaces mobilised and also acquired grain for themselves. Labour mobilization in Minoan contexts took place via ritualized occasions (Harvest vase scene), while for the Mycenaeans this was organised via the damos.
Angeliki Karagianni’s paper discusses how aspects of time are represented and extracted from the Linear B tablets relating to taxation, ration provision and offerings. While very few tablets are ‘dated’, taxation seems to a be a gradual process which moves from one to another fiscal year, from prognosis to the recording of received goods later on. Food rations (e.g., for textile workers) seem to be provided once a month, or, in cases of festivals and other ritual festivities, in large amounts at non-specified time slots. The offering tablets revolve around even smaller time units in which specific goods (honey, perfumed oil, etc.) are handed out to religious personnel, possibly for specific usage in rituals performed for/with palatial elites.
Rachel Fox discusses how taste and smell are important sensory technologies that convey messages of hierarchical differences between social groups in palatial feasts (host/elites—guests/others). By serving different meat species, cooking and spicing them differently, serving them in different vessels and different locations, and serving differently tasting wines or not even letting everyone taste (but only smell and drink instead), people’s place in society was made clear on the spot and for future reference, as such sensory experiences will have become incorporated. The paper shows how many differentiations were also backed up archaeologically.
Through studying archaeology, art, and language, and employing an adapted Peircian framework, Silvia Ferrara illustrates that the earliest writing on Crete had Prepalatial roots. Via a gradual development, this resulted in full writing in the MM II period, at the same time as seal iconography boomed. A wide range of symbols made for the interplay that caused the transition from picture to sign, and into the start of writing. As narrative sits in logical coherence and in orderly iconic configuration, the Phourni-Archanes seals played a key role as the precursors in the movement from proto- to full writing.
Several papers take Scripta Minoa I as starting point. Artemis Karnava focusses on the symbiotic relationships between logograms and syllabograms, both already used from the earliest stage of writing on Crete. She does so by placing the Archanes Inscriptions as a specific sign-group within the hieroglyphic script and/or Linear A. To her, logograms on hieroglyphic seals form a confirmation of the closeness of both manufacturing and using the hieroglyphs to the Protopalatial administration. Words, thus, existed in writing from the very beginning, whether they form a purely visual symbol or a sign used in abbreviation. The logograms did not inspire the later hieroglyphs; they were linked to them and disappeared with the script. Some signs also had double role as syllabogram and logogram.
Through disentangling several past assumptions about the purposes of Minoan written and sealed documents, Ilse Schoep thoroughly studies the relationships between both the acts of sealing and writing, and their social contexts on EBA to LBA on Crete. Very useful are her differentiations between structured and accumulated deposition modes, their individual relationship with ritual contexts, and in which stage of the life-cycle the objects per deposition mode were situated. The social aspect of the sealed document is embedded in a tripartite relationship: people’s complex networks, people-object relations, and the iconography on seal or ring. She also postulates, in my view correctly, that often enough, the seal (end-product) may be of less concern than the forging and reconfiguring of social relationships during production (e.g., of the seal), as well as employment.
Sarah Finlayson’s paper offers an alternative way of defining, recognizing, and accepting writing from the traditional western understanding, by alphabet users, that writing represents speech. Writing represents messages on support materials, and it is less the form of writing that is decisive but more the needs of specific social groups who employ it as part of their infrastructure to meet these needs in their specific contexts. Seeing writing as a way of communication, using specific conventions, and materializing it in a more permanent form than speech, makes different writing systems more equal within their social setting. Writing is only one element next to orality, art, and artisans’ social distinction/group identity marks (see also Ferrara).
Different levels of literacy of scribes and local non-palatial officials can be extracted from a range of document types and ways of writing in Cynthia Shelmerdine’s paper. She associates high-literacy levels with expansive and double writing, which through the choices and use of ideograms and monograms, needs the same literacy level as when using words. Different levels are understood between uninscribed versus inscribed sealings. Together with the Inscribed Stirrup Jars (ISJs), these also cross over into places outside the palatial administrative centres (but are related to them). Some seals were made by 300-year-old heirloom hard stone seals: signs of authority and controlled circulation. Extra-palatial literacy found in the very early tablets of Iklaina, Pylos and Petsas House were still linked to early Mycenaean palatial administration.
