Jeff Searle: Early civilisation

Showing posts with label Early civilisation. Show all posts

Wednesday, 11 May 2011

The iron revolution

The production of iron began some time in the second millenium BCE in western to central Asia. Its precise history is not clear, but the most recent evidence tells us it could date as far back as 2000 BCE in Anatolia, 1800 BCE in India and 1500 BCE in Africa, suggesting that it arose in various regions independently and was then diffused from these centres, not appearing in Britain for example until it was imported as a new technology around 700 BCE.

Although iron was known to human cultures as early as the second millenium BCE, its mass production was only possible with the invention of the bloomery. This was a furnace capable of achieving the high temperatures required to smelt it. A key impetus to creating this technology was the shortage of copper and tin following the Bronze Age collapse.

Smelting is the process by which iron is extracted from iron ore: the intense temperatures make the iron separate from the rest of the ore in a mass known as a ‘bloom’. The ancient blacksmith would hammer this mass to knock out cinders and slag and produce wrought iron, a hard malleable substance ideal for making tools. In its natural form iron is too soft to be very useful, but when combined with carbon it becomes harder than bronze. The bloomery allowed the controlled absorption of carbon by burning charcoal.

The working of iron also allowed the production of steel, an alloy known to the ancient world in which iron is mixed with carbon. The oldest example we have was found at a site in Turkey: thought to be part of a knife, it dates to around 2000 BCE. Steel has the hardness of cast iron (which has a high carbon content), and the malleability of wrought iron, making it the most useful iron product, but ancient technology could not produce it efficiently. Steel did not displace iron as the dominant material of civilisation until well into the modern era, when the Industrial Revolution introduced new methods for its mass production.

Iron did not sweep instantly across the ancient world, but over the next several centuries it spread at different times into different regions. There is a gap between the dates of the first iron use and the dates that a culture is considered to have entered the Iron Age, i.e. when iron displaced bronze, wood and stone as the principal material for tools and weapons.

Iron had a number of advantages. It was harder than bronze, making it more durable and much more effective for implements, transforming agricultural productivity through the introduction of iron axes and iron ploughs. Even in the Bronze Age, farmers often used wood and stone tools because bronze was not strong enough to work the earth. Iron was also more abundant than bronze, making it cheaper. Bronze was an expensive preserve of the ruling class, used for weapons, statues and luxury goods while the toiling masses remained dependent upon wood and stone. Iron was technology for the masses – every village could support its own blacksmith.

The superiority of iron weapons is sometimes given as a possible cause of the Bronze Age collapse, but it seems that the use of iron was not widespread until a period roughly contemporaneous with or after the collapse. It seems more correct to see the mass production of iron as humanity’s response to the crisis of productivity that had caused such a profound faltering and rolling back of society. The advent of mass-produced iron was a revolutionary forward step for human culture, helping to forge new social relations and forms out of the tottering structures of the Bronze Age. The comparatively limited civilisations of that period, built upon key fertile centres such as the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, could now be superceded by more expansive ones fuelled by bigger surpluses, productivity and populations: such as Assyria, Persia and Rome.

Crisis and revolution: from bronze to iron

For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them.
– Hesiod, Works and Days

In the second millenium BCE, human culture produced another of those revolutionary leaps which have driven its development since it first appeared. Yet the leap was preceded by a fall.

We have discussed the broad pattern of development of human culture since the last Ice Age. In some areas, notably the Near East, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers responded to climatic change by becoming Neolithic farmers, massively increasing productivity by domesticating animals and cultivating plant foods such as cereals. By the eighth millenium BCE, agricultural societies were building urban centres like Jericho and Jarmo. Neolithic settlements sprang up in key centres like Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria and the Levant. These peoples farmed milk, meat and grain, mastered pottery, weaving and spinning, and built permanent dwellings with wood, mud brick, plaster and stone. The social surplus allowed the upkeep of specialists, leading to greater sophistication in technique, e.g. in making weapons and tools, ploughs and wheeled carts. The sophistication of these cultures is well-attested by towns like Çatalhöyük, in which we see wall-paintings and sculpture alongside metalworking, religion, town planning, animal breeding and foreign trade. From the seventh millenium BCE, copper was being smelted to produce metal tools, and in around 3000 BCE the addition of tin gave society the harder and longer-lasting bronze.

By transforming nature, humanity was gradually taking its destiny into its own hands.

By the third millenium BCE, Bronze Age cultures were resolving the limitations of Neolithic culture through the Urban Revolution. Long distance trade, literacy, weights and measures, irrigation and land reclamation brought further advances in productivity. Civilisations flowered, defended by strong walls and governed by ruling classes – kings, aristocrats and priests served by bureaucracies and armies, all supported by the surplus produced by the agricultural workers who made up the great majority of the population. The demand for trade led the Near Eastern cultures to expand their contacts, setting up the cultural and economic routes that exported the Bronze Age to the Aegean, north Africa, and beyond.

The great cities of the Bronze Age are typified by the city-state of Ugarit, a commercial centre on the Syrian coast. Thousands of surviving texts attest to the great variety of peoples who lived there: Cretans, Cypriots, Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Hurrians. It produced dyed linen and wool, tools, weapons, oils and wine. It was home to a great variety of craftspeople from potters and smiths to scribes and sculptors. Its people built libraries and palaces, created literary myths such as the Cycle of Baal and the epics of Keret and Aqhat, and traded with the great cultures of the Mediterranean. It was a sophisticated, international and wealthy city.

Yet in about 1200 BCE Ugarit was sacked and destroyed. It was one of many cities and states overthrown or abandoned during what historian Robert Drews described as “arguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the western Roman Empire” [1] – the so-called Bronze Age Collapse.

Crisis

From 1200-1100 BCE, the late Bronze Age cultures based around the eastern Mediterranean suffered a profound crisis. The geographical scale of the reversal was exceptional. The Hittites and Mitanni in Anatolia, the Minoans and Mycenaeans in Greece and many major cities in the Eastern Mediterranean – including Ugarit and Troy – were dramatically set back or completely disappeared, and at the close of the New Kingdom Egypt was exhausted and declining [2]. There is plentiful archaeological evidence of this upheaval, such as destruction levels revealing large layers of ash, declines in pottery production and quality, sites depopulated or abandoned, and the breaking-off of written records. In some areas, no new culture replaced the old devastated one. Particularly in Greece and Anatolia, it took centuries for civilisation to recover from a ‘Dark Age’ of stagnancy and illiteracy.

There has been a great deal of speculation by historians about what lay behind this disastrous crisis. The theories include natural disaster, climate change, new military technology, mass migration or a general ‘systems collapse’.

One of the more mysterious elements was the appearance in the 13th century BCE in the eastern Mediterranean of the so-called Sea Peoples: displaced populations moving eastwards looking for new lands and razing the cultures that stood in their way. The source of the name ‘the Sea Peoples’ is an Egyptian inscription from the mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, which depicts Rameses III defeating an attempted invasion from the sea. It is probably inaccurate to see the Sea Peoples as a single group with a single origin. Rather, they were disparate peoples displaced from various parts of the Mediterranean.

Preziosi and Hitchcock [3] suggest for example that the Mycenaeans were overthrown by forces from inside or outside, perhaps mercenaries recruited from surrounding ‘barbarian’ peoples, and forced to migrate, following the established trade routes eastwards, displacing other peoples in a kind of domino effect. There are connections between the material culture of the Aegean and of the Philistines of the Levant, who are believed to have been among the Sea Peoples. The body of evidence for these links includes literary references (e.g. the Bible, which associates Crete with the Philistines) as well as correlations between pottery motifs, weapons, headdresses, burial practices, and more.

But the phenomenon of the Sea Peoples does not really answer the question of the crisis. Were they a cause of the crisis, or a symptom of it? What caused these peoples to migrate in the first place? There is no certainty among archaeologists about interpreting the incomplete evidence. The most likely explanation, formulated by Gordon Childe as early as the 1930s, is strangely absent from the current debate.

A dead end for class society

Across history, humans had found new ways to transform their societies in order to meet the needs created by new conditions. Hunter gatherers had responded to the end of the Ice Age with the Neolithic Revolution, and to the new demands of settled life – e.g. soil degradation, centralisation and technology – with the Urban Revolution.

Broadly the late Bronze Age cultures were commanded by powerful ruling classes commanding centralised states with bureaucracies, organised around the transfer of wealth to themselves from the masses. This meant an increased exploitation of the peasant cultivators, and their reduction to serfdom or even slavery. As Childe pointed out, “such concentration was probably essential to ensure the production of the requisite surplus resources and to make these available for effective social use” [4], i.e. for all its evident evils, class society was a progressive step forwards for humanity.

But class society would become a brake on development. As Childe argued:

Progress before the [Urban] revolution had consisted in improvements in productive processes made presumably by the actual producers, and made moreover in the teeth of superstitions that discouraged all innovations as dangerous.

But by the revolution the actual producers, formerly so fertile in invention, were reduced to the position of ‘lower classes’. The ruling classes who now emerged owed their power largely to the exploitation of just those hampering superstitions.

