Sympozjum Egejskie. 6th Conference in Aegean Archaeology (Warsaw, June 14-15, 2018)_Book of Abstracts (original) (raw)
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The belief in the existence of evil forces was part of ancient everyday life and a phenomenon deeply embedded in popular thought of the Greek world. Fear of such malevolent powers generated the need for protection and we find clear traces of these concerns in both textual and archaeological sources. From the beginnings of literature, there is mention of ghosts and other daemonic beings that needed appeasement, and of ways of repulsing evil, such as the use of baskania and antibaskania (apotropaia). Repeatedly, we meet rituals of an apotropaic or prophylactic character conducted as part of everyday and family life, as for example on the occasion of a birth, marriage or death in the oikos (the cleansing of the house and household, libations and sacrifices in honour of oikos ancestors), and other practices that focused on the protection of the community as a whole, i.e. the Pharmakos ritual. Archaeology reveals an abundance of material objects thought to have the power to attract benevolent, and avert evil, forces. Traces of ritual practices necessary to ensure prosperity and avert personal disaster are manifest today in the form of amulets, certain semi-precious stones believed to protect women and children, eye-beads found in large numbers in many archaeological assemblages, possibly various types of terracotta figurines, such as nude female grotesques and various ithyphallic characters, to name a few. In addition, symbols and certain iconographic motifs, such as the phallus, the open hand, the Gorgoneion, images of triple Hekate, and Hermes, have been subject to a number of differing interpretations relative to apotropaic power. In order to further our knowledge on this topic, the goals of the conference are: a. To explore the role(s) apotropaic, and prophylactic material and relevant rituals could have played in everyday Greek life, as supported by archaeological, iconographic, epigraphic, and literary sources. b. To explore the various interpretations of archaeological finds of an apotropaic and/ or prophylactic character, with information gained by recent studies. This conference will be divided into the following topics or thematic units: 1. Myth as the basis for apotropaic and prophylactic activity. Ancient beliefs and story-telling. Literary sources on apotropaic and prophylactic themes. 2. Apotropaic and prophylactic devices and practices: baskania, antibaskania, amulets, all types of apotropaic finds and possible reconstructions of corresponding apotropaic and prophylactic practices. 3. Representations of daemonic beings in art. 4. Archaeological finds or iconographic documentation that illustrate ancient ritual practices of an apotropaic or prophylactic character.
do-ra pe-re: The Ritual Processions of the Aegean 2 nd Millennium B.C. Re-visited
In: Gunkel-Maschek et al. (eds.), Gesture, Stance and Movement.Communicating Bodies in the Aegean Bronze Age (Heidelberg 2024), 307-313., 2024
One of the most important practices (apart from libations and communal feasting, animal sacrifice included) of the official cult in the Aegean during the 2 nd millennium BC is ritual processions. Since the rulers expressed their authority not through political or warrior imagery, but through the manipulation and control of ritual, Aegean Late Bronze Age two-dimensional iconography, especially wall paintings, provides rich documentation while additional evidence is offered by related representations on other media such as on golden signet-rings, seal-stones and clay sealings, painted sarcophagi, and stone and clay vessels. Due to space limitations, this paper focuses on the participants in ritual processions and the pictorial formula that enables the viewers to identify them. Prompted by selected examples, two of which I have recently reexamined , I discuss the messages conveyed on the one hand by the bodies of the worshippers in line (female, male, or even supernatural creatures, as the so-called Minoan 'genii') carrying cult equipment and offerings in their outstretched hands (i.e. do-ra pe-re in Mycenaean Greek, transcribed as δῶρα φέρει in ancient Greek) for a supposed deity (or her impersonator), and on the other hand by the clothing they wear.
Funerary practices represent well-articulated stages of culturally constructed acts which are motivated by the loss of a member(s) of a community(ies). The process of different forms of behaviours characterized by repeated performances occurring in both space and time in the mortuary setting would describe ritualization. The socially articulated components of this process can be distinguished by some sort of formalization as regards the use of space, the time, the codes of communication, gestures and symbols but also the participation of people. The formalized norms framing performances appear to be in a constant change, modification and negotiation due to the dialectical and continuous fluency of the relationships created between the ‘habitus’ of participants and the ritual practices. The performance of special activities and strategies can be experienced only when ritual participants are eligible in viewing, decoding and interpreting the symbolic meanings evoked throughout these processes. A strict classification thus between the ritual and the non-ritual, the sacred and the profane, the normal and the deviant but also between the living and the dead may be of minimal significance in prehistoric societies. In contrast, the fluent and changing character of multi-staged performances shaped through continuous and relational social negotiations framed by dimensions such as the participants, the dead individual(s), the circumstances of death(s) and/or the biography but also ideas on perceptions and experiences of the surrounding world would have probably made more meaning to traditional small-scale communities. In the prehistoric Aegean, funerary practices have until now been dominated primarily by aspects of material culture which can be potentially quantified and statistically demonstrated such as the architecture and construction of grave types and the elaboration and accumulation of grave goods. Processes related to the disposal of the deceased – not confined necessarily to the conventional notion of ‘burial’ – which can be perceived through a more dramatic, memorable and performative mode should be distinguished by the different stages of manipulation and transformation of the dead body. The latter alongside the sensory experiences involved during but equally importantly after the funeral have only recently drawn the attention of research. Furthermore, the visualistic apparatus created throughout the funerary performances reflecting the perceptional conditions to which the human agents involved were exposed to, that is the mortuary space and time, beautification of the dead body and of the participants, gestures, symbolic paraphernalia, mental state and sensory experiences can perhaps be imagined by iconographic evidence held in selected mortuary assemblages of the Late Bronze Age only. The scope of the workshop will be to disentangle different acts of transforming and viewing the body in the prehistoric Aegean based on archaeological evidence and paradigms derived from the funerary domain. Emphasis will be given on the integration of methodological approaches applied by osteoarchaeology but also of modern ideas of visualization and the archaeological theory of the human body.