Bulls and Bull-leaping in the Minoan World (original) (raw)

Above, this Late Bronze Age sarcophagus was found in a funerary chamber at Hagia Triada in Crete. It was made of limestone, covered with a thin layer of lime plaster, and then painted. On one side of the sarcophagus (left), we see the sacrifice of a bull, accompanied by music and a procession of women. On the reverse side (above) another procession is depicted including women carrying buckets of blood to an altar and men presenting animals and a boat model to what may be a deceased man.

Jumping to Conclusions: Bull-Leaping in Minoan Crete

Society and Animals, 2013

Bull-leaping has become one of the most emblematic activities of Minoan Crete and has recently received renewed attention with the BBC/British Museum radio series, A History of the World in 100 Objects. One of the featured objects, a Minoan bronze group of a bull and acrobat, was brought to life in a television advertisement using a modern bull and leaper. This act of translation is at the heart of the dialogue this paper seeks to address: the interaction between current human attitudes toward nonhuman animals and their depictions, and those of the Bronze Age. It suggests that the animal practices of the past were shaped by material and social circumstances far removed from those of modernity. The mutual affordances of bulls and humans have resulted in similar interactions, or bull games, in different societies, but modern archaeologists have tended to downplay the relationship between bull and leaper in Bronze Age Crete by regarding bull-leaping in purely symbolic terms. An archaeological account informed by Human-Animal Studies can instead bring to the foreground both the familiarity and distinctiveness of past human-animal relationships.

Bronze Age Representations of Aegean Bull-Leaping

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Atypical Bull-Leaping Seals from Minoan Crete

The most quantitatively robust source of data for bull-leaping is garnered from glyptic representations in Minoan Crete. These seals and sealings portray an array of bull-leaping scenes and were largely found in burial contexts. Being such a widely depicted activity, with relative consistency in pose and composition of the iconography itself, it would seem a given that these bull-leaping games not only took place in reality but were somehow integrally woven into the social and cultic existence of Middle and Late Bronze Age societies. However, as I will delineate below, a close look at the archaeological evidence proves that the bull-leaping games could not have physically occurred as depicted in the iconographic record. Further, I propose that the recognition of an atypical classification of bull-leaping glyptic, separate from the generally used John Younger classification system put forth in 1976, leads to a new interpretation of the socio-political significance of these 'games' themselves. Through this atypical classification, bull-leaping is further removed from the natural world and the depiction of such scenes transcends to a socio-political sphere of cultural organization, not just a snapshot of an athletic event.

Bull-Leaping in the Ancient Near East

Journal for Semitics 22/1 (2013)

Depictions of bull-leaping are found in Middle Bronze Age art of the late third- to the mid-second millennium BCE in Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant, and on Minoan Crete. Four main types of bull-leap can be identified: the “classic type”, the “schema of the diving leaper”, the “schema of the floating leaper”, and a fourth type which involved passing beneath the bull. The bull-leaping depictions are compared to the recortes (a type of bull-sport practised in some parts of modern-day Spain) in order to identify which of the visual representations could have been executed by ancient Near Eastern leapers. These depictions will further be analysed and compared to determine if the peoples of the ancient Near East were familiar with and had first-hand knowledge of bull-leaping, and whether it ever occurred as a practice in any area of the ancient Near East.

Divine Figures in Crete: A Re-examination of the Minoan Bull-leaping Fresco at Knossos

2022

For thousands of years an ancient society lay in ruins beneath a Greek civilization, only to be uncovered at the turn of the 20 th century by a man looking for something else. When the pottery and paintings of ancient Crete were discovered, they were catalogued, reconstructed, and interpreted by the British archaeologist, Arthur Evans. He applied his knowledge of Greek mythology to his assessment of the remains thusly building a narrative regarding the meaning of the symbols that only recently have been challenged by modern scholars. One such piece of art is the Taureador Fresco found in the Court of the Spout at the Palace of Knossos. This bull-leaping fresco has been one of the cornerstones for religious interpretation of the Minoan people while simultaneously shrouded in mystery about its true meaning. With no translation of their writing or language, scholars continue to speculate about the lifestyle, culture, and mythical beliefs of the ancient people of Crete. Re-examination of the Taureador Fresco in this thesis presents an alternative analysis of the figures depicted and the possibility of revealing the true nature of Minoan leadership.

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