By around 2500 BCE early civilisation’s wave of technological innovations – irrigation, the plough, the sailing boat, the harnessing of animals, the wheel, copper, bricks, writing, bronze [5] – had dried up. Elites that drew heavily upon superstition to justify themselves had no interest in further investigation of the natural world. They could also exploit big reserves of labour power and saw no need for improvements in technique. But the great cultures of the 13th century BCE were confronted with very high costs in maintaining their bureaucracies, military and extravagant monarchies.

Instead of investing in technology and increasing production, these ruling classes expended immense resources on tombs, public works, military adventures and luxury consumption. Much as we may admire achievements such as the Pyramids, their cost was extraordinary, and they contributed little to the progressive development of society as a whole.

The ruling class, itself the product of a progressive advance – class society – was now holding civilisation back from the further advances needed to feed the elite’s demands for resources. In short, the Urban Revolution, which had allowed a leap forwards from the limitations of Neolithic culture, had an internal contradiction and was beginning to be constrained by its own limitations. As Marx put it:

At a certain stage in their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations which have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters.[6]

With the strain this contradiction imposed on society as a whole, a shift in circumstances – a drought, a migration, a rising of a ‘fringe’ people [7] – could easily tip society into crisis. Indeed, there is strong evidence of widespread drought in this period.

In a later age, a new mode of production, capitalism, could develop within the framework of feudalism. There was no such alternative available to the Bronze Age. Social forces such as the peasant cultivators or merchants were incapable of taking over the organisation of those cultures, which were therefore stuck in a cycle of rise and fall. As one culture fell apart, another took its place, sometimes by force – only for this to fall apart in its turn. This pattern is not of course limited to 1200 BCE, but during the Bronze Age Collapse it became generalised, applying not simply to individual cultures but to the broader civilised world. With no possibility of a revolutionary step forwards in the class struggle, there remained only “the mutual ruin of the contending classes”.[8] The apparent barbarism of the Sea Peoples, perhaps themselves displaced by the crisis, might be one expression of this.

The analysis in this article might be seen as a reinvention of the theory of ‘systems collapse’, currently the most credible theory amongst archaeologists. In my view, ‘causes’ such as drought, the migration of peoples, new weapons technology and so on were important aspects of the crisis but the ultimate explanation is more fundamental than these or a mere combination of them.

The effects of the collapse were of course uneven. Although Egypt entered a period of decline, it retained a cultural continuity between the Bronze and Iron Ages. In other regions the change was more stark. In the Aegean the late Bronze Age was followed by a Dark Age, when the loss of long-distance trade and the breakdown of great bureaucratic states caused a fragmentation into smaller, more backward societies. This had a significant affect upon artistic production. Monumental buildings were no longer built, pottery designs became simpler, the Linear B script fell into disuse, craft output fell and the resources spent on art declined.

Though the collapse was a period of destruction and decline, there was also a positive opportunity for rebirth. The loss by Egypt of its territories in the Levant and the disintegration of the Hittite empire in Anatolia created the space for new, smaller cultures like the Phoenicians, inventors of the alphabet, or the Lydians, inventors of coinage, to emerge as commercial powers. And in time the recovery would bring a new wave of cultures. Among them was a culture whose art is often held up as one of humanity’s highest achievements – the ancient Greeks – whom we will examine presently.

Human history was also on the cusp of a new phase of civilisation, characterised by a technology that would change the world: iron.

[1] Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age (1995).
[2] Egypt’s period of decline occasioned the first recorded labour strike in history in ca.1170 BCE, when food rations failed to be provided for the skilled artisans in Deir el-Medina.
[3] Donald Preziosi and Louise A. Hitchcock, Aegean Art and Architecture (1999).
[4] Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (1936). This article draws upon Childe’s thesis from chapter 9 on ‘the acceleration and retardation of progress’.
[5] For a fuller list see Childe, op. cit.
[6] Karl Marx, Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).
[7] In the process of creating military machines, kings increasingly recruited mercenaries from their frontiers: Libyans and Asiatics for Egypt, peoples from Asia Minor for the Hittites, the Dorians for the Mycenaeans. These ‘fringe’ peoples, armed and organised, acquired the military capacity to bring down their employers.
[8] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).

Sunday, 21 November 2010

Grace in the Aegean: The art of the Minoans

Out in the wine-dark sea there is a rich and lovely island called Crete.
– Homer, Book XIX of The Odyssey

Archaeologists believe the first settlers landed on Crete in about 7000 BCE, and recent DNA research suggests they probably came from Anatolia in Asia Minor. We do not know what they called themselves, and the existence of their archaeological remains was not even suspected until the late nineteenth century. Yet between 2700 to 1450 BCE, Crete was the centre of one of the Bronze Age’s most vivacious civilisations [1]. The British archaeologist Arthur Evans [2] called their culture ‘Minoan’, after the King Minos famed in the myths of a later culture, the Greeks.

The Aegean Sea in the Bronze Age.
Map by Jeff Searle.

Lying near the coasts of Southern Europe, Africa and Asia Minor, Crete was influenced by cultural developments in the key centres of civilisation. Minoan civilisation was roughly contemporary with the Old and Middle Kingdoms in Egypt, the Sumerian Ur III dynasty in Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley civilisations based around Harappa and Mohendro-Daro. Many miles away, the ancient Britons were completing Stonehenge (c.1500 BCE).

The heyday of classical Athens was still a thousand years in the future. Although civilisation had existed in the Middle East since around 4500 BCE, and a culture had appeared on the Cycladic islands to the north centuries in advance of the Minoans, there was no culture of comparable importance elsewhere in Europe until the emergence of the Greek people usually referred to as Mycenaeans – famous for supposedly fighting the Trojan War – in the same region around 1600 BCE.

Background

With its small rivers and rocky hills, Crete doesn’t offer the easiest terrain for an agricultural society. But there was enough fertile ground for the Minoans to grow cereals, vines and olives. Although the island today is barren because of centuries of deforestation, in ancient times cypresses were abundant.

The sea served as a natural barrier against invasion and also as an opportunity to make money. Crete was well placed in relation to sea trading routes. The Greek historian Thucydides claimed that Minos was the first to build a navy:

And the first person known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into most of which he sent the first colonies... and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use.[3]

With their merchant fleet, the Minoans came to dominate the Aegean, sailing for hundreds of miles in search of trade, from Spain in the west to Syria in the east. Goods flowed from Cretan harbours including wine, olive oil, tin, pottery, bronze artifacts and metalware. In exchange the Minoans received gold, silver, ivory, lapis lazuli and obsidian from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and across the Mediterranean world.[4]

Town with boats in the harbour. Minoan fresco image from Akrotiri
on the Greek island of Thera (now Santorini), c. 1600 BCE.

Minoan colonies and trading posts were set up in the Cyclades islands due north of Crete – including Santorini, home of the famous site of Akrotiri – as well as mainland Greece and Asia Minor. It is possibly a measure of both the Minoans’ geographical isolation and the strength of their fleet that their coastal towns seem to have had few fortifications. Thus their period of ascendancy was called by Arthur Evans the Pax Minoica or ‘Minoan peace’ – a time when cities needed no walls. Like Gibbon’s Pax Romana, of course, such a peace if it existed would have been the product of military strength rather than pacifism – the Minoans did make weapons, and archaeologists have found watchtowers and fortifications on the island. But there is little evidence of warfare at home or overseas.

Historians generally speak of a formative period of Minoan culture from about 3000–1900 BCE, when Crete appears to have been divided into local regions. This was succeeded by a new system where power was centralised around a monarch, a period characterised by the building of grand palace complexes at Knossos, Phaistos, Mallia, Zakros, and other towns. These palaces, which had no fortifications, acted as the centres of commercial, cultural and social life. Historian Rodney Castleden summarised this civilisation as “very advanced in its orderly and bureaucratic organisation, showing a strongly rational and practical side with highly developed craft technologies, and yet it also possessed all the imaginative power and childlike freshness of a very young culture.”[5]

The so-called ‘palaces’ were the base upon which Minoan civilisation was built. Their significance was such that they influenced the naming of historical periods – whereas Evans created a chronology based upon Early, Middle and Late periods, an alternative system defines the early Bronze Age period as ‘Pre-Palatial’, the next the ‘Proto-Palatial’ or ‘Old Palace’ period, and the time of the rebuilt palaces the ‘Neo-Palatial’ or ‘New Palace’period. The old palaces were destroyed in around 1700 BCE: a natural disaster such as earthquakes is the most likely cause, as Crete’s main rivals at that time were not seafaring powers. Yet the palaces were quickly rebuilt, on a grander scale. In about 1450 BCE there was another wave of destruction of palaces and villas, from which the civilisation never recovered.

Minoan art

Minoan art is quite distinct from that of pre-Hellenic Greece. The surviving work, much of it in the museum at Heraklion near Knossos, covers a range of types, including fresco, pottery, jewellery, engraved seals and figurines. We have relatively little art from the Pre-Palatial period, the best work coming from the civilisation’s peak around 2000-1450 BCE.

Minoan ceramic in the marine style.
Photo: Andree Stephan.

