ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref
Cretan palaces start sometime after around 4,000 years ago at Knossos and other sites. A pattern seen in Crete & Greece from around 4,000-3,000 years ago.
“The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age Aegean civilization on the island of Crete and the other Aegean Islands, flourishing from around 3000 BC to 1450 BC until a late period of decline, finally ending around 1100 BC. It represents the first advanced civilization in Europe, leaving behind massive building complexes, tools, artwork, writing systems, and a massive network of trade. The civilization was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century through the work of British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. The name “Minoan” derives from the mythical King Minos and was coined by Evans, who identified the site at Knossos with the labyrinth and the Minotaur. The Minoan civilization has been described as the earliest of its kind in Europe,[2] and historian Will Durant called the Minoans “the first link in the European chain”. The Minoan civilization is particularly notable for its large and elaborate palaces up to four stories high, featuring elaborate plumbing systems and decorated with frescoes. The most notable Minoan palace is that of Knossos, followed by that of Phaistos. The Minoan period saw extensive trade between Crete, Aegean, and Mediterranean settlements, particularly the Near East. Through their traders and artists, the Minoans’ cultural influence reached beyond Crete to the Cyclades, the Old Kingdom of Egypt, copper-bearing Cyprus, Canaan, and the Levantine coast, and Anatolia. Some of the best Minoan art is preserved in the city of Akrotiri on the island of Santorini, which was destroyed by the Minoan eruption. The Minoans primarily wrote in the Linear A and also in Cretan hieroglyphs, encoding a language hypothetically labeled Minoan. The reasons for the slow decline of the Minoan civilization, beginning around 1550 BC, are unclear; theories include Mycenaean invasions from mainland Greece and the major volcanic eruption of Santorini.” ref
“The term “Minoan” refers to the mythical King Minos of Knossos. Its origin is debated, but it is commonly attributed to archeologist Arthur Evans (1851–1941). Minos was associated in Greek mythology with the labyrinth. However, Karl Hoeck had already used the title Das Minoische Kreta in 1825 for volume two of his Kreta; this appears to be the first known use of the word “Minoan” to mean “ancient Cretan”. Evans probably read Hoeck’s book, and continued using the term in his writings and findings: “To this early civilization of Crete as a whole I have proposed—and the suggestion has been generally adopted by the archaeologists of this and other countries—to apply the name ‘Minoan’.” Evans said that he applied it, not invented it. Hoeck, with no idea that the archaeological Crete had existed, had in mind the Crete of mythology. Although Evans’ 1931 claim that the term was “unminted” before he used it was called a “brazen suggestion” by Karadimas and Momigliano, he coined its archaeological meaning. And Cretans (Keftiu) are seen in art bringing gifts to Egypt, in the Tomb of Rekhmire, under Pharaoh Thutmosis III (c. 1479-1425 BC).” ref
“Crete is a mountainous island with natural harbors. There are signs of earthquake damage at many Minoan sites, and clear signs of land uplifting and submersion of coastal sites due to tectonic processes along its coast. According to Homer, Crete had 90 cities. Judging by the palace sites, the island was probably divided into at least eight political units at the height of the Minoan period. The vast majority of Minoan sites are found in central and eastern Crete, with few in the western part of the island. There appears to be four major palaces on the island: Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, and Kato Zakros. The north is thought to have been governed from Knossos, the south from Phaistos, the central-eastern region from Malia, the eastern tip from Kato Zakros. Smaller palaces have been found elsewhere on the island.” ref
Major settlements
- “Knossos – the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete. Knossos had an estimated population of 1,300 to 2,000 in 2500 BC, 18,000 in 2000 BC, 20,000 to 100,000 in 1600 BC and 30,000 in 1360 BC.
- Phaistos – the second-largest palatial building on the island, excavated by the Italian school shortly after Knossos
- Malia – the subject of French excavations, a palatial center which provides a look into the proto-palatial period
- Kato Zakros – sea-side palatial site excavated by Greek archaeologists in the far east of the island, also known as “Zakro” in archaeological literature
- Galatas – confirmed as a palatial site during the early 1990s
- Agia Triada – administrative center near Phaistos which has yielded the largest number of Linear A tablets.
- Gournia – town site excavated in the first quarter of the 20th century
- Pyrgos – early Minoan site in southern Crete
- Vasiliki – early eastern Minoan site which gives its name to distinctive ceramic ware
- Fournou Korfi – southern site
- Pseira – island town with ritual sites
- Mount Juktas – the greatest Minoan peak sanctuary, associated with the palace of Knossos
- Arkalochori – site of the Arkalochori Axe
- Karfi – refuge site, one of the last Minoan sites
- Akrotiri – settlement on the island of Santorini (Thera), near the site of the Thera Eruption
- Zominthos – mountainous city in the northern foothills of Mount Ida” ref
MINOAN TRADE ROUTES
“Minoan influence in the Bronze Age can be traced through archaeology. On the island of Melos, there are architectural remnants, pottery, and frescoes in Cretan style, similar to those on Thera. Farther north, there is evidence of Minoan settlement i on the island of Kea. In the eastern Aegean, Minoan pottery has been found in Rhodes. Minoan artifacts and cooking equipment have been found at Miletus, a city in Anatolia that would have attracted the Cretans for its proximity to sources of metal. Thucydides’ vision of ancient Crete was a thalassocracy, from the Greek words thalassa, meaning “sea,” and kratos, meaning “power.” This notion may well reflect the historian’s concerns with naval power in the region in his own day more than the reality of ancient Crete. Modern historians tend to view Crete as a less aggressive power that used its naval expertise to dominate trade rather than to conquer. Despite the importance of Crete to ancient Greek civilization, the archaeological study of its culture is relatively recent. Some of the earliest traces of a powerful, Bronze Age civilization were uncovered in the 19th century. British archaeologist Arthur Evans discovered extensive ruins on Crete in the early 1900s. In honor of the legendary King Minos, he termed the civilization he uncovered “Minoan.” Archaeological evidence shows that during the third millennium B.C. Crete lay at the center of an extensive trading network dealing in copper from the Cyclades and tin from Asia Minor. These materials were essential for producing bronze, a commodity that brought power and prestige to the Minoans. In the second millennium B.C., great palaces began to be built on Crete during the period known as the Neopalatial (circa 1700-1490 B.C.). Evans excavated several of these structures, including the magnificent Palace of Knossos, seat of the legendary King Minos. More recent archaeological digs have demonstrated that Crete was widely urbanized during this period and that Knossos exercised some kind of hegemony over other Cretan cities. The mid-second millennium B.C. seemed a time of great prosperity. Although many Minoan structures have been given the secular term “palace,” researchers believe their role was not a royal one. It has never been firmly established whether Minoan Crete had a true royal dynasty, so these lavish palaces may have had mixed secular and religious roles. Some archaeologists interpret these palaces more as civic centers from which to control and distribute raw materials, carry out rituals, mete out justice, maintain water distribution, and also organize festivals for the populace. Daily life was, for the majority, simple but comfortable. Islanders lived in houses made of stone, mud brick, and wood, and the domestic economy was based on viticulture and olive farming. The surrounding cypress forests provided timber for shipbuilding for the important Minoan fleet.” ref
“During the Late Minoan period (1570-1425 B.C.), nautical decorations were popular on pottery It was common to cover the whole surface of a vessel with paintings of creatures such as octopuses, fish, or dolphins. The Aegina Treasure is a trove of gold artifacts, like this two-headed pendant, featuring strong Minoan characteristics. Dating to between 1850 and 1550 B.C., it is named for the island. As the Minoan upper classes grew increasing wealthy, they imported luxuries—jewelry and precious stones—which provided extra incentive to develop new trading routes for Crete’s exports: timber, pottery, and textiles. Little evidence has been found of city walls or fortifications built on ancient Crete during this time. This finding seems to suggest that either there were no serious threats to the island or—more likely—that patrolling ships were enough to guard its coastlines. A maritime force would have also protected the trading routes, harbors, and strategic points, such as Amnisos, the port that served the capital, Knossos. As Minoan culture and trade radiated across the Aegean, communities on the islands of the Cyclades and the Dodecanese (near the coast of modern-day Turkey) were radically changed through contact with Crete. Cretan fashions became very popular in the eastern Mediterranean. Local island elites first acquired Cretan pottery and textiles as a symbol of prestige. Later, the presence of Minoan merchants also prompted island communities far from Knossos to adopt Crete’s standard system of weights and measures.” ref
“Perhaps the clearest sign of Minoan influence was the appearance of its writing system in the languages of later cultures. Characteristics of Crete’s letters appear to have used several forms. One of the oldest was discovered by Arthur Evans and is now known as Linear A. Despite not yet being deciphered, scholars believe it is the local language of Minoan Crete. But it must have been an important regional common language of its day, as Linear A has been found inscribed on many of the clay vessels discovered on islands across the Aegean. The other script, called Linear B, evolved from Linear A. Deciphered in the 1950s, Linear B is recognized as the oldest known Greek dialect. The Minoans also maintained trading relationships with Egypt, Syria, and the Greek mainland. Their trade routes may have extended as far west as Italy and Sicily. Certain locations had especially close ties with Crete and its sailors. These included Miletus on the Anatolian peninsula on Crete’s eastern trading route. The city of Akrotiri on the island of Thera (modern-day Santorini) is one of the best preserved of these Minoan settlements. A volcanic eruption around the 16th century B.C. buried Akrotiri under ash, preserving its ruins which were excavated in the 19th and 20th centuries. Digs in the 1960s and ’70s unearthed a wealthy city with many distinctive Minoan features. Its walls boasted stunning murals of brightly colored, stylized images of sparring boxers, climbing monkeys, swimming dolphins, and flying birds. The quality of the paintings uncovered at Akrotiri suggests that artists either from Crete or influenced by its culture had set up workshops in this city.” ref
“Other Aegean settlements bearing clear evidence of Minoan influence include the Cycladi islands of Melos and Kea, and islands in the Dodecanese, such as Rhodes. The settlement of Kastri, on the island of Cythera, south of the Peloponnesian peninsula of the Greek mainland, is another example of Cretan cultural power. Built to exploit the local stocks of murex—a mollusk highly prized for its purple ink used for dyeing cloth—Kastri is purely Minoan in its urban planning. But even this town was not a colony. There is no evidence that these places were politically subject to Crete, as it is not believed that they paid any kind of tribute beyond the money exchanged when trading goods. Minoan civilization declined by the late 15th century B.C., but the exact cause is unknown. One theory is that the volcanic eruption on Thera damaged other cities along Minoan trade routes, which hurt Crete economically. Taking all the evidence available, the volcano did not directly affect life on Crete—about 70 miles to the south. No damage from the eruption has been found there. Crete’s cities seemed unaffected for at least a few generations after the volcano. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of an invasion in the mid-15th century B.C. Many sites, including several large palaces in central and southern Crete were burned, and many settlements were abandoned shortly thereafter. The invaders most likely overthrew the Minoan government and took control of the island, ending the era of Crete’s dominance. Despite its abrupt ending, the influence of Crete survived. Its vibrant culture made a major impact on the rising new regional power: the Mycenaean Greeks, who lauded King Minos and Crete in their mythology. Linear B, the Cretan writing system adopted by the Mycenaeans, would be the basis for the Greek in which the poet Homer would write his two masterpieces.” ref
“Soles explores the fact that many Pre-Palatial tombs were “maintained in good condition for centuries”. “The distribution and ownership of land in ancestor-worshipping societies is widespread. This is because the land belongs to the ancestors, and is held in trust to be passed down.” And, Soles adds, “The erection of actual buildings at specific locations in order to house, honor and provide access to ancestors is a common phenomenon in the ethnographic record.” “Death and renewal remained linked in cult through all the periods of Minoan history,” Marinatos notes. Hence in her view, the ceremonies on the Agia Triada larnax “preserve the essence of Minoan ritual as it was established already in the Pre-Palatial period” (31; dated to the end of Late Minoan III or after 1370). The details present these relationships such as, a priestess (wearing blue) who pours a sacrificed bull’s blood into a blue vessel, and its contents will be “soaked up by the earth” for the person joining the ancestors. The dead must be propitiated to ensure a bountiful return from nature, the regeneration of crops, and human life. Or a priestess fulfills this reciprocity before a doubled Labrys and a doubled pair of horns, with a green tree centered between them. With the blood offerings made, the vessel for drink (which is sometimes a symbol of rain: Evans Palace 4: 453) and the fruit-bowl before her eyes seem to register a hoped-for agricultural return. The motif repeated on the priestess’ skirt is similar to Linear B writing-signs for “cereals” (for examples see Evans Palace 4: 624-5). On these practical and religious bases, the generations who made Knossos the center of Minoan cosmology were “likely to have enjoyed [an] egalitarian society…in which the small farms and country villas and townhouses that [in time, came to] dot the landscape in the New Palace period were not so much manifestations of a landed aristocracy as they were evidence for the existence of a large middle class of free, land-owning people.” In a phrase, Crete was what Schoep’s 2002 “Palace State” called a religion-centered heterarchy; meaning, a fiercely diverse and fluidly factional civilization with many centers and shared religious ways. If theocratic signifies central and compelling religious ideas, heterarchic suggests secular “real world” understandings about them, among proudly different and independent parties.” ref
