From Story to Memory: Some Combat Images from the early Late Bronze Age Greek Mainland (original) (raw)
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The emergence and function of narrative images in ancient Greece
Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, 2017
Does it make sense to ask about the emergence of narrative images? We are so used to such images that we take them as a given: we are not in the habit of asking how, when, and where the genre might have come into being. Isn’t storytelling one of the constant elements of human culture? And where there are stories to be told in words, can they not easily be transferred into images? If this is true, should we not expect to find narrative images in all cultures and at all times? And then, what is a narrative image in the first place? Are there ever images about which it would not be possible to tell a story? Therefore is not any image—at least potentially—a narrative image? The answers to such questions depend, of course, on how the terms are used. Rather than attempt a theoretical definition, I prefer to start with a concrete example. Let us look at the images depicted on an outstanding specimen of ancient Greek pottery. The so-called Chigi vase (fig. 1) was discovered in the late nine...
Θαλεροί τ᾽αἰζηοί: hunting scenes in Mycenaean pictorial tradition and Homeric epic
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In the Mycenaean pictorial tradition, hunting scenes, and specifically boar hunt sequences, played a key-role as a visual vehicle for a set of values shared by the palatial elites. These hunting scenes allow the members of the Mycenaean elites to strengthen their ties and express their excellent way of life by placing themselves in opposition to untamed wilderness. The same celebration of hunting and related ideals can be found in the Homeric epic. Therefore, this article proposes to use Homeric epic as a heuristic tool, to better understand the mechanisms through which hunting, warfare, and the expression of human excellence relate to each other. In Homeric epic, clashes and duels are frequently compared, by means of similes, to hunting actions, and specifically to boar hunting actions, since both are considered as a way to test Homeric aristeia. Some recurrent themes can be detected both in the Mycenaean depictions and in the Homeric descriptions of the hunt, although different conception of the human-wilderness relationship emerges, since the wild boar is no longer just a beast to be opposed and tamed, but also a term of comparison for the hero’s excellence.
The Memory of Greek Battle: Warfare, Identity, Materiality
The Memory of Battle in Ancient Greece: Warfare, Identity, and Materiality centers upon warfare in late Archaic and Classical Greece. Specifically, it looks to the material culture of battle and examines its role in the experience, memory, and representation of warfare: How did the Corinthian helmet determine the nature and experience of battle? How did despoiled armor and the battlefield trophy structure its narratives? And how did the display of armor figure into strategies of individual and communal self-representation? Through a focus upon these important questions, this work examines not only the critical role played by these objects in structuring the experience and memory of warfare, but also their subsequent importance in other areas of cultural practice, especially moral and political self-definition.
2024
Ikonografische Darstellungen von Kampfszenen gehören zu den faszinierendsten Motiven Ihrer Zeit innerhalb der Kunst der späten Bronzezeit. Diese Kampfdarstellungen überraschen mit ihrer Vielfältigkeit und wurden im Verlauf der Spätbronzezeit auf einem heterogenen Material verewigt. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, die ikonographischen Aspekte dieser Darstellungen vorzustellen und zu untersuchen. Dazu verwende ich eine typologische Methode, die auf thematischen, chronologischen, materiellen und kontextuellen Kriterien beruht. Es wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob sich diese Darstellungen auf mythisch-fiktionale oder historisch-reale Ereignisse beziehen. Darüber hinaus stellt sich die Frage, inwieweit diese Kampfszenen ein häufiges Thema der ägäischen bronzezeitlichen Kunst waren und in welchen chronologischen Perioden sie auftraten. Die Bedeutung solcher Motive in der damaligen Gesellschaft wird ebenso untersucht wie die Frage, ob es sich um Produkte minoischer oder mykenischer Werkstätten handelt und ob sich unterschiedliche künstlerische Tendenzen erkennen lassen. Die Analyse der Daten zeigt, dass es zumindest für die frühe Phase der Spätbronzezeit möglich ist, zwischen künstlerischen Stilen zu unterscheiden. Sie belegt ferner, dass jede Kampfszene der spätbronzezeitlichen Ägäis eine vielfältige Bedeutung für die Gesellschaft dieser Epoche haben konnte, vor allem, weil die symbolische Bedeutung des Kampfes in das praktische Kriegsgeschehen integriert war.
2015, "Heroic Fiction, Combat Scenes, and the Scholarly Reconstruction of Archaic Greek Warfare"
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 2015
Combat scenes depicted on vases are a critical source for the reconstruction of Greek warfare in the archaic period. They are the subject of a lively debate over their accuracy and reliability as historical sources, and the degree to which they represent historical ways of fighting among archaic Greeks has been questioned. A particularly common argument used to question, or even in some cases, to reject some scenes as potential sources is to identify them as depicting ‘archaizing’ and/or ‘heroizing’ topics, that is, images drawn from a legendary past or from the myths. This scepticism has often been based on the identification of a few elements in the pictures which have traditionally been regarded as belonging to myth or to a period prior to the introduction of the phalanx. It is shown here that an examination of both these specific elements and the larger combat scenes in the light of new theories about the phalanx and the hoplite in the archaic period offer fresh grounds for analysis.
A Rudimentary Motif in Greek Epic (Pylos Combat Agate and the Iliad 3. 369–376)
Philologia Classica
In 2015, Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, while excavating the so-called “Tomb of a warrior with a griffin”, discovered an agate seal with an extraordinarily detailed depiction of a combat scene. It shows a warrior armed with a sword only, bending over his adversary’s shield, grabbing him by the crest of his helmet and using it as leverage to render him absolutely powerless. The article studies the image on the Pylos combat agate as a reflection of an early epic narrative. It is shown that the account of the combat between Menelaus and Paris in the Iliad (3. 369–376) is an elaboration on a traditional epic narrative that was preserved in the text of the Iliad as a rudimentary motif (following Th. Zelinsky’s terminology). The comparison of this narrative with the Pylos combat agate allows us to comment the Homeric episode in a new way, insofar as it preserves the description of the type of helmet that was in use in the 16th–15th centuries BCE. This helmet would have permitted the adver...
Homer's Entangled Objects: Narrative, Agency and Personhood In and Out of Iron Age Texts
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2013
In recent years, material culture studies have come to embrace contemporary Melanesia and European prehistory, but not classical archaeology and art. Prehistory is still thought, in many quarters, to be intrinsically more ‘ethnographic’ than historical periods; in this discourse, the Greeks (by default) become proto-modern individuals, necessarily opposed to Melanesian ‘dividuals’. Developments in the study of the Iron Age Mediterranean and the world of Homer should undermine such stark polarities. Historic and proto-historic archaeologies have rich potential for refining our notions both of agency and of personhood. This article argues that the forms of material entanglements we find in the Homeric poems, and the forms of agency (sensu Gell 1998) that we can observe in the archaeological record for the Early Iron Age of Greece (broadly 1000–500 bc) are of the same kind. The agency of objects structures Homeric narrative, and Homeric descriptions allow us precisely to define Homeric...