The Minoans are famous for producing some of the most beautiful pottery of the ancient world, which finely demonstrates their rich decorative imagination. Minoan pottery has been found all around the Aegean and Mediterranean, including Cyprus, Syria and Egypt.

The best known style is the Kamares Ware [6], a fine pottery decorated in reds, browns and whites with symmetrical patterns or stylised images of sea or plant life.

The designs show an admirable harmony between the painted forms and the form of the vessel. As time went by, the Minoans began to observe nature more closely, moving from linear patterns to birds, fish and flowers. Later in the island’s history arose the ‘marine’ style in which the ceramics were covered in sea creatures – this dates to after a volcanic eruption that probably caused destructive tidal waves and a new relationship to the sea, which we will look at in a moment.

Minoan metalworkers too were renowned, not least in their skill with bronze, the defining metal of the age. Minoan decorated swords were the finest in the Aegean. They produced fine jewellery – see for example the Aigina treasure, believed by some researchers to be the work of Minoan craftspeople.

Bee pendant from the site of Mallia,
demonstrating a command of the granulation
and filigree techniques.

But some of the best-known works of Minoan art are fresco paintings. Fresco is the painting of plastered walls, usually found in palaces and villas. The artist would have prepared the wall with a layer of white plaster, then engraved the main elements of the composition onto the wall, adding the paint while the plaster was still wet. This differed from the dry technique of the Egyptians, demanding swift, fluid execution and spontaneity.

As a maritime trading civilisation, it is unsurprising that the Minoans left us some beautiful fresco images of their ships, wooden sailing vessels superior to any others on the Mediterranean. Perhaps because of this fleet and the protecting seas, military images are unusual in Minoan art. Until the attacks by the Mycenaeans in 1450 BCE, there is no real evidence that the Minoans fought wars with other any culture. This is in stark contrast to their contemporaries: the city states of Mesopotamia were constantly at war, celebrating their exploits on such works as the Stele of the Vultures, and Egypt covered tomb walls with images of military pomp.

The Minoans preferred leisurely scenes or sports. They loved to decorate walls with murals of dolphins, flowers and fish. Their art has a grace, movement and exuberance distinct from the art of Egypt and Sumer, and they enjoy decorative motifs, sinuous shapes and strong and sometimes improbable colours, as in the beautiful image of blue monkeys from Akrotiri. Their craftsmanship is second to none and delights in the beauty of natural things.

The Blue Monkey fresco, Akrotiri.

The Minoans were skilled and sensitive architects, and the palaces count amongst their greatest works of art. The most famous is the palace at Knossos, often called the ‘Palace of Minos’, built facing the Aegean about five miles inland. A multi-storey complex of corridors, rooms and staircases built around a central courtyard, the palace boasted impressive plumbing as well as lovely frescos, columns and gardens. Visitors found its ‘agglutinative’[7] architecture of over 1000 rooms so confusing that it is thought to have inspired the myth of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Knossos was an entire community, a centre for religion, pottery production and storage of trade goods, and a venue for festivals; there are workrooms, identifiable by the items left behind, for craftworkers such as potters and metalworkers. For this reason the term ‘palace’ is not adequate for describing these Minoan complexes. Of course, such structures are not static, and the site evolved over several millennia, starting in the Neolithic and ending probably about 1380 BCE when it was used by the Mycenaeans.

Sitting at the apex of a trading empire, the Cretan kings were extremely wealthy. It is therefore interesting that they appear to have ordered no sculpture, memorials, king-lists or other works to boast of their power and status. Knossos has been described as the primus inter pares (first among equals) among the Minoan palaces: yet even there we find nothing like the mighty monuments to the god-kings of Egypt. We have no record either of a king Minos or of any other named monarch, male or female. One conjecture is that Minoan monarchs were, in the Anatolian tradition, ‘priest-kings’ who combined royal with religious authority. The sacred double-headed axe appears all over the Knossos palace and there are numerous small shrines, as well as the so-called Throne Room which was probably used for religious purposes. But this can’t necessarily hold true for all Crete. Historian R. F. Willetts has suggested that the apparent modesty of the Minoan aristocracy can be explained by a difference in religious emphasis: the Minoans did not seek to associate the king with the immortal gods, like the Egyptians or Mesopotamians, but rather worshipped a particular vision of nature. From this standpoint, images glorifying the king were unnecessary. But this leaves unresolved the question of a class emphasis.

One of the most pervasive symbols in Cretan art is the bull. We can trace this cult back to Anatolia – the bull imagery and remains used in shrines in Çatalhöyük may be the ancestors of Minoan religion. In Bronze Age Crete there are frescos of bulls; drinking vessels in the shape of bulls’ heads; bulls’ horns carved from stone. The Hagia Triada sarcophagus portrays bull sacrifice. Murals and sculptures depict the ritual sport of bull-jumping, where an athlete would somersault over a bull’s back while another held its horns. It is not certain whether this remarkable feat was actually practiced, but it appears in other cultures too, and the ubiquity of the image suggests some sort of confrontation between human and bull must have taken place. The bull was a religious symbol, and bull-leaping may have had some ritual purpose rather than mere acrobatics, perhaps linking virility and divine power. In the Grand Fresco at Knossos, crowds of people are seen around a three-part building, probably a shrine, decorated with bulls’ horns. Strikingly, women are shown participating in bull-leaping as well as men.

Arthur Evans and the remaking of Minoan culture

In discussing Minoan art we must bear in mind that many of the extant images and artifacts, such as the so-called ‘Prince of the Lilies’, are not the original works. Many are in fact reconstructions by artists connected to Arthur Evans. When we examine the frescos we notice that the remaining fragments of the original account for just a few square inches of the whole, and some images use fragments that did not even necessarily belong together. On visiting the museum at Heraklion in the 1920s, Evelyn Waugh found the works discordantly modern. “It is impossible to disregard the suspicion,” he wrote, “that their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue.”[8]

The palace at Knossos was partly rebuilt by Evans. Visitors to the site may wander between columns and through multiple stories, but very little of this is original. The painted columns visible today, whose originals were made of wood, are made of twentieth-century concrete. Evans’ reconstruction work gave Knossos, as Cathy Gere remarked, “the dubious distinction of being one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on the island”[9].

Evans sometimes seems to have allowed his vision of Minoan culture – charming, goddess-worshipping, a kind of peaceful Eden compared to a rough mainland – to intervene between him and the evidence, and his restorations are plagued by dubious archaeology and sometimes downright forgery. While we may condemn him for interfering with the archaeological record, it was not so unusual by the standards of the time. And if the art of Knossos has been compromised, that of the Akrotiri site on Thera/Santorini is indisputably original.

Writing

Evans’ excavations turned up a number of clay tablets written upon in an unknown alphabet. It is very likely that writing arose in Minoan culture for the same reason it did in Sumer: to keep accounts. An early pictographic script, perhaps inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs, was replaced in around 1700 BCE by one which represented sounds, i.e. a true alphabet, known as Linear A.

Clay tablet from Knossos with Linear A script.

Linear A was engraved onto wet clay tablets, much like writing in Mesopotamia. It has still not been deciphered, as it is unlike any other and there is a lack of contextual evidence. If there is imaginative literature among these writings, we cannot read it. We have no Minoan poetry, no songs, no history, no scripture. It is a great culture, but a silent one.

By around 1450 BCE, Linear A had been replaced by Linear B, which on Crete is found only at Knossos, and was adapted from the Greek of the Mycenaeans who by then controlled the island. Linear B has been deciphered, but the surviving documents are mostly records of tax and goods and tell us frustratingly little about the island’s history and literature.

One of archaeology’s more mysterious objects is the Phaistos Disc, excavated from the Minoan palace at Phaistos. A fired clay disc about six inches across, it is covered on both sides with spirals of stamped symbols. Although the symbols are generally assumed to be a script, they belong to none of the three writing systems mentioned above. They have never been deciphered. Because the symbols seem to have been impressed into the clay using 45 stamps, the disc was described by Jared Diamond as “by far the earliest printed document in the world”[10]. Such sophisticated requirements imply that the disc, whether Minoan or from some other culture, was no one-off.

Women and Minoan art

Women seem to have enjoyed higher status in Minoan culture than was usual in the Bronze Age. We have already made mention of Minoan women in our article on women in ancient art. Women served as administrators and priestesses as well as participating in the dangerous and athletic sport of bull-leaping. (Even if no one in Crete ever actually leaped over a bull, the presence of women as well as men in the imagery, e.g. the ‘Toreador Fresco’, is itself revealing.) Some archaeologists argue in addition that Crete was matrilineal, i.e. one’s descent was measured through the mother, not the father [11].

Women always play a massive role in any economy, whether or not it is acknowledged, and ancient Crete was no exception. A fresco in Akrotiri known as ‘The Saffron Gatherers’ shows us women collecting saffron, a high-value resource used as a dye to indicate wealth and status in the wearer.

Detail from ‘The Saffron Gatherers’, c.1500 BCE.

