Phoenician Feast of Merit_Motya Baal HS 18 (original) (raw)
Related papers
DAIS—The Aegean Feast: Proceedings of the 12th International Aegean Conference, University of Melbourne, Centre for Classics and Archaeology, 2008
The data we present here stands as an argument for the importance of the everyday meal and why this information – how it was served, what meats it included – may be relevant for the subject of feasts within the Aegean region. Our evidence comes from both pottery and animal bones, excavated from Late Bronze and Iron Age levels at Tel Miqne-Ekron in Israel. This site is one of five ancient Philistine centers mentioned in the biblical account (Joshua 13:2-3) and is the only settlement associated with the Philistines where substantial 12th century BC levels, representing the initial phase of Philistine settlement, have been excavated.The identity of the inhabitants of Iron Age Ekron as Philistines is well documented both in the textual and archaeological evidence. The excavations at Ekron did not reveal the type of discrete deposits that might be representative of a ritual event such as a feast. Instead, we have mainly the detritus of daily activities including normal meals. Still, we argue that if it is so that occasional, ritual, feasts can be used as a means of assessing various forms of identity, then surely the more common everyday schedule of food preparation and serving can also be markers of heritage and ritual.
Annual of the British School at Athens, 2023
Feasts in Bronze Age Crete are an important manifestation of material culture. Indications of feasting can be identified in funerary, palatial, and domestic archaeological contexts. As a result of scholarship traditionally focusing on the religious character of funerary practices and palatial feasting, convivial activities within the domestic sphere have been neglected and/or misinterpreted. As a result of this research bias, there is a notable gap in the record of in-depth archaeological analysis of the social, political and ideological reasons of performing a feast in a domestic environment (or within the bounds of a settlement itself). Researchers have found it hard to distinguish between different types of feasts based on the associated cultural material, consequently leading to misinterpretations regarding the differences in feasting symbolism and the contribution of feasting to social organisation. The re-examination of published material from the Neopalatial (c. 1700‒1500/1450 BC or Middle Minoan IIIB‒Late Minoan IB in pottery terms) sites of Pseira, Mochlos and Gournia in eastern Crete reveals that specific patterns of feasts were in fact in existence and socially performed. Furthermore, the data suggest that feasts in settlements functioned as politically motivated rituals which played a leading role in the formation of social organisation through intra-community antagonisms.
The Politics of Feasting in the Ancient Near East
By Our Rites of Worship: Latter-day Saint Views on Ritual in History, Scripture, and Practice (Edited by D.L. Belnap), 2013
A discussion of food rituals from the Ancient Near East to modern America.
Feasting is one of the most ubiquitous communal activities in the history of humanity. Oftentimes, feasting is accompanied by a substantial amount of material culture that carries intimate details of the activities that took place at these events. In fact, the changes in the material culture of a feast can also inform us as to how society itself was transforming by becoming increasingly insular or shifting toward a more regional sense of identity. One of the established methods of analyzing a feast is through the examination of its ceramic assemblage. The Bronze Age site of Mochlos in East Crete has a well-stratified Early Minoan deposit which has provided me with an opportunity to interpret a number of social, political, and economic intricacies taking place in East Crete as Minoan society approached the palatial system that dominated the Middle and Late Minoan periods. In order to do this, I provide a background to my research, perform a ceramic study of the stratified deposit in question, interpret the results of the analysis, and include a cross-cultural investigation that serves to further enlighten the data from Mochlos. What is most important to take from this study is that Prepalatial society was not without complexity and structure, and, in reality, much of the complexity that we attribute to the palatial social system of the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE can be traced back to the second half of the 3rd millennium BCE