“A third ancient continuity cannot be ignored. Minoans mounted over 1000 years of bull-leaping games, events surrounded from Early to Late with timely festivals and, above all, feasting. The volumes of Aegaeum are replete with generations of feasts across a time when Egyptians devoted about 100 days per year to their banquets and pastimes, as MacGillivray notes. He dates these events in Crete as early as 2600 BCE, and they point to annual cycles of Festival whose religious and practical functions were central parts of life. Perhaps our guide forward should be the “time line for what happened next” provided in the Abstract published with Driessen and Macdonald’s 1997 Troubled Island—although debated, still one of the most detailed comprehensive studies of these last Minoan periods. Early forms that seem to address or anticipate an 8½-year lunar/solar cycle, Island is based in a view of “complete cultural continuity” from Middle into Late Minoan times.” ref
“Wiener details many apparent political changes, most in Knossos’ favor, through and after the Middle Minoan III (or circa 1700) destructions that ended their Old Palace period. Plenitude brought increases in population, expansions of old living-places (Crete’s many “villas”), and new settlements including “palatial style” buildings. Scholars of the villa system note “social structure but not, in view of the integration of house and village, social division”. Driessen and Macdonald look back into Middle Minoan times (roughly 1700-1600), and then examine the New Palace era, or what happened after the ensuing 1600 “tectonic earthquake” (which was to be only the first half of Thera’s eruption). Hence, toward the middle of the next period (1600-1480, or Late Minoan I A), they find the explosion of the volcano, its ash-fall, tsunamis, and after-effects: in their view, between the 1550s and 1530s. (Moody points out that for all the studies of ash-fall and more, the eruption’s date is no more “absolute” than 1650-1150. After that, the damaged landscape’s “limited capacity” and other factors reduced Crete’s population.” ref
“Their Abstract’s time line, slightly clarified below, begins with events that next unfolded after the 1480 dawn of Late Minoan I B—the period that culminated in clear Mycenaean domination of Crete, and which along the way brought wholesale destruction everywhere except Knossos. Here is their outline of the times in which the Bull Leap fresco and Great Year calendar possibly played their parts: …A severe economic dislocation…appears to have been triggered, first, by a tectonic earthquake [1600], and shortly afterwards, by the eruption of Thera [1550-1530]. The situation gradually worsened, accompanied by a general feeling of uncertainty caused by the eruption and its effects. The tectonic earthquake led to abandonments at some sites, or to an effort to rebuild at others, in an attempt to reestablish normal economic and social life. The results of these two natural disasters gave local centers greater independence from the traditional “Palaces.” The natural events that proved to be the catalysts for change presaged the end of the traditional ruling elites, who appeared to have lost their assumed divine support. They tried in vain to maintain their special status.” ref
“But, with major problems in the production and distribution of food, the existing system disintegrated. [This was] a process of decentralization, with an increase in the regional exploitation of land, chiefly for local consumption. Numerous lesser elites may well have prospered in this environment. However…the fragmentation of Crete into many small centers may have led to internal Cretan conflict. A massive wave of fire destructions [swept through the period from 1480-1425, or Late Minoan IB], indicating a state of anarchy by the end of the period. This fragmentation of Minoan Crete brought about the end of the most highly developed economic system in the Aegean. It was somewhat resurrected…during the succeeding Mycenaean period [1425 through the late 1300s; or, Late Minoan II and III]; during which only the palace at Knossos seems to have functioned as a major center. There was a gradual but general decrease in the sophistication of architecture and arts. This period may perhaps be regarded as the final phase of the decline that began [after 1480, with the widespread destruction of main Minoan sites]. Some major centers suffered destruction once again. [As of about 1425], a new Knossian elite or dynasty appears to have taken control, and installed a modified socio-political and economic system….” ref
“These conditions—a spirited creative resilience, followed by one disintegrative stress after another—might signify, or demand, focused efforts toward improved calendric precision. Timing underwrites agriculture and the rhythms of ceremonial life that foster effective organization. As noted from Wright (1995: 68), “uncontrolled variables” had to make “ritual activities” a “major concern”; and according to Wiener’s estimates, “the numbers [were] vast everywhere,” with more people than before “participating in mass rituals” and/or “larger work forces”. Island notes that Crete’s transition-years from Middle to Late periods had seen about 33% less-centralized storage of foodstuffs, “perhaps related to a better monitoring of agricultural production”. An inspired beginning might grow the more determined in a deepening crisis.” ref
“Although that food-storage trend reversed when the later problems arose, the century between the 1700 and 1600 earthquakes saw three or four Minoan generations building on their inheritance before the main disasters; then, five generations trying to respond to crises before the destructions began around 1480. Altogether, that is a period as long as United States history. Whichever generation may have created the Bull Leap fresco and brought together elements of a Great Year calendar, all of them had motive, means and opportunity before the time of outright “anarchy” began. Some research since Island has disputed some of its central characterizations of these times. J. S. Soles, for example (in his 1999 “Collapse”), finds that through the harshest decades after 1480, “food remained plentiful,” although because of more intense and “well-documented” land-cultivation. At worst, to quote one of Soles’ sources in volcanology, “Minoans had to tighten their belts for a year or two”. This largely agreed with Sewell’s 2001 evaluation of all Thera’s aspects (Section 8.3). According to Warren’s 2001 Island review, the eruption presented “challenges” for years, but few that Minoans had not faced before.” ref
“Soles rejected Island’s account of Thera’s impact on Crete, meaning near-famine, reduced population and the “fragmentation” of Late Minoan life. He judged that Minoan “reverence” was “too pervasive and too intense in all periods” for them to have desecrated and destroyed their own religious centers. Soles instead saw “alien intruders,” Mycenaeans, raiding Crete through the decades after Thera, across “one or two generations” whose elders had never before known such insecurity. Warren’s review could not reconcile Island’s account with a Minoan realm simultaneously at a new height of multiple powers. Stresses, however, might have turned the central strength of the Minoan system—its ability to respond to challenges “because of its dispersal of power into a number of quasi-autonomous palatial centers” (Soles)—into a liability. For Soles, a gradual collapse occurred between the pressure to feed a rising population, the need to turn farm-laborers into warriors for defense, and the eventual conquest of Crete’s main centers including Knossos, where “the large supplies of food [were] stored”. As Haysom notes also, more evidence is needed.” ref
“Either conception of Late Crete’s conditions can inform the examples ahead were elements of a possible Great Year calendar came into play. In both conceptions, food and the control of public food supplies were increasingly the base of power and a decisive element leading to “desperate choices” (Island 54, 103). A calendar attuned to ecology (maximizing food production), and to astronomy (yielding apparent “command of nature”), would be an instrument of power. Let us look further into social and other contexts based in the central, agreed Late evidence of what happened. Island and Soles’ “Reverence” agree that after 1600 (into New Palace times), elements of Crete’s “large middle class of free, land-owning people” were emerging as “new elites.” Their families comprised “a new managerial and redistributive bureaucracy,” with close kinship, reciprocal relations, and obligations to Crete’s “secondary elite,” the families established in the country villa system.” ref
“Together they raised new centers and grand residences along the coasts and fertile river-valleys, besides repairing the New Palace. “Never before had such tremendous effort been put into devising architectural schemes that gave sophistication and lightness to a building” (Island 41). While so much creative labor may have gone toward the “legitimization of certain elites,” it went into projects that stressed “group identity and prestigious labor” (45): a spirit not unlike that which built Egypt’s public monuments and Pyramids. Ceremonial practices anchored by the ancestors, festivals, and bull-leaping had given independent Minoans strong values in common. As conditions worsened with each Late decade, changes in social patterns measured them. It appears that some of these families raised houses encroaching on Knossos precincts. The masons’ marks on the best “ashlar” buildings included Labrys and star (41), while the lack of their own food-stores might also have signaled palace connection and dependency (53). Others built or developed old sites into “near-palaces” that signaled (in Soles’ conception) more of the same “dispersed” power; or, in Island’s view, increasing “fragmentation.” ref
“The New Labyrinth reflected new divisions, a new inequality and/or insecurity (Island)—well before the destructions began around 1480. These changes, visible above in this Old vs. New Palace comparison (in Moody’s 1987 “Prestige”), reduced and restricted access. In a Driessen/Macdonald phrase describing Vathypetrou, “permeability became linear and locked”. At the same time, Marinatos noted a marked increase of public pomp and ritual: “perhaps,” according to Hatzaki, “reducing social tensions among the many,” and reinforcing “the leading role of the few, who would have been closely linked to the ideological and economic supremacy of the Palace.” Island characterized these new programs as “propaganda”—again, to legitimize the new generation(s) of Knossos’ “managers,” whose “redistributive” powers of course concerned food and wealth. In a sense, these elites were simultaneously separating from the general population, and reaching out to them.” ref
“Reassuring symbols, ceremonies, and festivals might blunt the new divisions while imposing them. Perhaps this double aspect reflected a conflict of loyalties inside Knossos: one strongly traditional toward Cretans, and one less so. Because the pieces of evidence of Mycenaean roles and influences in these changes must be understood in Minoan contexts, let us first look further into Crete. Possibly, amid Knossos’ increasing affiliations with the mainland, Crete’s main population-based in their ancestors, in kinship, general equality, and independence—were as much the people “separating,” in some ways, from a Knossos that was failing them; and failing them in regard to more than warding off Thera’s eruption and its effects. Propaganda is a body of statements—claims and promises—from people who want to be believed about them. What remains to discover is the substance of this Late propaganda’s message. How did a few central symbols from Knossos present Minoans with the suggestion that their elites might have divine sanction? Seals, painted ritual vases, ceremonial equipment, jewelry, textiles: these were some of the central media carrying Knossos’ message into daily life, ceremonies, and socio-political practice.” ref
“According to studies of Crete’s scores of peak sanctuaries, all but 8 of these high-country ceremonial centers were abandoned in the midst of Knossos’ Late-period efforts at consolidation of religious and social power. Calendric efforts in the wind, inspired perhaps by the actual and consistent Great Year cycles in the sky, would have to be broadcast through the culture. Promises had to concern things ardently desired by people at that time. Whatever Knossos’ motives, their efforts had to speak in familiar Minoan terms to have a chance of broad adoption in a culture devoted to continuity. If part of the Knossos response to Late crises was in calendric terms, the forms they selected for their divine propaganda should reflect it. As Frankel and Webb note about the distribution of “distinctive” artifacts that “imply restricted access to esoteric knowledge,” such forms were “likely to have been closely linked to the dynamics of identity negotiation”.” ref
“For some people, riches and status themselves prove divine sanction and powers. Yet, this propaganda’s substantive content has remained as opaque as Labrys. In fact, along with some few surviving stone vessels in the shapes of Bull and Lion (Island 66), and the cults of Snake that Evans and Nilsson termed “canonical” through Late times, we find Labrys a main element among these Late signs of power—as noted, literally elevated to new heights of display and levels of distribution. The pair of vases above, dated to the last Middle period (about 1650-1600), show that Late Knossos had already created variations of Labrys that could speak to its most-troubled times (more below). Three other preexisting symbols most commonly deployed were the Sacral Knot, Marine Style pottery, and “horns of consecration.” Troubled Island’s chapters, charts, and its Gazetteer are packed with details showing these artifacts’ discoveries together. Marine Style vessels, for example, reached 23 settlements, and D’Agata studied “horns” at 12 sites.” ref
“Why would a Knossos elite, trying to re-negotiate their Minoan identity, calculate that these particular symbols might better unite, reassure and/or reconcile people toward a new political order? Let us look at each and at all together in their ways, and see how they might relate to a Minoan Great Year calendar. If we remember how important a calendar was/is to the most efficient production of food, then Labrys as its possible prime symbol would be key to the promises within Late Knossos propaganda. We have seen how, in MacGillivray’s words, Labrys “could symbolize the marriage of the sun and moon, perhaps the union of the solar and lunar calendar” (“Astral Labyrinth”). Like the powers that came with the throne itself, built from its solar alignment and lunar symbol (and from which, more appears below), Labrys might have embodied a natural cycle whose forms were adapted into religious, social, and political practices; in order to promote and ensure the smooth, perhaps-cyclical transitions of executive power (Chapter 8). Relating Bull (as part of the “horns” complex of meanings) to forms of power, Nikoloudis notes the ancient links between tauros and the Indo-European verbal root “to stand”—with senses suggesting “steadfast” and “sturdy”. Such was one meaning also of Egypt’s Djed Pillar.” ref