Women’s relative equality may be because of the absence of military threat, giving far less impetus to the development of a male warrior discourse and thus a greater role and respect for women. It is tempting when looking at images of young women somersaulting over bulls with the men to conclude that women enjoyed considerable freedom. The so-called ‘Grandstand’ fresco at Knossos shows a crowd of both men and women attending a festival – the biggest figures are all female, well-dressed, animated and enjoying themselves.

As for religion, Minoan art provides us with figurines of a ‘snake goddess’[12], and frescos such as on the sarcophagus at Hagia Triada on which women priests outnumber men. No images of male deities have been found from the peak of Minoan civilisation. The apparent prominence of women in Minoan religion has led to conjecture that the principal deity or deities of Minoan Crete may have been female, e.g. an earth or mother goddess. Through animal sacrifices, the Minoans appealed to the goddess to avert the familiar Bronze Age tragedies of failed crops, disease, shipwreck, and so on. The prevalence of women in such imagery has led to conjecture about Minoan religion being in some way the worship of women, even that ancient Crete was a ‘matriarchal’ culture based upon the status of the Goddess. But the prominence of a female goddess, if this is how the figurines may be interpreted, does not allow us to conclude anything of the sort, any more than the absence of old people in the frescos means that Minoans never grew old.

The reality is that we don’t know what is going on in the Grand Fresco, or who the snake-carrying women are, or what sexual relations were in Crete. There are no records of kings, and there are no records of queens either. What we see depicted in art does not necessarily correlate to actual roles or relationships in society, so to extend what we know to a general pre-eminence of women is untenable. We may tentatively conjecture that women pre-dominated in the religious sphere of Minoan life, and no more.

The problem of Minoan art

Cretan class society included a ruling class of nobles and priests, a middle-ranking class of artisans, officials, etc, a mass of primary producers, mostly farmers and labourers, and a bottom layer of slaves. Its social structure therefore resembles that of other cultures of the era. Yet the art of the Minoans is sometimes regarded as an enigmatic puzzle. Arnold Hauser commented that it “presents the sociologist with the most difficult problem in the whole field of ancient-oriental art.”

In all this vast period in which the abstract geometrical style predominated, in this unchanging world of strict traditionalism and rigid forms, Crete presents us with a picture of colourful, unrestrained, exuberant life, although economic and social conditions are no different here than anywhere else in the surrounding world. Here too despots and feudal landlords are in power [13], here too the whole culture is under the aegis of an aristocratic social order, exactly as in Egypt and Mesopotamia – and yet what a difference in the whole conception of art![14]

Every ancient economy was built above all upon agriculture. The great majority of Minoans laboured on land owned by a small minority of landowning aristocrats: where the latter enjoyed latifundia and fine villas, most Cretans lived in small mud-brick houses. As such, Crete was no different to the other early civilisations to the east.

Our response to this contrast between the Minoans and elsewhere must begin by pointing out that the art was not as radically different as all that. The range of cultural artifacts – pottery, wall paintings, figurines, tablets – is of course basically the same. Although Minoan designs have a lighter touch than the Egytian, we know that the two civilisations were in contact. In a tomb in Thebes dating to about 1500 BCE, foreigners described as ‘chiefs of the Keftiu and the isles in the midst of the sea’ are depicted bringing gifts to the Pharaoh Tutmosis III. Unlike the Egyptians they wear long hair and kilts and carry distinctive Minoan-style ‘oxhide’ ingots. These people, believed to be Minoans, were respected by the Egyptians – who were often dismissive of foreigners – for their skills in seafaring and trade. We can see a possible debt to the Egyptians in similarities in Minoan wall decorations: they show people from the side, never frontally; like the Egyptians they paint men and women in different colours (red and white respectively); they draw humans in a more stylised way than animals; they ignore perspective; and so on. The Egyptian influence should not surprise us, as its culture was widely admired in the ancient world.

There are other similarities too. Though Egyptian figures are certainly more rigid, their animal and plant images can be just as lively and colourful as the Minoans’, as the images from the tomb of Nebamun beautifully illustrate.

Nonetheless Minoan art does show a greater emphasis on spontaneity and invention, and is more secular and informal. It is less constrained by rigid conventions and geometry, and undoubtedly has, like any culture, a distinctive character of its own. The absence of battles, kings, boastful inscriptions and historical events in its art is surprising for the time. We need to recognise such distinctions without falling into the crude formulations sometimes used in the past, such as posing cultured Minoans against barbarous Mycenaeans.

Hauser’s first explanation for the particular character of the Minoans’ art is the relatively modest role of religion in their society. Minoan shrines seem to have been small, even in the palaces, kept in people’s homes or built in out of the way places like hills and caves. There is nothing like the great cult of the dead seen in Egypt, or the grandiose works that went with it. There was therefore less impetus towards sternly imposed conventions.

He also admires the urbanity of the cultural life that arose around the palaces:

The freedom of Cretan art can also be partly explained by the extraordinarily important role which city life and commerce played in the island’s economy... city life was probably nowhere so highly developed as in Crete.

Minoan urban centres were small compared to some of the imperial capitals to the east, but this should not be surprising given the much bigger territories of those cultures, and according to one historian the Aegean urban communities were “comparable in scale and almost certainly complexity, to many of their Eastern contemporaries.”[15] In this urban context, art was still principally created for the ruling aristocracy, yet there was a little more room for spontaneity and elegance, especially when religious convention was less strict. And he concludes with an observation on the character of the Cretan ruling class:

The special character of Cretan art must be seen first of all in relation to the fact that, in the Aegean, in contrast to other areas, trade, above all foreign trade, was concentrated in the hands of the ruling class. The unstable spirit of the trader, fond of making innovations, was able to make its way less hampered than in Egypt or Babylonia.

Willetts offers a different perspective. Noting that there is evidence of collective social organisation in the earlier phases of Minoan culture, he observes that the palace complexes represented a comparatively closely-knit and collective society and would have supported many specialists from their stored surplus. He comments:

Elsewhere, in the older centres of Bronze Age civilisation, this kind of dependence on the specialists seems to have resulted in a marked loss of freedom and prestige... The increasing diversity of specialist production under the economic and commercial stimulus of the Minoan palace centres may well, on the contrary, have resulted rather in an extension of such freedom and social prestige. The tenacious collective traditions of the past still appear to have exercised an enormous influence in the flourishing high period of palatial Crete.[16]

The ‘palace’ was the centre of Minoan life: of trade and agriculture, but also of art. It was perhaps this union of trade and culture, in a context of long internal stability, that gave Minoan art its urbane liveliness.

Crete’s geopolitical situation may also have exerted an influence. With the natural protection of the sea and backed by their fleet, the Minoans had little need to fear invasion. In the absence of a warrior class, not only were women’s rights better than in most Bronze Age cultures, but art was less constrained by the military and religion.

The Thera eruption

How the Minoan civilisation came to an end is an ongoing debate in archaeology. The most plausible theory relates not to economics or geopolitics but to a natural disaster.

The Aegean area is geologically unstable: it sits upon the meeting of two great tectonic plates, the Eurasiatic and African, causing both earthquakes and volcanic activity. Sometime between 1650-1600 BCE (the date is disputed), the island of Thera, eighty miles to the north of Crete, was hit by one of the ancient world’s mightiest volcanic eruptions. Evidence for this catastrophe can be found as far away as China and Ireland. The consequences for Crete would have been disastrous: a great wave would have hit its cities and shattered its navy, and hot ash would have blighted its crops. (The partial sinking of Thera may have given rise to the myth of Atlantis, which we will explore in another post.) The only reason the remarkable site of Akrotiri survived is that it was buried under ten metres of ash and pumice, like an Aegean Pompeii.

Despite this cataclysm, Minoan culture did not simply stop after 1600 BCE. But their view of the world must have been profoundly affected. After the Thera eruption and tidal wave, sea creatures proliferate on Minoan pottery, implying a new relationship to the sea. Archaeologist Colin MacDonald has suggested that decline was exacerbated by social breakdown, the authority of Minoan monarchs and religious leaders dashed by their powerlessness to prevent the disaster. Thus the Minoans had already been weakened in multiple ways when they were confronted by the external threat of the Mycenaeans. Evidence of intrusion from the mainland around 1450 BCE can be seen in new styles in pottery and in palace and tomb architecture. When the Knossos palace was finally destroyed in the mid-14th century BCE, it was not rebuilt.

The ‘eruption’ theory still leaves us with a puzzle: why would the eruption bring the Minoans to their knees, but leave the Mycenaeans, also an Aegean people, perfectly capable of organising and executing an invasion?

Conclusion

It seems likely that a series of blows struck by natural forces and invasion were to blame for the decline of Minoan civilisation. By about 1400 BCE, the Minoans had been displaced by the reputedly more warlike Mycenaeans as the dominant culture in the Aegean. Tablets from Knossos were now written in Linear B, a script used for Mycenaean Greek, and art moved to a more geometric style. Whatever the precise turn of events that caused their decline, the Minoans’ material civilisation disappeared almost completely. They make hardly any appearance in the histories of the ancient Greeks. For over thirty centuries their civilisation survived only in myth until the Cretan archaeologist Minos Kalokairinos initiated excavations in 1878, followed by Arthur Evans in March 1900.

