School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe cultic life of trees: what trees say about people in the prehistoric Aegean, Levant, Egypt and Cyprus( 2016)This thesis examines 43 images of Minoan tree cult as depicted in sphragistic jewellery, portable objects and wall paintings from Late Bronze Age Crete, mainland Greece and the Cyclades. The study also compares the Aegean images with evidence for sacred trees in the Middle and Late Bronze Age Levant, Egypt and Cyprus. The purpose of this research is the production of new interpretations of Minoan images of tree cult. Each of the chapters of the thesis looks at both archaeological and iconographic evidence for tree cult. The Aegean material is, in addition, examined more deeply through the lenses of modified Lacanian psychoanalytic modelling, “new” animism, ethnographic analogy, and a Neo-Marxist hermeneutics of suspicion. It is determined that Minoan images of tree cult depict elite figures performing their intimate association with the numinous landscape through the communicative method of envisioned and enacted epiphanic ritual. The tree in such images is a physiomorphic representation of a goddess type known in the wider eastern Mediterranean associated with effective rulership and with the additional qualities of fertility, nurturance, protection, regeneration, order and stability. The representation of this deity by elite human females in ritual performance functioned to enhance their self-representation as divinities and thus legitimise and concretise the position of elites within the hegemonic structure of Neopalatial Crete. These ideological visual messages were circulated to a wider audience through the reproduction and dispersal characteristic of the sphragistic process, resulting in Minoan elites literally stamping their authority on to the Cretan landscape and hence society.
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ItemInterpreting the wine-dark sea: east Mediterranean marine symbolism( 2014)This thesis is a study of the symbolism connected with the marine themed floor-paintings from the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean palace at Pylos (ca. 1330/15-1200/1190 B.C.E.), and the stone anchor assemblages from the Late Bronze/ Early Iron Age ‘sacred area’, Area II, at Kition, Cyprus (ca. 1300-1050 B.C.E.). Both the marine themed floor-paintings and the stone anchor assemblages have been little studied since they were first published, almost 50 years ago and almost 30 years ago, respectively. Since this time, and especially throughout the last thirty years, theoretical and practical approaches to archaeology, particularly with regard to the study of land- and sea-scapes and artefact symbolism, have greatly advanced, and as a result, interpretive studies of material culture are now more abundant. In addition, archaeologists have been recently experimenting with the idea that the Mediterranean Sea was understood by ancient people as a liminal zone, i.e. an uncontrollable and mysterious space existing on the threshold between the world of the living and the world of the gods, which required specialized knowledge, rituals, and technology to navigate safely. Nevertheless, despite these theoretical developments, which have spawned a large bibliography on symbols, thus far only a small number of studies dealing with material remains from the east Mediterranean region engage with symbols in a critical way, and these studies tend to be focused on iconographic artefacts. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the utility of symbolic theories in understanding both three-dimensional and iconographic material remains. Therefore, contextual analysis and the privileging of multivalent meanings are used to produce new interpretations regarding why the marine themed floor-paintings from Pylos and the stone anchor assemblages from Kition were created, and what they may have meant to the ancient people who produced and utilised them.