“The forms of Labrys that become most common in Late times have vegetal features—visual signs that it lives, and perhaps that through conformity with its (calendric) principles, the world of nature can be renewed and sustained at levels of abundance. Evans noted a Minoan “tendency to link themselves with vegetable forms”. Given the ways already shown that Labrys points from the underworld to this life and Beyond, we might call these promises the big three, for the power they have exerted in propaganda throughout history: A) food in plenty, B) ceremonial, social and political order, and C) a way to the afterlife. With the clear Middle-period “anticipations” of vegetal Labrys forms, Island dates the example at right to a time after Knossos suffered west wing fire-damage, near the very start of the destructions all over Crete (after 1480). The 4-point wheel and doublings (8 points) round a central sphere present Great Year forms, while adding 12 vegetal points in 3’s (possibly, moons and seasons). The links between natural cycles (crops and food), orderly production, social balance, and religion seem apparent in this form, the vegetal aspect an appealing practical and spiritual one in an environment either increasingly short of food, or more concerned with its storage and security for other reasons (ahead). Evans considered Labrys intimately connected with the cult of the dead, and this chapter’s final shreds of evidence will suggest how. These Late examples seem to suggest Labrys as the flower and center of nature, while connecting the double ax also to the throne’s disc-and-crescent. How—the meaning of these “promises”—will appear, again, through the final pieces of evidence.” ref
“Evans noted that Sacral Knots were parts of Minoan tradition as old as Labrys, dating many examples to at least Middle Minoan III (circa 1700); but their precise meanings have remained obscure. We saw New Palace seals which, as “knots” held together by Snake, perhaps embodied the four calendric beasts. According to Rutter’s Internet resources, Sacral Knots were a “popular” feature in the troubled times after 1480 (Late Minoan IB), and they too were sometimes fused with Labrys, as shown below. What can we learn of their meanings and functions as part of Late Knossos’ “divine propaganda”? How might Sacral Knots connect with the needs and claims of a new Minoan elite, and (if at all) with a Great Year calendar? Let us look at the best available clues. Sacral Knots had several forms: perhaps first in the hair of women, priestesses and deities, and those worn by Minoan sailors.” ref
“In Egypt, “she-knots” denoted women’s “holy mysteries” (Budge Dwellers 189, 250): Isis cut a lock of her hair to safeguard the soul of dead Osiris. When she unbound her hair and shook it out over him, his resurrection began (Budge Gods of Egypt). Later Greece’s Three Fates or Moerae spun, measured, and cut every person’s life-thread from their hair. And the power of a knot to bind or control forces was evident in Homer’s Odyssey when sailors untied the knotted bag from wind-god Aiolos (X, I), and in “Circe of the braided tresses.” Binding and unleashing power, protection through a bond, transformation, and resurrection might be reasonable associations to explore. Some Knots were made of costly ivory or faience, and painted or physically mounted on a wall, as if produced and posted to the purpose of some social meaning. They also often appeared with figure-8 shields. While shields are sometimes read as “thunder” signs, they are as frequently literal shields, another possible connection to Minoan “men in the service” on land and sea. This was, after all, the period of Crete’s greatest influence in the Aegean and Mediterranean. If these Knots were almost the one sign of a cultural practice on Minoan sailors, they must have borne important meanings.” ref
“Sometimes in textile form, Knots were tied around a pillar, an act Evans related to a later ritual “sleeping-in” within sight of them. To bind a circle around a symbol for life itself, evoking the image of a snake entwined around it, and then to seek out a visionary dream in its presence might connect to traditions (at Neolithic Malta and Catal Huyuk) of women or priestesses sleeping in proximity to tombs and snakes, both embodiments of the dead. In the seal images just above, the probably-dead bull-leaper and doubled Sacral Knots might be one image for “binding prayers” for the resurrection of people lost in many life-threatening endeavors. Below, we see how Labrys and the Sacral Knot at times became one sign, which Marinatos reads as “life” because of its similarity to the Egyptian ankh. It seems significant that this bound-together sign should be found in Minoan skies, as above (though the object was found at Mycenae). Beside it we see likely signs for rain (the vessel), for grain (the stalk descending), and a magnificent tree, toward which a man reaches while climbing upward and the central female whirls in a cosmic dance. To the right, a “chrysalis” with a Sacral Knot behind it unfolds the potential new or reborn creature still within. Lowe Fri found “a” butterfly along with “a” Sacral Knot (and bulls’ heads) incised on double axes.” ref
“Labrys in the sky” might not surprise us, but why fused with a Sacral Knot? In times of increasing stress on communities, rich offerings to collective causes are called for and/or come forward in recognition of common threats and interests. Sailors and warriors were sons of families and clans. Supporting them in their services in both practical and religious terms might have been a reason for “civilians” to obtain a Sacral Knot—the right to wear one or to post one in public and ceremonial form. Defense of Crete and its trade required all the labor and manpower that Soles (above) saw being drained from Minoan agriculture in its post-1480 crescendo of violence. Watrous recently found evidence of a large wall and “tower” defending Gournia from seaborne (not inland) attack. A Knossos elite had to be bound by the same reciprocal relations governing Crete’s classes, and had to bestow the rewards at its command in respect for crucial contributions, including children. Such relations and political strategies may have informed Mycenaean life as well, given the examples above and below-right.” ref
“Clearly, “binding forces together” was a message old in Crete before its “twilight,” and an appealing one as their Late fortunes declined. Enlistments of family-members, contributions of labor and wealth in exchange for the status rewards of posting civic participation, solidarity in the midst of cultural crises and struggles—and a hope of reunion with the ancestors, waiting in the astral afterlife Beyond, as reward for maximum effort and contribution here. To post a Sacral Knot in the sky around Labrys (in conjunction with the above-listed other signs) might represent another part of Knossos’ Late propaganda-promises: food, order, and afterlife. If these efforts “failed” as Island says, or seemed to fail in the face of increasing violence, they might have turned in “a generation or two” into motives for widespread resentment and rebellion. As Island argues, the pressures of living more closely together than before, and of having to devote formerly public ritual space to domestic service and food-storage, would have degraded the bond-supportive meanings of those places; and, in turn, many human bonds. Again, however, Labrys in this connection seems to be deployed in Late forms as the core of a hopeful, proffered formula for plenitude, security, order, and rebirth.” ref
“Those would be the levels of cultural work where we might expect to find a calendar and cosmology: enabling a society to sustain and empower its connections with nature, through a set of observations (like the Great Year cycle) mixed with “beliefs” or propositions for making the most of them, in practical, social, political and religious affairs. A Late Knossos elite whose best option meant pouring gold into mainland Shaft Graves needed to appropriate multiple home traditions. Wedding Sacral Knots to Labrys in the sky, they might have promised eternal care over Minoan sons and family interests; and so tried to enlist the powers of family bonds to their own “divine” benefit. The gestures at least seem visible in relation to the central sign of the Bull Leap fresco calendar. The Marine Style element of Late Knossos’ “divine propaganda” was in part a new kind of Minoan recognition of the sea, which had mothered their race, made them rich, and then done them so much damage through Thera and its tsunamis. Evans found “some” Marine Style in the last Middle period, a rise to importance after 1600, and then its “rush” to production through the destructive decades after 1480—along with another increase in the appearance of “horns of consecration” (Island), to explore last here.” ref
“Perhaps people demanded ceremonial recognitions of the powers that had struck them by sea and air. Some attribute Marine Style vessels to the influence of refugee artists from Thera. Or, Knossos had begun to recognize or appropriate a Mycenaean sea-deity, Potidan, Poseidon (Island). Evans showed that Marine elements such as shells were known as early as any other religious aspect. He also speculated (2: 542) that while Minoans were including pumice, shells, and other sea-objects in ritual places (Island 97), they built “many” new pillar crypts into the Little Palace next to Knossos, as if with some “expiatory” motive that, implicitly, relates to Minoan ancestors and cosmology. Was this a sign of Minoan feeling that, given their disasters and increasing mainland pressures, they had gone astray from reliable ways? While the Snake Goddesses seem to have been “put away” in some further adaptation of central ceremony, it is probably a coincidence that Marine Style included an “8 or 9” Great Year feature in its forms of octopi. Labrys’ other new aspects as part of this will appear. As one measure of its ascendancy, by the time Crete’s destructions had subsided into Mycenaean domination (circa 1425), it was the substance of a Labyrinth ceiling pattern (at left below); possibly as protection, from above, against seismic forces. Before long (circa 1400), Marine Style mingled with a vegetal form of Labrys between horns, below at right. Marinatos reads this combination as “a mini-model of the universe,” showing Labrys’ reach into “the upper and lower worlds.” ref
“While no calendric element seems appreciable among Marine Style motifs, the final element in Late Knossos “propaganda,” “horns of consecration,” returns us first by way of Mount Ida to the Knossos throne. Mount Ida with its pair of horns is the peak at right. Close to the center of Ida’s northern face is the Idaean Cave (long one of Crete’s most important, along with Dikte). Yet, we do not have to think of Mount Ida to see, below, the twin peaks of the mountain in the face of the throne, below its disc and crescent. Banou’s comprehensive history of expert debate (over “horns of consecration” as references mainly to Bull, or something more) reflects new contemporary opinion—that Minoan “horns” were at least as connected with the concepts of “mountain[s]” and “horizon”). As forms, sun, moon and horned mountain are seamlessly part of one another in the Knossos throne. Given all that we (may) know about the calendric connections built into this central artifact, let us see if we can read why it presents moon and sun centered above a horned mountain.” ref
“Two other examples of this mountain come from an Akkadian seal, and from an Egyptian tomb-painting. At left, Babylon’s “Shamash,” a god of justice, mounts upward from the horned mountain toward sun, moon, and likely Pole Star. At right, the djew sign for mountain is used to express a massive Egyptian harvest of grain—and grain, as on the Agia Triada larnax where we began this chapter, was always the primary gift returned to mortals by the dead after receipt of their proper ceremonial offerings and honors. Plenitude, steadfast social order through the honor of the ancestors, and the afterlife appear entwined in the mountain’s many meanings. A basic one was that the djew (or “mountain,”) denoted in part The Land of the Dead, the necropolis of tombs that Egyptians had made of their “wilderness” lands east and west of the Nile. And we saw similarities between the akhet (or “horizon of the sun,” above right) and the widespread, long-held, and many-formed figure of a person or divinity “with upraised arms,” including New Year and rebirth.” ref
“Horns as a figure of a mountain do not dispense with their relations to Bull, or with D’Agata’s and the Hallagers’ views of them as “a clear symbol of territorial power.” In Late times, horns were important aspects of 12 sites from Knossos to Zakros. As in the model shrine and seal-impression above (and, by wide agreement in research), horns pointed to the sanctity and authority of sites where they were posted (Marinatos “Kingship”). Again above, horns—their ancestral meanings, their referents in cycles of astronomy and hence their doublings–date from at least the last period of the Old or Proto-Palatial Knossos. In Rethemiotakis’ 2009 reconstruction of a very Late “model” from a peak sanctuary, a doubled pair of horns also flank the central point. On the Agia Triada larnax we found a tree in the central place: in these “models” as at left above, a niche or door. Both connect this world and Beyond. (Marinatos 2010, 194 notes that “Minoans deliberately played with the form: horns look like mountain peaks” and vice-versa.) For Hitchcock, horns marked “transitional spaces” in the architecture of ceremonial places. Troubled Island is clear that Knossos never “dominated” Crete except in symbolic terms. It seems we have to look beyond a Bull’s brute force to understand this “horned mountain” better, and what it might have offered for so long to a society of families rooted in kinship.” ref
In Egypt, the original meaning of ka was “bull,” and its sign was a pair of upraised arms. It was often “the symbol of an embrace, a greeting, an act of worship, the protection of a man by his ka, or a sign of praise, although other interpretations are possible”. “When depicted with the arms squared off at the elbow and extended so as to embrace, it is thought to represent the life force being passed to an individual by gods or the creator” (Isler). For all the complexity of the term—the ka as one part of an Egyptian soul, and as the very source of being, in one’s ancestors—there might be ways to understand these relationships to the dead and to astronomy.“To return to one’s Ka” was to rejoin ancestors and family, the people from whom one received life. The way to access the ancestors was in many traditions through the use of a construction called a niche, or a “false door” threshold between the living and the dead: a transitional space encountered in the midst of ceremony. The Egyptian, Theran, and Minoan conceptions above are types of these structures. “Mountain” is clearly a part of the Aegean and Minoan examples shown here, including at its highest point (in the detail above from a Zakros stone rhyton), between the horns of wild goats, a shape that Marinatos (Religion) links to the Knossos throne. According to Isler’s study of niches and false doors (which agrees with Marinatos’ Religion), the dead, in turn, received revivifying effects from offerings, and as well from the alignments of these tomb-portals with the sun at chosen times of the year. As a Pyramid Text stated at the moment of the king’s “ascension to the celestial realm,” “The doors of the sky are opened” (Shafer).” ref