Nonetheless the Minoans’ influence outlived them. The Minoans were not Greeks, but they can count the ancient Greeks among their cultural descendants. The art, architecture and religion of early mainland Greece show a Minoan influence. From the Minoans, the Mycenaeans learned to make bronze and finely-crafted artifacts, and adapted their own script from Linear A. The debt is even symbolically represented in myth: it is on Crete that Zeus spent his childhood. As a baby he was carried off to protect him from the infanticide of his father Kronos, and was hidden in a cave on Mount Ida until he was ready to take over as the ruling deity of the Greek world.

The excavation of Minoan Crete had the stunning effect of extending European civilisation back into antiquity – partly contemporaneous, even, with that of Egypt. But although Minoan Crete was the first major civilisation to appear in Europe, I would argue that to stress Crete as the first ‘European’ civilisation is to misread the geopolitics of the ancient world. It should rather be seen as the westernmost expression of a development lasting thousands of years that began in, and spread from, Mesopotamia and Egypt, which also includes Syria, the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean. This region is connected by geography and trade, but also by cultural transmission. Crete is, as Michael Wood put it, the “stepping-stone between Europe, Asia Minor and Africa”.

Further investigation

• Learn about the Akrotiri site from the Thera Foundation: http://www.therafoundation.org/akrotiri/
• See a gallery of images from Akrotiri on Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Akrotiri
• Explore the Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean.

[1] Along with the Cycladic culture and the Mycenaeans, the Minoans represent one of the three main Bronze Age cultures of the Aegean.
[2] After becoming fascinated by Minoan clay tablets, Evans initiated excavations on Crete, uncovering Knossos in 1900 (although he was not the first to dig there).
[3] Thucydides, First Book, History of the Peloponnesian War (431 BCE).
[4] We should never under-estimate how ‘joined up’ the ancient world was. See for example the late Bronze Age shipwreck discovered near Uluburun in Turkey, which was carrying a remarkable assortment of international goods from northern Europe, Africa and Mesopotamia.
[5] Rodney Castleden, Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete (1990).
[6] ‘Ware’ is a term used by archaeologists to refer to ceramic styles.
[7] The choice adjective comes from R. F. Willetts, The Civilisation of Ancient Crete (2004).
[8] From Labels (1930). Cited in Mary Beard, ‘Knossos – Fakes, facts and mystery’ (2009).
[9] Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (2009). For a riposte to Gere’s book, see Nanno Marinatos’ book review in American Journal of Archaeology (April 2010).
[10] Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (1998).
[11] This should not be confused with ‘matriarchy’ or rule by the mother, itself a concept that is often mistaken to mean general ‘rule by women’.
[12] Bear in mind that these have also been partially ‘restored’ by Evans’ team.
[13] Incidentally, Hauser’s use of the term ‘feudal’ here, like his references elsewhere in his book to an ancient ‘bourgeoisie’, is completely inappropriate. Both terms belong to different modes of production that would not emerge until centuries later.
[14] Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol 1 (1951).
[15] Todd Whitelaw, ‘From sites to communities: defining the human dimensions of Minoan urbanism’ in ed. Keith Branigan, Urbanism in the Aegean Bronze Age (2001).
[16] R. F. Willetts, op. cit.

Friday, 31 July 2009

Early civilisation: Women in art

The enormous social changes of early civilisation influenced women’s role in art.

It isn’t always possible to distinguish between women and men in prehistoric and ancient art. When it is, a society’s artistic depictions of men and women’s behaviours and activities, along with the archaeological contexts, provide valuable evidence about gender roles.

Women had been relatively equal to men under primitive communism, but suffered, in Engels’ words, a ‘world-historical defeat’ [1] with the advent of class society. We have already outlined the roots of the oppression of women, and shan’t repeat those arguments here. The degree and forms of this oppression varied from civilisation to civilisation – they had more rights in Egypt than in Greece, for example – but wherever class society existed they were pushed into a subordinate relationship with men. The situation is summed up in Genesis when God casts Adam and Eve out of Eden, and tells Eve: “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” [2]. In the ancient world, it was mostly assumed that men should administer society and control its wealth. This had an inevitable influence upon the arts.

The inequality of the sexes has been universal in class society, to the point that it became thought of as innate to human nature. Yet as Rosalind Miles argued in her book The Women’s History of the World, “Women have been active, competent and important through all the ages of man.” Even though women were subordinated to men, they still lived, worked, and contributed to society and culture, and many succeeded in carving out significant roles for themselves. There have always been women who managed to overcome the obstacles placed in their way.

Images of women, possibly also by women, take an immense variety of forms after the Paleolithic, far more than we can examine here. We could mention votive statuettes of women worshippers from Mesopotamia; statuettes of ageing midwives or codex drawings of the exploits of Lady Six Monkey, from Mesoamerica; clay figurines of women by the Jōmon culture of Japan; fresco paintings of ladies from the Minoan culture of Crete; and much more. Many forms, such as textiles or tattooing, are much less durable than others, so as ever we are restricted by what archaeological evidence happens to have come down to us – we must also practice caution in our interpretations.

Neolithic art

As we have discussed, images of women are predominant in the Paleolithic, mostly in the form of figurines.

Female figurine from the Cycladic
culture of the Aegean. White marble,
ca. 3000 BCE.

The creation of female figurines persists into the Neolithic, with a geographical shift towards the Mediterranean and a much greater diversity of forms, commensurate with a higher level of development and a wider variety of societies. Their purpose is often unclear: their diversity across time and space means that however tempting it may be to seek a single interpretation, we must consider each culture independently. Archaeologists have suggested that they are images of deities or of esteemed ancestors, magic tools aimed at helping women conceive, or even toys for the dead.

One of the most popular theories about Neolithic images of women is that they represent a universal ‘mother’ or ‘fertility’ goddess. Such claims are difficult to prove. There is documented evidence of a fertility goddess cult from Anatolia which post-dates the region’s figurines but does suggest that they might be early forms of such a cult. Cases like this cannot be put forward as an explanation for such images across all Eurasia, especially in the early Neolithic when religion is likely to have focused on spirits and natural forces rather than humanised deities; nor does it explain the male figurines that are often found at the same sites. Archaeologists and other commentators are sometimes too quick to label a female representation as a ‘fertility’ figure, as if that explains everything, or as an incarnation of the ‘great goddess’. In reality each culture and/or region has to be considered upon its own evidence.

It was between the early Neolithic and the rise of literate society that women lost their relative importance in food production and became increasingly subordinated to men. As gatherers, it was probably women who took the decisive steps towards agriculture, but with the advent of more intensive farming techniques – above all the introduction of the plough – the food surplus became an increasingly male sphere. It may be no coincidence that these enigmatic works of art disappear over the same period.

Gordon Childe raised the likelihood that several Neolithic crafts – pot-making, , – were the invention of women, and noted for example that a temple in Lagash listed female spinners and weavers amongst its considerable staff.[3] Pottery, one of the most distinctive Neolithic art forms, was largely made by women as a public and collective activity. When the wheel was introduced, pottery production became faster and more regular: “the making of pots by hand is a domestic craft plied by the women, whereas manufacture on the wheel is a specialised trade reserved to men” (Childe).[4] Thus pottery became an increasingly male art as it gained in status.

Weaving, which began with the making of baskets and mats, is one of the most ancient arts, often associated with women in tradition and mythology. The discovery of silk-making in ancient China (around 2700–2650 BCE) is credited by tradition to a woman named Lei-tzu, also known as ‘Si Ling-Chi’ or ‘Lady of the Silkworm’. Male weavers did exist – we see them in images from the New Kingdom in Egypt, for example – but the , one of the great inventions of agricultural society, was predominantly worked by women. Used to produce linens for clothing, household items and funerary goods, the loom used yarn created above all from cotton and wool. Ancient looms were mostly made of wood, so little has survived of them besides spindle whorls and weights. The vast majority of the textiles created are also lost (one finely preserved exception is the set of clothes found with the body of a girl at the Egtved site in Denmark). But we get an insight into their aesthetics from images such as wall-paintings that record decorative textiles and fashions [5].

Fresco image of a woman,
from Knossos, Crete. Mid-second
millenium BCE.

It is likely these were also designed by the women who made them.

In Greek mythology, it was seen as a sexual humiliation for Herakles to have to assist Omphale with her spinning. The story reminds us of the loss of status suffered by women and the activities associated with them – despite women’s indispensable role in food production, child-rearing, toolmaking and many other skills both before and after the Neolithic Revolution, ‘women’s work’ became a perjorative term.