Rupert Thompson discusses the linguistic variations in the Linear B documents in relation to the dialects that existed in the 1st millennium in the region by analysing the ‘normal’ and ‘special’ Mycenaean that show five different features. Based on feature 4, ‘special’ Mycenaean is closest to the dialects of the 1st millennium which seem to be West Greek or proto-Doric. While the tablets represent a uniform language across time and space, there are, however, linguistic variations between sites and scribes, real and orthographical. The Linear B scribes seem to represent the vernacular reality, and the orthographic change delay in relation to the phonetic changes is no reason to call the tablet language ‘fossilized’ (p. 325).
Jörg Weilhartner demonstrates Arthur Evans’s efforts in making sense of the Linear B script by his study of close to 1000 tablets he had excavated and through comparing them with other scripts. In his contributions along the road to decipherment, Evans published several important correct results: the decimal counting system, syllabic and metronomic signs, logograms and ideograms, etc. The pictorial information on the tablets allowed him to recognize some purposes of the tablets, such as economic and archival (secular) documentation of the palatial administration. He perhaps could have achieved even more if he had not been stuck in wanting to see the script fit his historical preconceptions of the Aegean Bronze Age. That did not allow him to argue certain phenomena correctly, e.g. (among other) that Linear A and B scripts did not represent the same language as he believed.
Authors and Titles
Introduction (John Bennet)
- Image, Context and Worldview: Peak Sanctuaries, Tripartite Buildings and the Palace at Knossos (Matthew Haysom)
- 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)
- 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)
- Representation and Hidden Technologies (Sue Sherratt)
- Materialising Culture: Images of Violence and their Media as Status Symbols in the Late Bronze Age Aegean (Angelos Papadopoulos)
- Resurrection: the Depiction of Martial Culture at LH IIIB Mycenae (Kate Harrell)
- The Colourless Narrative: Some Thoughts on the Mycenaean Colour Palette and the Art of Pylian Diplomacy (Mark S. Peters)
- ‘Representations of Time’ in Linear B Documents from Knossos and Pylos (Angeliki Karagianni)
- Representing People Through Taste and Smell: Social Status and Sensory Experiences in a Mycenaean Palatial Feasting Context (Rachel Fox)
- Icon, Index, Symbol: Language Notation in the Cretan Hieroglyphic Script (Silvia Ferrara)
- ‘Picture-Writing’ and Phoneticism after Scripta Minoa I (Artemis Karnava)
- Minoan Seal-Use and Writing: from a Functionalist to a more Social Approach (Ilse Schoep)
- Redefining Writing in the Bronze Age Aegean (Sarah Finlayson)
- Mycenaean Scribes and Literacy (Cynthia W. Shelmerdine)
- Mycenaean Scribes and Mycenaean Dialect: Interpreting Linguistic Variation in the Linear B Documents (Rupert Thompson)
- Arthur Evans and Linear B: his Efforts towards an Understanding of the Script (Jörg Weilhartner)
Notes
[1] Important work on this topic: Marcar, A. 2002. “Ancient Aegean Textiles and Dress Design: c. 2500 to 1200 BCE” (PhD, UCL – Institute of Archaeology, London)
[2] On the Kamares connection and beyond: Blakolmer, F. 1999. “The history of Middle Minoan wall painting: the Kamares connection”. In P.P. Betancourt et al. (eds), Meletemata. Studies in Aegean Archaeology Presented to M.H. Wiener. Liège, 41–51.
[3] Earliest mention and analysis of murex, and its recognition on painted plaster at Akrotiri: Aloupi, E. et al. 1990. “Analysis of a purple material found at Akrotiri”. In Hardy et al. (eds), Thera and the Aegean World III (vol. 1). London, 488–490.
[4] For the full fresco trace list: Brysbaert, A. 2008. The Power of Technology in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. The Case of Painted Plaster. (Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology, 12). London.