“And it was from such a mountain, through a door’s transitional space, that the goddess Hathor emerged as shown at left above, “showing forth” and manifesting new life born of the immortal dead. Egypt’s widely-popular cow-goddess and “daily companion” of the Solar Bull left evidence in Crete from Old Palace times in the sistrum; and Hathor appears in post-Minoan art in Egypt. It is she (or “Wazet of Buto,” Evans) emerging likewise from a “field of rushes,” welcoming the deceased to the afterlife. Hathor’s links to the protection of the dead, and to the stars and sky, articulate connections between the mountain, the dead in their underworld, and the Beyond. Banou noted a seal image showing a doubled pair of horns “in the sky” over a sacrificed Bull, and found them redundant unless they reflected a “wider abstract meaning” for ritual with “celestial” associations.” ref
“Not every Minoan peak sanctuary—the birthplaces of Minoan religion—included a “horned” mountain or a view of one. But while Krattenmaker notes that “the mountain” had “much to do with the character of Minoan kingship” and “the sources of its power,” neither she nor Marinatos seem to make the crucial connection between “the mountain” and the all-important Minoan ancestors. Peak sanctuaries fundamentally position their living celebrants between the sky with its moon, sun, and stars, and the ancestral underworld with its tombs, niches, caves, and pillars. “The mountain,” especially a horned one, seems to embody the realm of the dead protected by this deity (Marinatos Warrior); to manifest their “risen” status with its upraised points or “arms”; and as shown in Chapter 1, the dead were commonly believed to live on as well in the sky. “The mountain” thus points from and connects “below” to “above.” The “Snake Tube” above at right, from Gournia’s Late shrine, with its disc between horns at the top, presents a like configuration. While Cadogan suggests it should be called a “stand” because of uncertain connections with snakes, J. and M. Shaw, writing of excavations at Kommos, described the same functions and meanings in these objects, symbolically connecting earth (in the “snake handles”) and the sky (above, with the disc; and on other such tubes, birds).” ref
“Access to the ancestors and a share in their life-eternal—promised in “horns,” and in their mountain-form, graven into the Knossos throne—were central concerns for Minoan generations. Display-processions such as “the god-king going up the mountain of the ancestors” had been a convention of rulership since Babylon. As Watrous observed in exploring Minoan-Egyptian connections, one of the key tenets of a religion-centered society was that, by following the way of society, one gained a place in the Beyond. The ancestors promise back grain, plenitude, and life-eternal for their honors. Living boughs, Labrys, X-forms weave these meanings together between the horns. The Minoan mountain in the throne room, however, upholds and is crowned with the solar disc and crescent lunar horns. Hence, if a Great Year cycle was (or was trying to be) “the” Minoan organizing principle, a Great Year cosmos would be the visible capital principle of spiritual relationship and access to the ancestors. As Hitchcock observed, the only other truly “monumental” horns were found near Knossos, atop a mountain—Juktas, the tomb of a dying and resurrected god.” ref
According to Pietrovito, it was in these Late times that Labrys began to be “socketed” and “monumentalized” as never before: it was posted atop pillars and between horns, not as “a replacement of either, but [as] a new symbol of the two combined”. Briault’s 2007 study of long-term ritual practices focuses on the Minoan double ax, horns of consecration, and their combined ‘composite symbol’. Her careful chronological inventory finds double axes most prevalent ‘as a marker of temporary cult places inside settlements’ and, outside them, as a ‘votive offering’ at peak and cave sanctuaries. These findings coincide with others suggesting the double ax’s associations with mountains (peaks above, caves below) and the dead. A ‘temporary cult place,’ meanwhile, is a space made sacred at certain times by and for religious ritual—and the question of which times almost certainly points to the role of a calendar, symbolized in these chapters by Labrys. By the Late years in which these two symbols combined their similar functions, they still ‘had as much to do with funerary as with religious ritual’: the double ax on a horned mountain ‘was part of a wider re-inscription of traditional practices…[a] selective use of tradition as an actively shaping force’ that was ‘perhaps indicative of a deliberate reaching back to traditional meanings and values that still retained significance.’ (And as we’ll see, they continued to appear and function ‘long after elite groups’ had vanished as producers and users of both symbols).” ref
“Perhaps this emergent union of Labrys and horns of consecration can be read in terms consistent with Great Year pieces of evidence. As Pietrovito and Dietrich date “horns” to the Neolithic, this new symbol seemed to combine Crete’s oldest beliefs with calendric ones, which must have gradually become ascribed to Labrys from Middle into Late times. If horns had long been a sign of the ancestors and kinship, Labrys posted between horns of the World Mountain might have embodied and been intended to present a calendric, ceremonial, and cosmic way to them, in this life through annual and cyclic rites and festivals. What else might explain the ‘mason’s marks’ on many new constructions of this period that juxtaposed a double ax and a star—astral symbols of the calendric ‘way’ and its ‘Door’ to the Beyond? If that was what Knossos’ Late leaders were claiming and offering, it would only have been to repeat a strategy employed in the rise of the first palaces, whereby “elite groups…were successful in merging their own ideology with a long-standing tradition of beliefs and practices” (Schoep).” ref
“In this way, “Labrys between horns” might be read as a new form or configuration of the central traditional symbol on the Knossos throne, the sun-and-moon-over-mountain; as the sign of “a social group who exercised power in the economic, military and religious realms,” all of which depended on an orderly calendar, and who, like Labrys, were centered in but not confined to Knossos. This new combined symbol, appropriating old relationships with ancestors, appeared “without an exclusive control” over its use, and without Knossos “imposing a strict iconographic form” for either element. While there seems no better candidate for the centerpiece of the Late Labyrinth’s “propaganda”, two artifacts noted in Rehak might be examples of its varied echoes. A Late IIIA mirror-handle from a tomb presents a pair of Genii flanking a “mound,” or mountain-shape, like that of the throne; and below, this seal-image (dated contemporary with Knossos’ final years) shows a “snake-frame” headdress with a Labrys between its crescent horns, worn by a female from mainland Pylos. Both combine the ancestral and the astral in what appear to be Great Year terms.” ref
“Knossos as Calendar House: “the” horned threshold-place, “the” mountain, “the” door on its landscape to the ancestors and Beyond. Labrys—like the sun, but also like the moon and stars—pointing a path to eternity through time, constructed in cycles of lights and shadows. Perhaps for such cosmically-centering reasons, the “new symbol” continued through Knossos’ final decades (in the Shrine of the Double Ax), and reached into Cyprus. A Late-period distribution across the island, claiming for Knossos such a cosmic mediator’s role, might have begun in attempts to “standardize” solstices and equinoxes through the use of horns (MacGillivray “Astral”): calendric activities. Standardization, a many-sided and widespread conformity with Knossos detailed by Wiener, was a main Late-period trait, including the arranged “intervisibility at increasingly greater scales” among the 8 peak-sanctuaries still in use (Nixon). Blomberg and Henriksson see an “8 or 9”-year cycle connected with Minoan high office itself, as does Willetts.” ref
“With Labrys and other calendric and vegetal forms posted between horns at significant places and times, Great Year symbolism points again toward plenitude, earthly order, and eternity. In this detail (above) from Luce’s reconstruction of Knossos Labyrinth, shadows from the supposed upper stories happen to configure a djew-form in front of the throne room’s doorways. It grows easier to imagine many deliberate constructions like it, built to incorporate the ancient sacredness of peak sanctuaries and, in so doing, invest Knossos’ political ascendancy (and calendric system) with an aura of blessing and approval from the ancestors. In the light of these developments in Minoan iconography, Late-period social divisions between Crete’s larger kinship groups and a Knossos with perhaps-divided loyalties. A Late Knossos that had borrowed and then was seen to be corrupting ancient traditions might have needed to be building so many “expiatory” pillar crypts. O’Connor and Silverman noted in Ancient Egyptian Kingship (1995: 264) that a “palace” was “structured so as to be a vital link between Egypt [for example] and the cosmos. The plan, architectural form, ‘decorative’ scenes, and texts of the temple integrated the earthly reality of the rituals performed…with the supra-reality of the cosmic processes of creation and the renewal of creation. This integration ensured that ritual had meaning, authority, and effective power.” ref
“Perpetuation of the Minoan world-order depended on the “incorporating practices” of participative ceremony; meaning “actions of the body [that] transmit information, including gestures, manners or etiquette [as well as] rituals, in which the body ‘performs’ the information” to be lived out and passed on (Lucas Archaeology of Time). The ceremonial inclusion of nature—turning its major powers, phases, and events into ritual backgrounds to confirm “elite esoteric knowledge” and power—would have been an advantage to reckon with, beyond the Late-period “light shows” that some scholars (Banou and Soles, for example) have inferred from various pieces of evidence. While those might have included uses of “bright objects” such as the “crescent crystal” below from the throne room (which Evans judged “part of a necklace”), rites at centers such as Mochlos must have been equally impressive, for awhile. Soles described “large numbers of conical cup lamps” there, perhaps for “luminary” rituals that ranged from pillar crypts to upper-floor “windows of appearance.” From “columnar rooms” above the crypts came “a clay boat and female figurine, which may have formed a three-dimensional religious tableau showing a goddess and a sacred boat, like the scene depicted on the famous Mochlos signet ring”.” ref
“A journey from below to above, culminating (in some related beliefs) in a guided boat-journey across the stellar void, might evidence an elite providing ritual reassurances about the afterlife. To many Minoans, a boat might have symbolized a farthest-imaginable journey: a dragon-headed guide might serve in traditional terms we have seen. Yet, in the decades that ended Crete’s independence, “shows” did not protect Mochlos or any other center from “desecration” (by Mycenaeans, Minoans, or both). Knossos alone withstood the times. Bull-leaping scenes expressed 1200 years of festival in the center of the fresco. For the central image of a central calendar there was hardly a more mainstream way to express and enlist Minoan life. “This kind of design was never more popular,” or perhaps calculated to be, “than in the Late epoch of the Palace”. This seems thoroughly consistent with Peter Warren’s detailed 2012 review of 25 years of studies on Minoan civilization. His finding is that Late Minoan Crete manifests two main political and social dynamics. First, a ‘shifting instability of factional competition,’ manifesting not in ‘military or coercive’ terms, but in monumentality, emulation, and great expenditures in ‘feasting and drinking ceremonies’—multiple elite locations, then, outdoing each other along a chain of probably-regular events. In a phrase, alternating places and times of high festivals, with the benefits of distributing prestige and thwarting full centralized power. (Long after the Minoans, alternation with those purposes was still a core aspect of Cretan political structure.” ref
“If this political rhythm was also important to the city-states later listed on the Antikythera Mechanism, then the second main Late Minoan condition that emerges in Warren’s study (an ‘organizing power’) may point to a Knossos with a similar function—as the timekeeping-piece among Crete’s shifting heterarchic factions. Again, the only throne in Crete is positioned in space according to time. To what purpose? The studies gathered by Warren also document some kind of ‘organizing power…a ruler or ruling family’ whose hierarchs were ‘engaged in traditional, stabilizing practices’ across the island’s independent groups. And yet, because there are no visible rulers or dynasties—the throne is inscribed with moon, sun, and mountain, not with a dynastic logo—the one supportable theory left standing for a viable mechanism of Minoan government (a central, but thoroughly limited ‘state’) can only be such a ‘family.’ I.e., an initiated elite mostly local to Knossos, refining and using knowledge of the cycles of time (through their sciences, traditions, arts, and assets) to turn nature into the platform of their influence, and hold Minoan space together. The centrality of Knossos—which began in the cooperation of groups, not in one faction’s entrenchment—must have anchored Crete’s time-based practical and political affairs, while it evolved to turn the sun’s journey into the soul’s.” ref
“After all, for a century of international research, what we clearly do have so far in the artifacts is not imperialism or ‘kings’ but a heterarchy held together by shared practical, political, and spiritual cycles. The great houses that imitated Knossos and took on its symbols must have been at least partial subscribers to its temporal frame. We can see their remains speak to each other, of sun, moon, mountain, star, and the Beyond, from the first Labrys to the Bull-Leap Fresco, in artifacts common and elite. How, finally, would actual Great Year lunar/solar anniversaries play out from beginning to end (and around again), and provide meaningful bases in time and nature for the structures of central unifying festivals? Altogether, we might conceive of a ceremonial life led by the most gifted and charismatic in religion, the arts and proto-sciences: what Frank called “ritual calendar-keepers, a class of proto-astronomers,” who studied nature and spiritual matters, and from their learning constructed life as a dramatic play; based in and structured by a cycle with ever-different episodes, new combinations of circumstances and individuals—on a scale we still find in Tibet and Bali.” ref
“Once the mainland’s Mycenaeans had a potent place in Crete, a Minoan calendar had to provide an inner benefit as well. Who, after all, would control and gain the most from a cultural movement toward a central cosmology? Minoans, or their “new elites”? In Late Knossos propaganda, kinship—founded in plenitude, social reciprocity, and a confident afterlife—was apparently being “appropriated” toward a cosmology and a new conception of political power. Long ages through which the only “kings and queens” had seemed to remain anonymous in their executive and/or ceremonial functions were coming to an end. Blakolmer found in the Knossos throne’s traditional “anonymity” a “strategy for equality of persons.” Minoan arts were serving “not king, but cult” (Davis “Missing Ruler”), in the elucidation of a “religious rather than secular ideology” (Marinatos “Divine”). Or as Driessen observed in “Crisis Cults”: “Whereas in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Pharaoh and the En or Lugal guaranteed the link between mortals and gods, explaining their role in iconography and…the royal image, the link between the two worlds [in Minoan cosmology was] constituted by the rituals themselves. The acts were more important than the actors or mediators, and these actions seemed to constitute the political ideology”.” ref