A key expression of this loss of status is the movement away from ‘mother right’. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels discusses the transition to monogamous marriage and its role as the core of the nuclear family, in which the woman and children were dependent upon the man. Developing alongside class society, this saw the replacement of matrilinearity or ‘mother right’ with ‘father right’ – measuring the line of descent through the father. Engels proposed an example of how this was later expressed in literature:

Bachofen [6] interprets the Oresteia of Aschylus as the dramatic representation of the conflict between declining mother-right and the new father-right that arose and triumphed in the heroic age. For the sake of her paramour, Aegisthus, Clytemnestra slays her husband, Agamemnon, on his return from the Trojan War; but Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and herself, avenges his father’s murder by slaying his mother. For this act he is pursued by the Furies, the demonic guardians of mother-right, according to which matricide is the gravest and most inexpiable crime... Apollo now comes forward in Orestes’ defence; Athena calls upon the Areopagites – the Athenian jurors – to vote; the votes for Orestes’ condemnation and for his acquittal are equal; Athena, as president, gives her vote for Orestes and acquits him. Father-right has triumphed over mother-right, the “gods of young descent,” as the Furies themselves call them, have triumphed over the Furies; the latter then finally allow themselves to be persuaded to take up a new office in the service of the new order.[7]

There is no need to jump to ancient Greece to see the effect of women’s falling status on their representation in the arts.

The early civilisations

After the Urban Revolution, the Stone Age emphasis on women in art faded away as the predominance of males became established in most societies. In the schematic art of early civilisation, males become prominent, engaging in dynamic deeds such as hunts or battles. Renfew and Bahn pointed out:

Three new dominant themes appear: weaponry, especially males with daggers; hunting images, particularly stags identified by antlers; and plowing, with oxen identified by horns. This consistent association of male form with male cultural icon – men/daggers; stags/antlers; oxen/horns – builds a symbolic system used to enact and express male gender from which an ideology of male power and vitality is created.[8]

From the Bronze Age there is an increasingly clear social distinction between the sexes, which laid the basis for a division that persists to this day. (The Egyptian practice of representing wives on a smaller scale than their husbands sums it up.) Instead of being equally respected, women were seen as ornaments, breeders, or objects of sexual pleasure. This was particularly true of ruling class women, who despite their material privileges were broadly sheltered from wider society. Women in the toiling classes, by contrast, were essential to production and so had a different experience of oppression – not least a long series of pregnancies to reproduce labour and sustain the household income.

Various cultures are held up as exceptions to this pattern. One was the diverse Iron Age Celtic culture of north-western Europe, which we shall return to when we discuss the Roman Empire and its contemporaries. Another was the Minoan culture which flourished on Crete from about 2700–1450 BCE. The Minoans were a highly civilised trading people, who created very beautiful works of art [9]. These include murals of bull-leaping where women participate alongside men on an apparently equal footing, and put a disproportionate emphasis upon female deities and priestesses; the Grand Fresco from the palace of Knossos portrays a large number of men (painted red) together with a smaller number of women (painted white) who seem to have the best seats. Such works have been cited by archaeologists and feminists as evidence that Minoan women enjoyed equal or even superior status.

Snake goddess figurine from
the palace of Knossos. Photo: Chris 73.

Some of the most regularly reproduced works are the so-called ‘snake goddess’ figurines which have been found at various Minoan sites. These terracotta statuettes, of bare-breasted women in long skirts with snakes curling around their hands, seem to be religious in purpose, perhaps representing priestesses or goddesses. Depictions in frescos show figures like these being venerated, mostly by women.

However, the anthropologist Margaret Ehrenberg sounded a note of caution about overstating the status of women because of Minoan art:

The frescos certainly show women involved in a wide variety of activities, some physical... There may well be some connection here with religious ritual, in which women, in the form either of goddesses or of cult leaders or priestesses, or both, certainly appear to predominate. But it is important to bear in mind that all the evidence comes from the palaces, which clearly were primarily occupied by the wealthy or higher strata of society, and that the frescos presumably reflect the interests of these people. Taken at face value, it certainly seems that elite women may have had more status and participated in a wider range of activities than women in many other societies. But the question of how relevant the frescos and other evidence are to the lives of most women living in Crete during the Minoan period remains unclear.[10]

The degree of oppression of women in the early civilisations varied a great deal. It seems likely that women held a respected place in Minoan society. But an emphasis upon women in art, and their likely predominance in religion, does not by itself prove they enjoyed pre-eminence in politics. To claim matriarchy existed in the Minoan culture or any other is, on the evidence, unsustainable.

Ruling class women

Given the disproportionate control of material and human resources enjoyed by the ruling class, it is no surprise that the most accomplished images portray elite women.

Disc from Ur portraying the priestess Enheduanna.
Alabaster, ca. 3rd millennium BCE.
Photo: University of Pennsylvania Museum.

One of the most significant is an alabaster disc found in the residence of a priestess in Ur. The front shows four figures approaching a ziggurat, the second of whom wears the headgear of a priestess. A cuneiform inscription mentions Enheduanna, princess of Akkad and priestess of the moon god Nanna, whom we have mentioned briefly before. Enheduanna is one of the most prominent figures from ancient Mesopotamia, and as the author of several hymns she is the earliest ever literary figure known by name. This ten-inch disc is a relative rarity in the ancient world because it honours a woman.

More impressive again are the images of female royalty. The most famous female image of the ancient period is probably Thutmose’s bust of Queen Nefertiti. But there are other lesser known works, such as the life-size bronze and copper statue of the Elamite queen Napir-Asu or the carved wooden head of Queen Tiye. One of the most interesting cases is that of the female Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Hatshepsut.

Limestone sculpture of Hatshepsut.
The queen is recogniseably female, although
dressed as a king. Photo: Postdlf.

Hatshepsut occupies an unusual place in ancient history. She was exceptional in being a female Pharaoh, but she was not unique – Cleopatra VII is the most famous of the others, but we could also mention such figures as Merneith (whether she was actually a Pharaoh is unclear), Sobeknefru and Twosret. Archaeologists believe that Hatshepsut acted as regent during the minority of Thutmose III and was accepted as Pharaoh, reigning for roughly twenty-one years. Only upon her death in 1458 BCE did Thutmose take power.

One product of Hatshepsut’s very successful reign was the production of a great deal of building and statuary, including of course images of herself. The great architectural achievement of her reign is the remarkable mortuary temple at Deir el Bahari, designed by her architect Senenmut, where relief sculptures unusually tell the story of the birth of a female Pharaoh.

As Pharaoh, Hatshepsut adopted the regalia associated with kings, such as the khat headcloth and even the traditional false beard. As Gay Robins observed:

The majority of Hatshepsut’s images show her as a male king in male dress and without female breasts. A few, however, show her in female dress. It is possible that when she proclaimed herself king, artists tried to reconcile her biologically female sex with what was traditionally a male gender role. The result may have been felt to be unsatisfactory, since for most of her reign Hatshepsut was represented by the conventional image of a male king.[11]

Whether Hatshepsut wore male clothing in real life is not as important as the fact that over time she felt an increasing need to adopt a more masculine appearance in art to legitimise herself as a ruler.

Female Pharaohs were very exceptional cases, of course. Here is Gay Robins again to put it into context:

Women could not hold office and benefit from its privileges, so that their status accrued mainly from that of their parents or their husbands. The male monopoly of office is reflected in the art through the far greater number of monuments owned by men than women, and through the gender hierarchy that privileged husbands over wives by generally giving them the primary position in both two- and three-dimensional compositions. Nevertheless, the frequent inclusion of wives, mothers and other female relatives on the monuments of men suggests they had a salient role within society. The nature of their contribution is indicated by the idealised female image used to depict women of all ages. As well as embodying an aesthetic concept of feminine beauty, the youthful image that frequently reveals the form of the body stresses the role of women as potential child-bearers, on whom the continuity of the family and society depended.

Some of the best images of lower class women are also from Egypt. They were not created because artists had a documentary interest in depicting workers. Rather, they take the form of ‘servant statuettes’ buried in tombs so that nobles would still be provided for after death.

Woman making bread. Photo: Einsamer Schütze.

Made of stone and later increasingly of wood, many of these illustrate women baking, brewing, carrying baskets, grinding grain and carrying out other day-to-day work, and have a directness and realism at odds with the idealised images of aristocratic women.

Egyptologist Jaromir Malek commented: “Women were involved in the manufacture of everyday objects such as textiles and pottery, which form some of the most attractive products of ancient art” [12]. But there is little evidence, across all the ancient world, of women participating in large-scale works of art or in workshops as professional craftspeople or artists.

Fertility and sexuality

Regarding the figurines of the Stone Age, we have advised a cautious approach to their proposed role in ‘fertility’ cults or rituals. The early civilisations, by contrast, devised many deities responsible for pregnancy, birth and reproduction both in humans and in nature as a whole. The cult of fertility made particular reference to women, not least because of their role in childbirth, and perhaps also their likely role in the discovery of agriculture.

Fertility was important firstly because of the reproduction of the species, itself tied to the compelling subject of sex. It was also a key theme in agricultural societies whose wealth was hard-won from the soil and who lived in fear of famine. Animal fertility was important for replenishing a community’s livestock, and it was women who bore the main burden of producing more hands to work the land. In the ancient world it was considered women’s duty to bear children, leading to a pregnancy rate significantly higher than that under primitive communism. Eleanor Leacock was not just speaking for the modern world when she wrote: “In some ways it is the ultimate alienation in our society that the ability to give birth has been transformed into a liability.”[13]

A variety of goddesses relating to the earth, fertility and birth can be found in the ancient world – such as the Egyptian Isis or the Greek Gaia – who appear in creation stories and a wide variety of other works of art. In Mesopotamia, the most important figure connected to fertility was a goddess known as Inanna to the Sumerians, Ishtar to the Babylonians.

