Winter, I. J. (2000). Thera Paintings and the Ancient Near East: The Private and Public Domains of Wall Decoration. The Wall Paintings of Thera: Proceedings of the First International Colloquium. S. Sherratt (ed.). Athens, Thera Foundation. 2: 745-762. (original) (raw)

Fundamental to any informed assessment of the possible linkages between the wall paintings of Thera and those of the contemporary Near East is the establishment of appropriate grounds for comparison. Despite several shared motifs and elements in common between the Near Eastern palaces of AJalakh and Mari on the one hand and the houses of Thera on the other, the central themes decorating the palaces can be shown to have had public functions of articulating issues of royal and state ideology, while those found in the houses of Akrotiri on Thera seem to have had more private goals, one of which may be reflected in the distinctive use of space to create the impression of a total environment. Thus it is argued that even those motifs held in common cannot be said to document direct contact between the two painting traditions, as opposed to the possibility of transmission via other movable media, such as pottery. It is logical, and would seem to have been the case, that sites on or closer to the coast, such as Alalakh and Tel Kabri, manifest greater interaction with Aegean painting traditions in general , and with Thera in particular, than more inland sites, such as Mari. For the present, there is no evidence to privilege direct contact between Thera and the Levant on the basis of the painting repertoire. What seems necessary for the immediate future is progress in methodology: specifically, the development of measurement criteria that will enable an inquiry into not only the mechanisms but also the intensity of cross-eultural interaction in the early to mid-second millennium Be. Crucial in this regard is the need to incorporate aspects of production , function and overall surround, not merely the presence/absence of individual design elements, such that degrees of intensity may be effectively evaluated.