Beyond Crete
“The Minoans were traders, and their cultural contacts reached the Old Kingdom of Egypt, copper-containing Cyprus, Canaan, and the Levantine coast and Anatolia. Minoan-style frescoes and other artifacts were discovered during excavations of the Canaanite palace at Tel Kabri, Israel, leading archaeologists to conclude that the Minoan influence was the strongest on the Canaanite city-state. These are the only Minoan artifacts which have been found in Israel. Minoan techniques and ceramic styles had varying degrees of influence on Helladic Greece. Along with Santorini, Minoan settlements are found at Kastri, Kythera, an island near the Greek mainland influenced by the Minoans from the mid-third millennium BC (EMII) to its Mycenaean occupation in the 13th century. Minoan strata replaced a mainland-derived early Bronze Age culture, the earliest Minoan settlement outside Crete. The Cyclades were in the Minoan cultural orbit and, closer to Crete, the islands of Karpathos, Saria, and Kasos also contained middle-Bronze Age (MMI-II) Minoan colonies or settlements of Minoan traders. Most were abandoned in LMI, but Karpathos recovered and continued its Minoan culture until the end of the Bronze Age. Other supposed Minoan colonies, such as that hypothesized by Adolf Furtwängler on Aegina, were later dismissed by scholars. However, there was a Minoan colony at Ialysos on Rhodes.” ref
“Minoan cultural influence indicates an orbit extending through the Cyclades to Egypt and Cyprus. Fifteenth-century BC paintings in Thebes, Egypt depict Minoan-appearing individuals bearing gifts. Inscriptions describing them as coming from keftiu (“islands in the middle of the sea”) may refer to gift-bringing merchants or officials from Crete. Some locations on Crete indicate that the Minoans were an “outward-looking” society. The neo-palatial site of Kato Zakros is located within 100 meters of the modern shoreline in a bay. Its large number of workshops and wealth of site materials indicate a possible entrepôt for trade. Such activities are seen in artistic representations of the sea, including the “Flotilla” fresco in room five of the West House at Akrotiri.” ref
Minoan/Cretan (Keftiu) women
“As Linear A, Minoan writing, has not been decoded yet, almost all information available about Minoan women is from various art forms. Most importantly, women are depicted in fresco art paintings within various aspects of society such as child rearing, ritual participation, and worshiping. Artistically, women were portrayed very differently compared to the representations of men. Most obviously, men were often artistically represented with dark skin while women were represented with lighter skin. Fresco paintings also portray three class levels of women; elite women, women of the masses, and servants. A fourth, smaller class of women are also included among some paintings; these women are those who participated in religious and sacred tasks. Evidence for these different classes of women not only comes from fresco paintings but from Linear B tablets as well. Elite women were depicted within paintings as having a stature twice the size of women in lower classes: artistically this was a way of emphasizing the important difference between the elite wealthy women and the rest of the female population within society. Within paintings women were also portrayed as caretakers of children, however, few frescoes portray pregnant women, most artistic representations of pregnant women are in the form of sculpted pots with the rounded base of the pots representing the pregnant belly. Additionally, no Minoan art forms portray women giving birth, breastfeeding, or procreating. Lack of such actions leads historians to believe that these actions would have been recognized by Minoan society to be either sacred or inappropriate. As public art pieces such as frescoes and pots do not illustrate these acts, it can be assumed that this part of a woman’s life was kept private within society as a whole.” ref
“Not only was childbirth a private subject within Minoan society but it was a dangerous process as well. Archeological sources have found numerous bones of pregnant women, identified as pregnant by the fetus bones within their skeleton found in the abdomen area. This leads to strong evidence that death during pregnancy and childbirth were common features within society. Further archeological evidence illustrates strong evidence for female death caused by nursing as well. Death of this population is attributed to the vast amount of nutrition and fat that women lost because of lactation which they often could not get back. As stated above childcare was a central job for women within Minoan society, evidence for this can not only be found within art forms but also within the Linear B found in Mycenaean communities. Some of these sources describe the child-care practices common within Minoan society which help historians to better understand Minoan society and the role of women within these communities. Other roles outside the household that have been identified as women’s duties are food gathering, food preparation, and household care-taking. Additionally, it has been found that women were represented in the artisan world as ceramic and textile craftswomen.” ref
“As women got older it can be assumed that their jobs taking care of children ended and transitions to more of a priority towards household management and job mentoring, teaching younger women the jobs that they themselves participated in. Minoan dress representation also clearly marks the difference between men and women. Minoan men were often depicted clad in little clothing while women’s bodies, specifically later on, were more covered up. While there is evidence that the structure of women’s clothing originated as a mirror to the clothing that men wore, fresco art illustrates how women’s clothing evolved to be more and more elaborate throughout the Minoan era. Throughout the evolutions of women’s clothing, a strong emphasis was placed on the women’s sexual characteristics, particularly the breasts. Female clothing throughout the Minoan era emphasized the breasts by exposing cleavage or even the entire breast. Similarly to the modern bodice women continue to wear today, Minoan women were portrayed with “wasp” waists. This means that the waist of women were constricted, made smaller by a tall belt or a tight lace bodice. Furthermore, not only women but men are illustrated wearing these accessories. Within Minoan society and throughout the Minoan era, numerous documents written in Linear B have been found documenting Minoan families. Interestingly, spouses and children are not all listed together, in one section, fathers were listed with their sons, while mothers were listed with their daughter in a completely different section apart from the men who lived in the same household. This signifies the vast gender divide that was present within all aspects of society. Minoan society was a highly gendered and divided society separating men from women in clothing, art illustration, and societal duties. Scholarship about Minoan women remains limited.” ref
“Minoan men wore loincloths and kilts. Women wore robes with short sleeves and layered, flounced skirts. The robes were open to the navel, exposing their breasts. Women could also wear a strapless, fitted bodice, and clothing patterns had symmetrical, geometric designs. The Minoans seem to have prominently worshiped a Great Goddess/or goddesses, which had previously led to the belief that their society was matriarchal. However it is now known that this was not the case; the Minoan pantheon featured many deities, among which a young, spear-wielding male god is also prominent. Some scholars see in the Minoan Goddess a female divine solar figure. Although some depictions of women may be images of worshipers and priestesses officiating at religious ceremonies (as opposed to deities), goddesses seem to include a mother goddess of fertility, a goddess of animals and female protectors of cities, the household, the harvest, and the underworld. They are often represented by serpents, birds, poppies, or an animal. Minoan horn-topped altars, which Arthur Evans called Horns of Consecration, are represented in seal impressions and have been found as far afield as Cyprus. Minoan sacred symbols include the bull (and its horns of consecration), the labrys (double-headed ax), the pillar, the serpent, the sun-disc, the tree, and even the Ankh.” ref
“According to Nanno Marinatos, “The hierarchy and relationship of gods within the pantheon is difficult to decode from the images alone.” Marinatos disagrees with earlier descriptions of Minoan religion as primitive, saying that it “was the religion of a sophisticated and urbanized palatial culture with a complex social hierarchy. It was not dominated by fertility any more than any religion of the past or present has been, and it addressed gender identity, rites of passage, and death. It is reasonable to assume that both the organization and the rituals, even the mythology, resembled the religions of Near Eastern palatial civilizations.” It even seems that the later Greek pantheon would synthesize the Minoan female deity and Hittite goddess from the Near East. Haralampos V. Harissis and Anastasios V. Harissis posit a different interpretation of these symbols, saying that they were based on apiculture rather than religion. A major festival was exemplified in bull-leaping, represented in the frescoes of Knossos and inscribed in miniature seals. Similar to other Bronze Age archaeological finds, burial remains constitute much of the material and archaeological evidence for the period. By the end of the Second Palace Period, Minoan burial was dominated by two forms: circular tombs (tholoi) in southern Crete and house tombs in the north and the east. However, much Minoan mortuary practice does not conform to this pattern. Burial was more popular than cremation. Individual burial was the rule, except for the Chrysolakkos complex in Malia. Evidence of possible human sacrifice by the Minoans has been found at three sites: at Anemospilia, in a MMII building near Mt. Juktas considered a temple; an EMII sanctuary complex at Fournou Korifi in south-central Crete, and in an LMIB building known as the North House in Knossos.” ref
Minoan snake goddess figurines
“Snake goddess” is a type of figurine depicting a woman holding a snake in each hand, as were found in Minoan archaeological sites in Crete. The first two of such figurines (both incomplete) were found by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans and date to the neo-palatial period of Minoan civilization, c. 1700–1450 BCE. It was Evans who called the larger of his pair of figurines a “Snake Goddess”, the smaller a “Snake Priestess”; since then, it has been debated whether Evans was right, or whether both figurines depict priestesses, or both depict the same deity or distinct deities. The figurines were found only in house sanctuaries, where the figurine appears as “the goddess of the household”, and they are probably (according to Burkert) related to the Paleolithic traditions regarding women and domesticity. The figurines have also been interpreted as showing a mistress of animals-type goddess and as a precursor to Athena Parthenos, who is also associated with snakes.” ref
“The first two snake goddess figurines to be discovered were found by Arthur Evans in 1903, in the temple repositories of Knossos. The figurines are made of faience, a technique for glazing earthenware and other ceramic vessels by using a quartz paste. After firing, this produces bright colors and a lustrous sheen. This material symbolized the renewal of life in old Egypt, therefore it was used in the funeral cult and in the sanctuaries. These two figurines are today exhibited at the Herakleion Archeological Museum in Crete. The larger of these figures has snakes crawling over her arms up to her tiara. The smaller figure holds two snakes in her raised hands, which seems to be the imitation of a panther. In particular, one of the “snake goddesses” was found in a few scattered pieces, and was later filled with a solution of paraffin to preserve it from further damage. The goddess is depicted just as in other statues (crown on head, hands grasping snakes etc.). The expression on her face is described as life like, and is also wearing the typical Minoan dress. Another figure found in Berlin, made of bronze, looks more like a snake charmer with the snakes on top of her head. Many Minoan statues and statuettes seem to express pride.” ref
“The snake goddess’s Minoan name may be related with A-sa-sa-ra, a possible interpretation of inscriptions found in Linear A texts. Although Linear A is not yet deciphered, Palmer relates tentatively the inscription a-sa-sa-ra-me which seems to have accompanied goddesses, with the Hittite išhaššara, which means “mistress”. The serpent is often symbolically associated with the renewal of life because it sheds its skin periodically. A similar belief existed in the ancient Mesopotamians and Semites, and appears also in Hindu mythology. The Pelasgian myth of creation refers to snakes as the reborn dead. However, Martin P. Nilsson noticed that in the Minoan religion the snake was the protector of the house, as it later appears also in Greek religion.[8] Within the Greek Dionysiac cult it signified wisdom and was the symbol of fertility. Barry Powell suggested that the “snake goddess” reduced in legend into a folklore heroine was Ariadne (whose name might mean “utterly pure” or “the very holy one”), who is often depicted surrounded by Maenads and satyrs. Some scholars relate the snake goddess with the Phoenician Astarte (virgin daughter). She was the goddess of fertility and sexuality and her worship was connected with an orgiastic cult. Her temples were decorated with serpentine motifs. In a related Greek myth Europa, who is sometimes identified with Astarte in ancient sources, was a Phoenician princess whom Zeus abducted and carried to Crete. Evans tentatively linked the snake goddess with the Egyptian snake goddess Wadjet but did not pursue this connection. Statuettes similar to the “snake goddess” type identified as “priest of Wadjet” and “magician” were found in Egypt.” ref
Sacral knot
“Both goddesses have a knot with a projecting looped cord between their breasts. Evans noticed that these are analogous to the sacral knot, his name for a knot with a loop of fabric above and sometimes fringed ends hanging down below. Numerous such symbols in ivory, faience, painted in frescoes or engraved in seals sometimes combined with the symbol of the double-edged ax or labrys which was the most important Minoan religious symbol. Such symbols were found in Minoan and Mycenaean sites. It is believed that the sacral knot was the symbol of holiness on human figures or cult-objects. ff Its combination with the double-ax can be compared with the Egyptian ankh (eternal life), or with the tyet (welfare/life) a symbol of Isis (the knot of Isis).” ref
Really a goddess?