Babylonian relief of Ishtar, ca. 1700 BCE.
Photo: seriykotik1970.

Inanna was also responsible for sexual love and, curiously given its male-dominated nature, also for warfare [14]. Among her artistic incarnations are the Warka vase, on which she is depicted in an agricultural context receiving gifts; the female poet Enheduanna’s hymn, the Nin-me-sara, or ‘Exhaltation of Inanna’; and her role in the Ur III poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.

Goddesses were essential in the ancient pantheons, but they tended to become objects of beauty and motherhood/fertility. There are few male equivalents for such female deities of beauty and sex as Inanna, Aphrodite/Venus, and Astarte. The trend was for the old goddesses to be gradually demoted and made subordinate to ruling male deities. An example of this is the overthrow of Tiamat by Marduk in Tablet IV of the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish:

He seized the spear and burst her belly,
He severed her inward parts, he pierced her heart.
He overcame her and cut off her life;
He cast down her body and stood upon it.

When the single deity of the Abrahamic religions became ascendant in the Middle East, he was created in a male image.

As women lost status relative to their husbands, their sexuality too became male property, something which should be constrained to guarantee the legitimacy of the husband’s children. The term ‘patriarchy’ – rule of the father over the household – is often misused, but in the ancient world it actually prevailed.

This had a strong influence upon representations of female sexuality. Women tend to be presented in terms of their physical attractiveness to men. We could take countless examples of this. One is the way female garments in art tend to reveal the body shape underneath (as in the less well-known image of Nefertiti here), along with a tendency to expose the breasts and clearly delineate the pubic area. Or to take a literary example, in the Epic of Gilgamesh the two main female characters are both seen in sexual roles. Not only does Ishtar tempt the hero, but a harlot seduces his companion Enkidu and acclimatises him to human culture against the animals with whom he used to live, in an equation of prostitution with civilisation:

Shamhat unclutched her bosom, exposed her sex, and he took in her voluptuousness.
She was not restrained, but took his energy.
She spread out her robe and he lay upon her,
she performed for the primitive the task of womankind.
His lust groaned over her;
for six days and seven nights Enkidu stayed aroused,
and had intercourse with the harlot
until he was sated with her charms.[15]

But there was more to it than that – sexuality potentially gave women the ability to overturn the ‘normal’ power balance between the sexes, and was viewed with deep suspicion. The Sumerian deity Lilith, a demon who appears from around 4000 BCE, and for whom there is again no male equivalent, was not only lascivious and a prostitute but was also associated with bringing disease and death.[16] The Hebrew story of Salome is a classic example of a woman portrayed as using her sexuality to bring ruin upon a man (John the Baptist).

The sexualisation of women has been characteristic in class society, because when women became subordinate to men it was possible to exploit them. In the early civilisations we can see the birth of stereotypes that in more recent times have given us the academic nude and the fashion model. It would be wrong to claim that women of that period never had any ability to determine their own lives. But just as the ruling class has always had the greatest power to define the form and content of art, so too have men broadly been able to define the representation of women.

Conclusion

We have here only offered a few snapshots of the changing representation of women in art, and risk, as in any short survey, over-simplifying an immense and complex subject.

It is only in the last fifty or so years that the study of the particular experience of women has been taken seriously. The traditional approach of seeing art as the product of ‘Great Men’ has been consistently challenged and exposed, especially by feminists, and today has generally been abandoned by serious academics.

Reconstructing what works of art meant at the time they were created, without the distorting prism of modern Western values, styles and assumptions, is perhaps impossible. Archaeological evidence is incomplete, and much of what survives, such as literary records, will have been written by men. There are all sorts of reasons why ancient evidence cannot necessarily be taken at face value as representations of women, their lives and their contribution to culture. Some of the love poems of ancient Egypt for example are written in a female voice, which invites speculation that they were also written by women, but there is no way of knowing that they are not examples of males writing from female viewpoints [17]. There is also great diversity in how different societies across the world responded to social and historical change. The subordination of women did not follow a smooth, linear pattern, or one that can be easily applied to every culture. We must also remember that ruling class women had a different experience of oppression to that of women of the toiling classes.

It would be completely wrong to see all women post-Neolithic Revolution as passive victims of male oppression, and there is often a big gap between what a dominant ideology declares about a society and how that society actually is. However, we can assert that from the advent of class society there was a sexual division of labour, and a relative inferiority of social status for women, that greatly influenced how women were portrayed in art.

Thursday, 16 July 2009

Early civilisation: Art and religion

Myth was described by Herbert Jennings Rose as ‘the result of the working of a naive imagination upon the facts of experience’ [1]. This applies equally to religion. Humans observe natural phenomena such as floods, thunder, the apparent passage of the sun across the sky, etc, and ‘the imagination is commonly set going by an object that appears wonderful or puzzling’. At a time when a poorly developed science was unable to provide many answers, humans’ attempts to understand their environment turned to the supernatural – how else to address the mysteries of the origins of the cosmos without the theory of the Big Bang?

There is no place for religion in scientific, materialist thinking. Religion is closely linked with idealism, the philosophical position that mind has primacy over matter, the laws of the universe being decided by the greatest mind conceivable – that of God, or the ‘absolute Idea’, or what have you. Gods, votive rituals and so on are invented by human beings, and are historical and social in origin. Nonetheless, supernatural beliefs have influenced art probably since its first flowering, so critics need to appreciate the ways in which religion and art interact.

We have already discussed religion in Neolithic art. Here we will take a look its role in the early civilisations. The subject is so huge that we must restrict ourselves to a few general observations.

Highly organised and ritualised religion, with complex deities, became a prominent part of human society from the time we had something to lose. As agriculturalists, our way of life depended upon rhythms and forces that were completely out of our control, and which could mean disaster for us. Every natural event was seen as an act of the gods. Through the notion that these gods could be appeased and worshipped to keep their goodwill, we sought to gain more control over our environment. When such supplication coincided with improvements in human conditions, religion was considered to be vindicated. When ineffective, it was taken as evidence that these were indeed unpredictable and unknowable beings.

Gordon Childe pointed out that successful civilisations had hit upon a way of life that worked – why should they change how they did things?

The success of simply equipped societies depends on everyone doing what has proved to be the right thing at the right time and in the proper way; it imposes a complete pattern of behaviour on all the community’s members. This pattern finds expression in social institutions and in traditional rules and prohibitions. It is sanctified by magico-religious beliefs and fears. Just as the practical acts of life are accompanied by appropriate rites and ceremonies, so mystical forces are supposed to watch over the traditional rules and avenge any transgression of them. The established economy is reinforced by an appropriate ideology.[2]

Religion has usually, though by no means always, played a conservative role ever since. In Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels outlined the origins of religion from a different angle:

From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions came to believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death – from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the outside world. If, upon death, it took leave of the body and lived on, there was no occasion to invent yet another distinct death for it. Thus arose the idea of immortality, which at that stage of development appeared not at all as a consolation but as a fate against which it was no use fighting, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. The quandary arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after the death of the body, and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces.[3]

The early civilisations were : they worshipped pantheons [4] of gods, often seeing one particular god as ruling over the others. These gods probably originated, as Engels observes, from a variety of spirits and supernatural forces, and evolved into a kind of extended family around which a system of core beliefs was developed. But in the sun worship of Akhenaten, or in the patron deities of city states in Mesopotamia, the roots of can already be seen. As Engels goes on:

And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man’s intellectual development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.

As we implied at the beginning, belief in deities only became a possibility when our species acquired an imagination. The fluid human consciousness, able to make associations and connections regardless of whether they were physically possible, allowed us to conceive of beings who lived forever – a combination of human sentience with the longevity of nature (to a human, landscape features like mountains or the ocean seem like they exist forever).

But of course, these beings don’t exist, and can therefore never be seen, heard or experienced. Human society compensates for this partly through works of art. The archaeologist Steven Mithen wrote:

Ideas about supernatural beings are unnatural in the sense that they conflict with our deeply evolved, domain-specific understanding of the world. As a consequence they are difficult to hold within our minds and to transmit to others... Matthew Day, a professor of religious studies, has recently written, ‘one of the bedevilling problems about dealing with gods is that... they are never really there’; hence we have difficulty in knowing not only how to communicate with them, but also how to think about them...

Modern humans compensate for this by the use of material symbols that provide ‘cognitive anchors’. Whether supernatural beings are made tangible in a representational manner, as we suppose is the case with the lion/man from Hohlenstein Stadel, or in abstract form as in the Christian cross, such material symbols function to help conceptualise and share the religious entities and ideas in which one believes.[5]

Thus a community can share its ideas about religion by the use of music, figurines, ritual, special clothes, hymns, scriptures and so on that emphasise a common set of beliefs and group identity. Such forms provide religion with the concreteness which it cannot, of itself, possess. Without them, it is hard to see how religion could exist as a coherent structure or exercise any mass influence.