“The Snake Goddess is a provocative image, but its restoration and interpretation are problematic (and why my art is missing its head and left arm). The crown and cat have no parallel in any image of a Bronze Age woman, so these should be discounted. The interpretation of this figure as a goddess is also difficult, since there is no evidence of what a Minoan goddess might have looked like. Many images of elite Minoan women, perhaps priestesses, look very much like this figurine. If it is the action of snake-wrangling that makes her a goddess, this is also a problem. The image of a woman taming one or more snakes is entirely unique to the Temple Repositories. Therefore, if she is a snake goddess, she is not a particularly popular one {or to me, maybe was a more secrete /mystery religious aspect- Damien). Certainly, Evans was interested in finding a goddess at Knossos. Even before he excavated at the site, he had argued that there was a great mother goddess who was worshiped in the pre-Classical Greek world. With the Snake Goddess, Evans found—or fashioned—what he had anticipated. Its authenticity and meaning, however, leave many questions today.” ref
“This figurine of a woman holding a snake was discovered by Arthur Evans in the original excavation of the Pallace of Knossos. Other examples of this motif have since been discovered, reinforcing the idea that the small sculpture portrays a deity of some kind. The theory of the sculpture’s identity is further supported by both the existence of an Egyptian snake goddess named Wadjet, and the animals associated with later Greek Maenads whose cult worshiped Dionysos. Snakes are were associated by Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and later cultures world-wide as symbolizing regeneration because of the fact that they shed their skins and can form a circle by biting their own tails. Regeneration of the changing seasons is important for agriculture, which is also often symbolized by female fertility, so the snake goddess may embody both these symbolic associations.” ref
“There is now plenty of archeological evidence linking the Minoans with the Egyptians. Not only has Minoan pottery been discovered in Egypt, but there is also a Middle Kingdom tomb that was painted by Minaon artists and the suggestion that a Minoan princess married an Egyptian prince. This particular snake goddess sculpture was created using a technology that the Minoans must have gotten from the Egyptians. Faïence, aslo known as Egyptian paste glass is essentially a ceramic glaze thick enough to sculpt with. It is a fussy medium that can produce shiny vitreous sculptures. Faïence work is typicaly small in scale and not very detailed. The snake godess with her hallow body and extended limbs is an exceptionally detailed faïence peice. Her outfit with it’s open bodice and the intricate skirt is thought to be representative of fancy Minoan fashion.” ref
“Dionysos, the Greek god of wine had a particularly cultish following that was especially popular with women. The cult may have originated on the Isle of Naxos, which is close to Crete and according to myth, is where Theseus abandoned the Minoan princess Ariadne who helped him navigate the labyrinth. Also According to myth, Ariadne was happy to stay on Naxos where she went on to mary the god Dionysos and become his high priestess. Pumas somewhat like the one perched on top of the sculpture’s head, and even more so leopards, are associated with Dionysos. Snakes too are a Dionysian animal. Olympias, Alexander the Great’s mother, was considered something of a witch because of her beauty, her power over King Philip, and her cult worrship of Dionysos. She also surrounded herself with live snakes, even in her bedroom.” ref
Dionysos
“Dionysus is the god of the grape-harvest, winemaking, and wine, of fertility, orchards and fruit, vegetation, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, festivity and theatre in ancient Greek religion and myth. He is also known as Bacchus, the name adopted by the Romans; the frenzy he induces is bakkheia. Another name used by the Romans is Liber meaning “free”, due to his association with wine and the Bacchanalia and other rites, and the freedom associated with it. His thyrsus, sometimes wound with ivy and dripping with honey, is both a beneficent wand and a weapon used to destroy those who oppose his cult and the freedoms he represents. As Eleutherios (“the liberator”), his wine, music, and ecstatic dance free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful. Those who partake of his mysteries are believed to become possessed and empowered by the god himself. In his religion, identical with or closely related to Orphism, Dionysus was believed to have been born from the union of Zeus and Persephone, and to have himself represented a chthonic or underworld aspect of Zeus. Many believed that he had been born twice, having been killed and reborn as the son of Zeus and the mortal Semele. In the Eleusinian Mysteries he was identified with Iacchus, the son (or, alternately, husband) of Demeter.” ref
“His origins are uncertain, and his cults took many forms; some are described by ancient sources as Thracian, others as Greek. Though most accounts say he was born in Thrace, traveled abroad, and arrived in Greece as a foreigner, evidence from the Mycenaean period of Greek history shows that he is one of Greece’s oldest attested gods. His attribute of “foreignness” as an arriving outsider-god may be inherent and essential to his cults, as he is a god of epiphany, sometimes called “the god that comes”. Wine played an important role in Greek culture, and the cult of Dionysus was the main religious focus surrounding its consumption. Wine, as well as the vines and grapes that produce it, were seen as not only a gift of the god, but a symbolic incarnation of him on earth. However, rather than being a god of drunkenness, as he was often stereotyped in the post-Classical era, the religion of Dionysus centered on the correct consumption of wine, which could ease suffering and bring joy, as well as inspire divine madness distinct from drunkenness. Performance art and drama were also central to his religion, and its festivals were the initial driving force behind the development of theatre. The cult of Dionysus is also a “cult of the souls”; his maenads feed the dead through blood-offerings, and he acts as a divine communicant between the living and the dead. He is sometimes categorized as a dying-and-rising god. Dionysus is shown to be an Agriculture and Vegetation deity. His connection to wine, grape-harvest, orchards, and vegetation displays his role as a nature god. As the god of Viticulture and Grapes, he is connected to the growth and harvest of the fruit. In myth, he teaches the art of growing and cultivating the plant.” ref
A mysterious “snake goddess” found in Athens is painted on a plaque with a molded face.
“A mysterious “snake goddess” painted on terracotta and discovered in Athens may actually be Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest. Once linked to the worship of the dead, the goddess is flanked by two snakes on a slab of terracotta about the size of a piece of notebook paper. She has her hands up above her head, which has given her the nickname “the touchdown goddess” thanks to the resemblance of the pose to a referee’s signal. The goddess is painted in red, yellow, and blue-green on a tile, with only her head molded outward in three dimensions. This unusual piece of art was found amid a jumble of gravel and other terracotta fragments in 1932 in what was once the Athenian agora, or public square. The catch, however, is that the snake goddess isn’t originally from the agora. The gravel and figurine fragments were fill material, brought in from an unknown second location to build a path or road in the seventh century B.C. “Not only is our snake goddess unidentified, but she’s homeless,” said study researcher Michael Laughy of Washington and Lee University in Virginia. “She got mixed up in that road gravel, presumably obtained near the site of her original shrine.” ref
Demeter
“In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Demeter is the Olympian goddess of the harvest and agriculture, presiding over grains and the fertility of the earth. Her cult titles include Sito (Σιτώ), “she of the Grain”, as the giver of food or grain, and Thesmophoros, “Law-Bringer”, as a mark of the civilized existence of agricultural society. Though Demeter is often described simply as the goddess of the harvest, she presided also over the sacred law, and the cycle of life and death. She and her daughter Persephone were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a religious tradition that predated the Olympian pantheon, and which may have its roots in the Mycenaean period c. 1400–1200 BC. Demeter was often considered to be the same figure as the Anatolian goddess Cybele, and she was identified with the Roman goddess Ceres.” ref
The Snake Goddess Plaque, A Forgotten Athenian Offering?
“Along with the snake goddess plaque, the road fill contains small terracotta figurines, or votives, of humans, chariots, shields, loom weights, portions of spindles, and pottery disks, most of which individually could fit in the palm of a hand. The terracotta figurines were used during this time period as offerings at the sanctuaries of gods and goddesses, Laughy told LiveScience after presenting his findings here at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. Normally, he said, the votive offerings were considered somewhat sacred, and once cleared from sanctuaries would be buried and left undisturbed in a pit. Thus, although it’s typical to see artifacts out of place in Athens, which has been built over for thousands of years, it’s strange to see votives used as road fill, Laughy said. Tracing the source of this fill is a difficult task. Previously, archaeologists have assumed the figurines originated from the worship of the dead, linking the items found in Athens to ones found at a Bronze Age tomb outside the city. But the items at that tomb don’t match all those found in the Athens agora, Laughy said. More Likely, according to Laughy’s analysis, the snake-flanked woman is both a representation of and an offering to a goddess. Votive deposits from the shrines of goddesses include pottery disks, terracotta horses, plaques and shields, as well as female figurines. These votives match the finds uncovered in Athens. Small human figurines made of terracotta found in the agora deposit.” ref
“In particular, shrines devoted to Demeter and Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, show the closest matches to the types of figurines found, Laughy said. Demeter is a strong candidate, as there was a shrine built in her name in the seventh-century mere minutes-long walk from the Athens agora, he said. It’s the only sanctuary where ancient Greeks are known to have left loom weights and spindle whorls, which are disks that weigh down spindles used for spinning thread and which are found in the Athens fill debris. What’s more, Laughy said, the spot was graded in the seventh century, which could have produced a debris pile that was then carted away to make paths in the agora. Finally, the goddess’ serpentine companions also point to Demeter, who was particularly associated with snake iconography, Laughy said. “Snakes and Demeter are happy together in imagery in the seventh century,” he said. Laughy warned that the evidence linking the snake goddess and Demeter is circumstantial. However, he said, the evidence is strong that the woman is not a figure associated with death, but a goddess. If she were Demeter, the snake goddess plaque would be one of the oldest images ever found of that particular deity. Either way, the snake goddess is “striking,” Laughy said. It’s one of the earliest multicolor paintings found in Athens. It’s an amazing piece of work,” he said.” ref
The Emergence of the New Sacred Temple Priestess
Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest, with wheat and snakes. Seen in a Hellenic, terracota relief, third century B.C. is seemingly known to us by many names: Isis, Inanna, Astarte, Ishtar, Kali, Demeter, Aphrodite, Virgin Mary, Ceres, Cybele, etc. She is the Great Mother Goddess and she has been around for thousands upon thousands of years. She is, among other things, eternal wisdom, fertility, death and renewal, healing, astrology, agriculture, accounting, protection. And, with the exception of the Virgin Mary and a handful of others, she is most often a sexual goddess whose ancient priestesses were our predecessors. But who were these priestesses? And what were they all about? Known in the East by various names, such as entu, quadistu, ishtaritu, hierodoulai, devadasi, horae and har (the words whore and harlot come from these origins), these priestesses were honored citizens of their day. They were afforded much love, respect, and wealth and possessed a great spiritual focus when they performed dances, administered to temple rituals and activities, and had sexual unions honoring the Goddess and fertility and life mysteries. Considered embodiments of beauty, love, and compassion, they were viewed as “sacred servants.” In today’s terminology, they are known by historians as “sacred prostitutes.”3 But this term is confusing and is an oxymoron (for how can prostitution be sacred?) and indicates a mindset that the ancients once held that we no longer hold.” ref
“So what happened? Well, a bit of herstory is in order (we usually only get history). In the ancient Mothertimes, before writing was even invented and hunter and gatherer tribes were evolving to agricultural-based societies, sexuality and spirituality were considered as one, with no separation of body and spirit. There was no concept of original sin, no concept of the flesh as a source of defilement. The flesh was considered part of the natural earth, which was revered for its procreative mystery. The earth cycles became of paramount importance. When to plant, when to harvest, the seasons, the weather, were all-encompassing issues, and rituals (including dancing and drumming) developed around them. These Goddess worshipping cultures were in some instances—such as the Anatolian community of Catal Huyuk (approximately 6,000 BC)—considered “gylanies” (gy meaning female, an meaning male). Women and men worked together sharing equal status, with the females predominating as priestesses. Fertility was especially honored. Sacred dance led to sacred desire, which led to sacred sexuality, which led to a cherished child who, under the best of circumstances, would grow to adulthood to continue the life and death cycles. Many artifacts have been found showing an Earth Mother deity—sometimes with large breasts and a pregnant belly, other times with the head of a vulture—indicating the importance these ancients gave to the Goddess’s predominance over birth and death.” ref
Many symbols found in ancient art on pottery and dwelling walls indicate Middle Eastern dance’s direct connection to early Goddess worshipping cultures. It is no coincidence that we wear hip belts often featuring a downward pointing triangle over our procreative area. This ancient symbol represents the Goddess’s vulva and womb.9 Along with the triangle, other symbols of dynamic motion such as whirls, spirals, winding and coiling snakes, circles, crescents, V’s and M’s, have been passed down to us for millennia as a moving, visual tradition and are the building blocks of our dance vocabulary. Then, as herstory continues, something happened. Between the years 4,300 BC and 2,300 BC, a series of northern Indo-European invasions brought with them a warring thunder/volcano God with a rule by king. Goddess worshipping already had the concept of a vegetative, dying God who was the Goddess’s son-lover-brother consort. He was initially a lesser deity who was known throughout the Near and Middle East as Damuzi, Tammuz, Adonis, Osiris, Baal, and Attis. He would annually make love with the Goddess, die (sometimes be sacrificed), be mourned for, and then resurrected. With the northern invaders, however, the Goddess religion began to assimilate the Indo-European male deity, and there began to be more of a sharing of deity dominance—a Ms. Goddess and Mr. God, so to speak.” ref
“The hieros gamos, or sacred marriage rite, reflected this. In this annual Sumerian and Babylonian ceremony, a chosen favorite high priestess, representing the Goddess, would have sacred sex (sometimes publicly) with the prevailing king, representing the God. The event would symbolically ensure fertility of the land and bestow the Goddess’s blessing on the king’s power to rule. Over the course of 3,000 years the Goddess, who was initially predominant, lost ground completely, until her final demise in the year 406 AD when the temple of Artemis at Ephesus (now Turkey) was looted and burned. Worship of her went underground and there is much speculation that many of her followers were burned as “witches” in the subsequent centuries. What is important to remember here is that as the status of Goddess worshipping declined, so did the status of women. The presence of the northern invaders also brought about a gradual shift from gylanies—with a matrilineal descent—to patriarchy—with a patrilineal descent. Previously, women were afforded much freedom and sexual license. They chose their own mates and the bloodline always passed through them. With patriarchy (rule by men) came the need to insure definite fatherhood, and therefore it was necessary to control female sexuality. Goddess worshipping, with its exaltation of sexuality, had to be suppressed in order for patriarchy and patrilineage to take hold. Women became increasingly subjugated.” ref
“We can easily trace the Goddess’s decline (and women’s) through the surviving myths of early her/history and from the Judeo-Christian creation myth. From the Mesopotamian Sacred Marriage of Inanna to the epic of Gilgamesh to the creation story of the Enuma elish, we see her deteriorate from a glorified, sexy, and holy being to a demon monster. Whereas Inanna praises her vulva and asks for her “holy churn” to be filled with Damuzi’s “honey cheese,” her sexual advances are rebuffed by the hero Gilgamesh and she becomes Tiamet, the sea dragon, killed and dismembered by King Marduk in the Enuma elish. By the time we get to the Canaanite Genesis story, female sexuality and her desire to even have spiritual wisdom is punished by expulsion from Paradise. Eve is responsible for the complete downfall of humanity and her sentence is that childbirth be painful. By using the natural process of childbirth as a tool for blame and punishment, the Genesis creation myth ensured that all women giving birth would directly relate to the character of Eve, and thus, to herself as “Evil.” ref
“Many believe, and it appears to me to be so, that Genesis was intentionally and deliberately fabricated (out of fragments of older myths) specifically to undermine Goddess worshipping. Every symbol in the story was important to female deity followers. The tree represented their asherahs, or the living trees or poles that were often situated next to Goddess altars. The snake, for millennia, had been a symbol of the Goddess’s eternal wisdom, with many Goddesses artistically depicted wearing or holding them. The eating of the fruit, symbolic of the concept of communion, was to partake of “the flesh and fluid” of the Goddess. All these symbols were twisted and turned in their meaning so that they would be viewed in a negative light. Furthermore, one might consider Christianity a perfect culmination of deity assimilation: Jehovah (Yahweh) as the thunder/volcano God, Jesus as the sacrificed, dying God, and Virgin Mary as a dismembered Goddess. The latter is of particular importance in that she represented the Goddess in every way except for one. She was loving, beautiful, compassionate, procreative (with her cherished son), but she was stripped of her sexuality and, in my opinion, symbolically circumcised. Thus, a fatal blow was dealt separating sex and spirit and resulting in the evolution of the unhealthy Madonna/Whore complex.” ref
“Continuing on to the Islamic tradition, we see that women were again blamed for being sexual temptresses. They were veiled, secluded, and literally sexually circumcised. (Editor’s note: Although not specifically prescribed by Islam, female circumcision is practiced in many, but not all Muslim countries.) This tradition continues today in the Middle East and Africa and is a heinous act against girls and women. It clearly illustrates a deep and unhealthy psychology in which men, women, and children alike suffer. And this brings us to the present.” ref
Disarming the Snake Goddess: A Reconsideration of the Faience Figurines from the Temple Repositories at Knossos
“The two reconstituted faience figurines from the Temple Repositories at Knossos were restored by Sir Arthur Evans as epitomes of elite women of the Neopalatial period and objects of an indigenous palatial cult of the Snake Goddess. They have appeared as such in the literature for the past century. Reassesses the accuracy of Evans’s characterization by examining only the original fragments—a head, two torsos, and the remnants of skirt—to determine whether clothing and gestures have parallels in Cretan art. His process reveals that the figures do not have close parallels, for the most part, within the Cretan tradition. Furthermore, there are no Cretan iconographic sources for the images of the women as participants in the cult of the Snake Goddess, whether as goddesses or as priestesses. Rather, the craftsmen who created them employed motifs from the Syrian artistic tradition most likely relying on the representations of the goddess opening her skirt and the renderings of Syrian goddesses with cylindrical crowns, straight hair, and robes with thick edges. e elites who ordered the production of the figurines did so within the context of the construction of the Middle Minoan III palace at Knossos. At a time of heightened interaction with the late Middle Bronze Age monarchies of the Levant, the elites at Knossos emulated Syrian iconography as an assertion of their access to exotic knowledge and control of trade. When the Middle Minoan III palace was destroyed, the figurines were deposited in the Temple Repositories, and their iconography was buried with them. There is no trace of them in subsequent Neopalatial art.” ref
“Iconic images, the statuettes appear in most general studies of the art and culture of Bronze Age Crete as examples of Neopalatial Cretan haute couture and as evidence for a cult of the Snake Goddess. But they fill these roles because Arthur Evans reconstructed them to do so. Scholars, as they do with Knossos itself (Hitchcock and Koudounaris), recognize that the statuettes are flawed restorations, but accept Evans’s interpretation as fundamentally appropriate. This paper aims to rectify the situation by deconstructing these early twentieth-century products and problematizing Evans’s claim that they both epitomize Neopalatial elite women and embody the subject of an indigenous cult of the Snake Goddess. Instead, it is argued, the statuettes are hybrids of Syrian and Cretan iconographic elements created as part of the negotiation of social relationships embodied in the Middle Minoan (MM) IIIB structure, MacDonald’s ‘New Pal-ace,’ that replaced the first palace at Knossos. When the New Palace was destroyed by an earthquake approximately 50 years later and construction began on its Late Minoan (LM) IA successor, fragments of the figurines were deposited in the Temple Repositories perhaps in a commemorative act. Their distinctive association of women and snakes, of which not a trace is to be found in subsequent Neopalatial Cretan art, was buried with them.” ref
“Answering this question requires recognizing the figurines as products of, and agents in, the social negotiations attendant on the construction of the New Palace at Knossos at what appears to have been a transitional moment at the site. The figurines’ biography—the material engagements that led to their formation and the circumstances of their deposition—situates them in the larger architectural project, which in turn was a monumental embodiment of the social relationships emerging in the latter part of the Middle Bronze Age in central Crete, a topic addressed more fully below. As part of the furnishings of the New Palace, the figurines were imbricated in the elites’ strategies and the assertion of power implicit in the scale and appointments of the building. The material of which the figurines were constituted and the specific forms imposed on that medium—the figurines’ iconography—dis-close the nature of the social actions in which they were embedded. That is, the images’ form and substance acted on the participants in these relations, and the effectiveness of the figurines’ agency depended on those individuals’ understanding of them. Part of the significance of the figurines resided in the material of which they were composed, the faience. Although Cretan craftsmen had acquired the technical knowledge to manufacture faience by the beginning of the Protopalatial phase, faience was a luxury product that required the importation of natron, almost certainly from Egypt, and specialized technical knowledge probably acquired from Syria, but perhaps with Egyptian influence as well. Acquisition of the resources thus implied participation in a network of gift and trade exchanges with places far from Crete.” ref
“Moreover, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the faience from the Temple Repositories surpassed all previous works and constituted ‘the acme of Minoan faience production’. The manufacture of so many different objects, including beads, plaques, and miniature vases required a significant investment of expertise and wealth. The figurines, in particular, represented the highest achievement of the Knossian faience craftsmen, involving the combination of separate parts either with pins or the use of a slurry. Foster, struck by the sheer number of faience objects from the Temple Repositories, comments on the ‘magico-religious significance’ of faience in Egypt and Mesopotamia. She notes that faience’s luminosity and array of potential colors conveyed symbolic meaning and that the manufacture of faience, in which dull materials emerge from the kiln gleaming, was a form of magic in and of itself. She then conjures up the image of a glowing shrine filled with faience objects, including garlands of faience fruit, at the heart of the palace at Knossos. Whether Foster’s reconstruction of the shrine is accurate is irrelevant, or, more importantly, she has illustrated the exceptional power of faience as a medium for expression. The faience did not represent or symbolize elite control of exotic resources and technological expertise: this material embodied that authority.” ref
“Assertions of that access to the exotic are embedded as well in the forms impressed upon the faience and in particular the iconographic details of the figurines. Those responsible for the crafting of the figurines and their intended audience shared an understanding concerning which formal aspects were part of a shared tradition and which were exotic. To access this original semi-otic complex requires excising the 20th-century additions. All of the details added by Evans and Bagge, including the addition of the tiara and feline, are simply the excavator’s conclusions to sentences begun by the Knossian craftsmen. The surviving traces of the original content reside only in the actual Bronze Age material. Since, as noted above, the effectiveness of the figurines’ agency depended on their audiences’ understanding of them, then one way to deploy the figurines in the structuring of relationships within the larger project would have been to reassert traditional or established gestures. Yet we find few parallels for most of the constituent elements of the figurines in other representations of Neopalatial elite women. HM 63 and HM 65 appear at first blush to con-form to the Cretan prototype, as they wear the typically Cretan tight bodices that lift and push forward the breasts to dramatic effect. HM 63’s skirt could have been bell-shaped like HM 64 and the faience dress plaques from the Temple Repositories, for which there are numerous Protopalatial and Neopalatial parallels.” ref
“These aspects of costume situate the figurines in Crete. But HM 63 also could have worn a flounced skirt like HM 65’s garment. As Jones has demonstrated, there are no parallels in Cre-tan art for either the construction or the overall checked pattern of the earliest seamless flounced garment in the Aegean. With seven rows of alternating plain and striped squares in tan, purple, blue, or indigo and ochre creating a checkerboard effect, HM 65’s skirt has only a single Aegean parallel, the gold brooch attached to a silver pin from Shaft Grave III at Mycenae, on which a woman wears a skirt with seven flounces comprised of alternating plain and striated squares. The other details—the arrangement of hair and position of hands and arms—that identify the status and communicate the significance of the actions portrayed are unique in Neopalatial art. The figurines’ straight hair has little in common with the copious curls and face-framing tendrils seen in the frescoes on Crete and Thera, and HM 65’s tiara is without parallel. Finally, the positions of their hands and arms are unknown in Cretan art until nearly the conclusion of the Late Minoan period. The lowered and extended arms of two of the figures participating in the bull sacrifice on the LM III Hagia Triada sarcophagus provide the only parallel to HM 63’s gesture, while HM 65’s upraised arms occur again only in the LM III ‘Goddesses with Upraised Arms’, who in any event are empty-handed and display the palms of their over-sized hands. The images thus are hybrids, with only some of their roots in Cretan imagery. Just as there is no indigenous formal source for much of the figurines’ iconography, so there is no evidence for a pre-existing cult of the Snake Goddess.” ref