Religious beliefs provided a cosmological scheme to explain everything in the world, and played a huge role in shaping the ideologies upon which works of art were predicated. They influenced an immense number and variety of artistic forms: gorgeously designed and decorated temples; lavish tombs aimed at sending aristocrats safely to the afterlife; countless paintings, statues and other images on religious themes; stories and songs about the creation of the world and the deeds of the gods; and so on.

We can’t discuss every civilisation here, so let’s take a look at the Mesopotamian culture(s), and draw out some generalisations.

In Mesopotamia, a paradigm was established that was to persist for three millennia. The land was considered to be literally the property of the gods, and each city-state was not only dedicated to a deity but was thought to belong to that deity (Sippar to Shamash, Nineveh to Ishtar, etc). In George Roux’s words, “the mighty Assyrian monarchs whose empire extended from the Nile to the Caspian Sea were the humble servants of their god Assur just as the governers of Lagash who ruled over a few square miles of Sumer were those of their god Ningirsu.”[6] Religious ideas permeated the whole of Mesopotamian society: in their daily routines, their social structure, and in their art. One of the most important pieces of Mesopotamian literature that has survived, the Babylonian Enuma Elish, is a creation myth, and the gods intervene into human affairs in the Epic of Gilgamesh just as they do in Homer.

We know a good deal about early Mesopotamian religious beliefs, thanks mostly to texts preserved in libraries at Nippur, Assur and Nineveh. Sumer had a pantheon of hundreds of deities, each assigned to a particular area and covering everything from the sun to ploughs. Since these deities were ‘never really there’, it was to human behaviour that the Sumerians looked for a model. Here is Roux again:

These gods, like the Greek gods, had the physical appearance and all the qualities and defects of human beings: they were highly intelligent but could run out of ideas; they were good in general, but also capable of evil thoughts and deeds; they were subject to love, hatred, anger, jealousy and all other human passions; they ate and drank and got drunk; they quarrelled and fought and suffered and were wounded and could even die – i.e. go and live in the Netherworld. In brief, they represented the best and worst of human nature on a superhuman scale.

We may generalise here and say that for this reason, religious art, despite the superhumanity of the deities involved, always has a human character. When we look at images of gods in friezes, sculptures, frescos and other forms, it is men and women we see before us. And these men and women live in something resembling the conditions of human society at the time. We are reminded here of Marx:

Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc... We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.[7]

Or, as he put it in his fourth Thesis on Feuerbach, “the earthly family is... the secret of the holy family”.

Stela of Shamshi-Adad V from the Assyrian city
of Nimrud, ca. 820 BCE. The king stands next to
the symbols of his main gods;
from left to right: Ishtar, Adad, Sin,
Shamash and Ashur. Photo: nrares

True, the Mesopotamian deities were not always represented in human form: Enlil appeared as a bull, Shamash as a sun, Inanna as an evening star.

But the briefest look at their behaviour makes their nature very clear, as in the episode from the Epic of Gilgamesh where the goddess Inanna tries to seduce the hero:

When Gilgamesh placed his crown on his head,
a princess Ishtar raised her eyes to the beauty of Gilgamesh.
‘Come along, Gilgamesh, be you my husband,
to me grant your lusciousness.
Be you my husband, and I will be your wife.’

Gilgamesh spurns her advances, citing the many cases of lovers she has taken and abandoned in the past:

See here now, I will recite the list of your lovers...
You loved the supremely mighty lion,
yet you dug for him seven and again seven pits.
You loved the stallion, famed in battle,
yet you ordained for him the whip, the goad, and the lash,
ordained for him to gallop for seven and seven hours,
ordained for him drinking from muddled waters,
you ordained far his mother Silili to wail continually.
You loved the Shepherd, the Master Herder,
who continually presented you with bread baked in embers,
and who daily slaughtered for you a kid.
Yet you struck him, and turned him into a wolf,
so his own shepherds now chase him
and his own dogs snap at his shins. [8]

The passage tells us nothing about the operations of the cosmos, but a great deal about the loves and lusts of humans and a particular (fearful and disapproving) attitude towards female sexuality.

Not only were the individual gods created in humanity’s image, with very human jealousies, needs, passions, etc, but religion echoed the social hierarchy of human class society. Some gods were more powerful than others. At the apex of the Sumerian pantheon was An, the ruler of the heavens – beneath him were Enlil, god of the air, and Enki, god of the earth and the waters. Beneath them were further deities such as the moon-god Nanna (Sin), the sun-god Utu (Shamash), the love goddess Inanna (Ishtar). Other deities were important only in their own towns, or represented the humble brick or pickaxe.

Image of the sun-god Shamash (right), before a king and his attendants.
Stone tablet, 9th century BCE. Shamash appears much larger and in
repose, emphasising his greater status. This is similar to how
human kings are portrayed in relation to their subjects throughout
Bronze Age art.

So religion was an expression, as well as a mainspring, of the ideologies of the early civilisations. These ideologies overwhelmingly promoted the interests of the ruling class. Divine support was a means of legitimising the inequalities in class society, and thus hugely important in explaining why religion was taken so seriously; Marx refers to priests as ‘the first form of ideologists’.[9] The alliance between kings and priests is made clear by the many holy rituals that associate the nobility with religion. Kings of Ur participated in a ceremony on New Year’s Day in which they climbed the ziggurat to be symbolically married to Inanna, the goddess of fertility, and the Akkadian king Narâm-Sin declared himself a god, thus winning his home city the distinction of being the seat of a divine being. In Egypt, the Pharaoh was technically the highest priest of all, who delegated the necessary rituals to lower ranks.

This does not mean that religion may be reduced to a tool of ruling class oppression. Marx’s understanding was more complex. One of his key statements was made in the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances.[10]

Religion is the product of a human race alienated from itself, oppressed by its system of production. Marx referred to this as an ‘inverted world’, in which humans created gods in their own image and then worshipped them as all-powerful. Far more than a weapon wielded in a class war, it is “the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form... the fantastic realisation of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality.”

As John Raines pointed out, “for Marx the essence of religion is its voicing of ‘suffering’ – its crying out against the realities of exploitation and degradation.”[11] For this reason alone it would be wrong to reject it out of hand – Raines cites the example of Black slaves in the Americas for whom religious songs were a collective expression of their search for dignity. Religion’s obvious failing – not being true – need not concern us from an aesthetic point of view, for reasons we will explore another time. Art is no less valuable for drawing inspiration from fictional deities instead of, say, realistic but equally fictional humans. Religion in ancient times was science, ethics, philosophy and law – our attempt to explain the unexplainable. It was therefore inseparable from art.

Religion is entwined with the cultural products of civilisation to the point that objects with no direct religious purpose must still be understood within the context of that society’s religions if its full meaning is to be explored. Take for example this work from Egypt:

Model of painted wood, ca. 2000 BCE. Photo: Gérard Ducher.

This model seems to be an entirely secular depiction of farmers herding cattle. Yet it was found, among other models, in the tomb of a noble called Meketre. Ancient Egyptian burials often included images of servants performing daily chores, soldiers marching, etc, so that the dead noble might continue to enjoy them in the afterlife. If it were not for religion, this model might never have been made at all.

Obviously no work of art can be reduced to its religious value alone. The Pyramids, for example, embody many meanings simultaneously – they are religious buildings aimed, we believe, at assisting the Pharaoh’s passage to the afterlife; they are the summation of Egyptian mathematics, engineering and construction skills; they are aesthetic creations of great beauty, along with the funerary objects put inside them; and they are massive affirmations of the power of the ruling class. But again: remove religion from this totality, and the Pyramids would simply not have been built.

[1] Herbert Jennings Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology (1928). This has been updated as The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology (2008).
[2] Childe, Man Makes Himself (1936).
[3] Engels, ‘Part 2: Materialism’ from Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886).
[4] This should not be equated with pantheism, a concept which includes ‘belief in many gods’ but also “the belief that God exists in and is the same as all things, animals and people within the universe” (Cambridge Dictionary).
[5] Steve Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (2005).
[6] Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (1964, rev. 1992).
[7] Marx and Engels, ‘Part 1 A: Idealism and Materialism’ from The German Ideology (1845).
[8] Tablet 6 of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
[9] Marx and Engels, op. cit.
[10] Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843).
[11] John Raines, Marx on Religion (2002).

Wednesday, 11 May 2011

The iron revolution

Crisis and revolution: from bronze to iron

Crisis

A dead end for class society

Sunday, 21 November 2010

Grace in the Aegean: The art of the Minoans

Background

Minoan art

Arthur Evans and the remaking of Minoan culture

Writing

Women and Minoan art

The problem of Minoan art

The Thera eruption

Conclusion

Further investigation

Friday, 31 July 2009

Early civilisation: Women in art

Neolithic art

The early civilisations

Ruling class women

Fertility and sexuality

Conclusion

Further reading

Thursday, 16 July 2009

Early civilisation: Art and religion