“The supposed ‘snake’ on the Early Bronze Age Koumasa bust-vase’s neck and chest more likely constitutes the figure’s arms holding the jug signified by the spout in the shoulder. Similarly, the continuous loops on the triangular shape on a Middle Bronze Age bowl from Phaistos are not snakes, but simple loops, ‘regular with no heads or tails’. Indeed, snakes in any artistic form are rare (Branigan 1969: 33), and often it is unclear whether the craftsman intended a serpent or simply an irregular line. Clay snakes occasionally were offered at the peak sanctuaries, where they constitute a very small percentage of zoomorphic votives, but whether to a chthonic deity or to gain relief from a snake infestation is unknowable. In any case, HM 65 is not holding a snake, but a spirally-striped object that could not have been a snake, as Evans knew. With reference to HM 63 he wrote in Palace of Minos I (Evans 1921): ‘…and as we know from the contents of the Temple Repositories described below, spotted snakes [emphasis added] were her peculiar emblem in her chthonic aspect as Lady of the Underworld.’ In any case, Evans, ‘who had played with the reptiles since childhood’, knew that snakes never have ‘peppermint stripes’. Indeed the textured surface of the upper original portion of the ‘serpent’ seems to reflect the craftsman’s intent to depict a twisted object such as a rope or cord (I don’t agree it is not a snake, but it could have held an extended reference to rope and knots as well- Damien).” ref
“The Syrian ConnectionConfronted with the clearly exotic elements of the figurines, the question then is where to look for possible sources. There is good evidence of interaction between the Aegean and the Levant during the decades around the construction of the New Palace. Several of the cylinder seals found on Crete, almost always in unstratified contexts, are Old Syrian. Woolley recognized the Aegeanizing elements in the paintings from Alalakh level VII, which is probably the late Middle Bronze Age, but whose date is still subject to dispute. More recently fragmentary remains of painted rockwork, irises, and crocuses at the site of Tel Kabri in the Galilee in a true fresco technique provide more evidence for exchange between Aegean and Levantine art, leading the excavator to suggest that Aegean artists had worked abroad (Niemeier and Niemeier, an interpretation recently affirmed by Cline and Yasur-Landau, who now date the Tel Kabri frescoes to around 1750 (i.e., con-temporary with the New Palace). Yet as Sherratt has argued, these are Aegeocentric positions predicated on some notion of Cretan cultural superiority; Knapp cogently argues against so simplistic an explanation for the hybridity that begins to emerge in the Eastern Mediterranean toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age, and contends that trade and diplomatic exchange are more likely means for the transmission of motifs.” ref
Although rulers in the Middle Bronze Age did not rely on the diplomatic visual language that Feldman argues had developed by the 13th century BCE, exchanges among courts still occurred for more general political ends. We learn in particular from the Mari letters of Zimri-Lim’s appreciation for Aegean crafts. At Ugarit he acquired Cretan metal-work which he almost certainly used as prestige gifts to his contemporaries in the region, and his appreciation for Cretan crafts continued with the order of a ‘Cretan boat’ trimmed with lapis lazuli and the importation from Crete of goods such as shoes, leather belts, and boots. Still, these interactions are limited in number. Von Rüden observes that during the Middle Bronze Age in the Levant Syrian seals (cf. an Anatolian gold seal from level IB at Karum Kanesh [Özgüç 1968: pl. XXX2b]; an Old Syrian Seal [Özgüç 1968: pl. XXVI, 3 and XXIX, 1, ‘Syrian long-haired woman’]; a Syrian cylinder seal in the Morgan Library collection [‘typically long Syrian hair’); and an Old Syrian cylinder seal from Tylissos. While Evans restored HM 63 with shoulder-length hair, she too may originally have had longer hair, and in any event, the straightness of her coiffure conforms with the Syrian prototypes.” ref
“The Cretan figurines’ poses are more difficult to pin down. While it is tempting to associate HM 65’s gesture with the Mistress of the Animals), that particular type is much later. The Master of Animals was known in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, but his feminine counterpart—who is naked, unlike HM 65—is later (Old Babylonian, ca. 1900 BCE) and quite rare (CIIIg [the so-called Burney Plaque] and pl. CIIIh [terra-cotta jar]). Goddesses in this aggressive posture, so forthright in their exposure of themselves, do appear, usually holding caprids, on a small number of seals from north Syria or Anatolia. They do not become associated with snakes until Late Bronze I-IIA Syria, as on the gold foil plaque from Minet el-Beida, 1400–1300 BCE, where the goddess does not hold the snakes, but instead is surrounded by them. As the Canaanite goddess Qedeshet, she never appears holding snakes (Cornelius 1999: 247; 2004), until in Egypt, as Qudshu, she holds snakes and lotus flowers (one to three of each) (Cornelius 1999). She did not arrive in Egypt until the New Kingdom, already partially Egyptianized with her Hathor headdress, and did not become prominent until the 19th dynasty (1298–1187 BCE).” ref
“The emergence of a goddess holding snakes, the predecessor to the Mistress of Animals, occurs long after the craftsman fashioned HM 65. But HM 65 is not, of course, holding snakes. The most likely prototype is a form of the goddess specific to Syria. The image of a naked goddess first appears on a few Old Babylonian cylinder seals from the early second millennium BCE. She seems most at home in Syria, however, where she appears in a variety of settings. In a particularly popular variant, she stands with arms raised, holding either end of what appears to be a long cord that hangs nearly to her feet. As Marinatos describes it, ‘the goddess holds something like a rope which has been plausibly interpreted as an abbreviation of her skirt’ to indicate that she is pulling her skirt open to display her sexuality. Holland observed that the figure on the Shaft Grave III pin holds a garland before her that exactly replicates the curved shape held by the Syrian goddess. The Votary also likely held ‘something like a rope’ or a garland, because the artisan, like the goldsmith who made the pin, modified the motif of the goddess opening her skirt.” ref
“Since Cretan women are never depicted nude, the artist could have felt compelled to clothe the figure completely, thereby obscuring the source for the image. HM 63’s Syrian roots are more difficult to discern. Her tapering cylindrical headgear could derive from the modified cylindrical crown with a single pair of horns at the base, worn by Syrian goddesses, as in the sealings from Level VII at Alalakh. But we do not find goddesses holding snakes in Syria or Anatolia, where the snake is instead associated with the weather god who occasionally holds the serpent. A semi-clad winged goddess with a cylindrical headdress always accompanies the weather god, but never holds or touches the snakes. Serpents are associated with water, as on an Early Dynastic vase with the Master of Serpents on one side and the Master of Water on the other, and depictions of gods holding water courses often appear as though the deity were holding snakes [god with flowing vase, ca. 2250 BCE [storm god and rain goddess holding water, 2250 BCE [Kassite seal with rain god, 1359–1330 BCE, but these are both much earlier and much later than the Snake Goddess.” ref
“That said, Keel suggests that in some instances the god who dominates the snake metamorphosizes into a god associated with water, and he cites a ritual vessel from Ebla in Syria (1800 BCE), on which the god holds a fish (?) in one hand and the tail of a snake in the other. Alternatively, the craftsman who created HM 63 may have misread a convention on late Middle Bronze Age seals from Syria, namely the use of a thick border on the robes. For example, on several sealings from Alalakh VII the goddess wears a cylindrical horned crown and a robe with a thick border that drapes around her arm like a snake. This misunderstanding would not be unique to the Bronze Age. The figure on a stele from Tell Beit Mirsim originally was restored in the twentieth century as encircled by a snake, whereas the craftsman had intended to render the typical thick border of a robe.” ref
“The faience figurines are thus to be understood as hybrids of Syrian-Cretan imagery and an intentional evocation of the exotic. Their hybridity—the combination of specifically Cretan bodices with Syrian gestures and flounces—embodied the experience of Knossian elites informed by and aware of eastern iconography. While these exotic forms, constrained by Cretan sensibilities, lack the aggressive sexuality of the Syrian goddesses, nevertheless HM 63 and HM 65, because of their three-dimensionality and luminous tactility, seem more emphatic than the later frescoed depictions of elite women with exposed breasts. The transformations to the Syrian prototypes underscore the hybridity of the images, as elites unfamiliar with the underlying ideology of the eastern models shaped the forms to their own ends. The resulting exoticism was central to the figurines’ positions as signs of human agency and intentionality, to their participation in the construction and furnishing of the New Palace, and to their deposition in the cists with the destruction of that project.” ref
“MacDonald has demonstrated that during the ceramic phase MM IIIB the elite at Knossos built the New Palace as a single coherent structure, an overly-ambitious enter-prise that did not survive an earthquake perhaps 50 years later. The builders of the New Palace did not reuse any surviving portions of the older palace, a process which would have incorporated shared experience and memory (recycling of components as a recollection of the past). The debris from the preceding structure was leveled to form the foundation for this totally new building. The construction was a performative act that decisively separated the new building and the social relations embodied therein from its predecessor. It differed from its LM IA successor in having a substantially larger central court and broad access. The Central Palace Sanctuary, where the Temple Repositories were located, was a single large space, not the suite of smaller rooms that appears on Fyfe’s plans. The Temple Repositories themselves, with a total liquid capacity of 6,900 liters, were situated exactly on the middle of the western edge of the court. While there is no way of knowing where the objects deposited in these massive cists originally were situated (including whether they were displayed as an ensemble), they were certainly part of the furnishings of the New Palace. The sumptuous-ness of the faience would have contrasted with the austere monumentality of the structure, apparently decorated only with marble dadoes and relief rosettes and triglyphs.” ref
“The precise status of Knossos at this stage of Cretan prehistory, the beginning of the Neopalatial phase, is far from clear, as archaeological evidence continues to accumulate that challenges Evans’s narrative of Knossian dominance over Crete as the head of a prominent ‘state’ in the Eastern Mediterranean and as an administrative center. Increasingly it appears that, to the extent, we can speak of Knossian hegemony at all, it was limited both in time and in territorial extent. At the time the New Palace was constructed there were still numerous regional centers possibly organized along corporate lines (Parkinson and Galaty 2007: 119), of which Knossos was simply the largest. That is, as Cherry (1986) had proposed, elites who had concentrated authority at sites such as Galatas and Phaestos interacted as peer polities that competed for power in a landscape occupied by numerous settlements of varying sizes. These regional centers may have been part of a heterarchically ordered system with completely localized relations between the centers and the smaller sites.” ref
“A heterarchy is a system of organization where the elements of the organization are unranked (non-hierarchical) or where they possess the potential to be ranked a number of different ways. Definitions of the term vary among the disciplines: in social and information sciences, heterarchies are networks of elements in which each element shares the same “horizontal” position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role. In biological taxonomy, however, the requisite features of heterarchy involve, for example, a species sharing, with a species in a different family, a common ancestor which it does not share with members of its own family. This is theoretically possible under principles of “horizontal gene transfer“. A heterarchy may be parallel to a hierarchy, subsumed to a hierarchy, or it may contain hierarchies; the two kinds of structure are not mutually exclusive. In fact, each level in a hierarchical system is composed of a potentially heterarchical group which contains its constituent elements.” REF
“The local variations in architecture and ceramic styles that characterize both the Prepalatial and Protopalatial phases on Crete were still apparent. What is clear at the moment is that in MM IIIB Knossos was still essentially a local power with, perhaps, larger aspirations that found expression in the New Palace and the burial of the past under this new construction. The faience figurines were manufactured during this early stage of the Neopalatial period, subsequently broken (perhaps during the earth-quake), and deposited in the Temple Repositories at the time of reconstruction early in LM IA of the Frescoed Palace. In the new building, which modified, but did not build over, the New Palace, access was more restricted, the central court was smaller, and the rooms around the court also were reduced in size. The marble dadoes were replaced by plaster and the light-filled frescoes. This palace may embody the apogee of Knossian power, although the precise char-acter of that power still remains open to scholarly debate. Although in LM IA independent polities continued to exist in the east and west, Knossos became the most significant force in central Crete. By the end of LM IA, the peer polity or hierarchical system had been replaced, at least in central Crete, with a different system structured according to a simplified hierarchy centered at Knossos. Yet even this centralization of authority, which some see as cultural rather than political, may have co-existed with heterarchies and factionalism.” ref
“While the elites at Knossos may have succeeded in asserting dominance only in LM IA, the monumentality of the MM IIIB palace and the exotic qualities of the faience figurines may signal initial efforts to centralize authority at the site. Although elites across the island certainly had controlled access to prestige goods throughout the Prepalatial and Protopalatial periods, the accumulation and concentration of such goods, particularly in this deposit at Knossos, marks a new stage. The unified conception of the palatial structure with its broad access and monumentality suggests a socio-political agenda of some kind, and—to the extent that the building was intended to perpetuate memories—they were to be of the new elites and not the past. The appearance of exotica contemporaneous with the construction of the New Palace is similar to, although much more limited in scope than, the evidence for the social and political shifts that occurred on Cyprus at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age. There, changes in the copper trade apparently led to the rise of Enkomi where, as evidenced by significant wealth differentials in a mortuary context, elites in the emerg-ing hierarchy became significant consumers of prestige goods from Egypt and the Levant). These prestige goods, because of their association with distant and exotic places would have legitimized elite claims to authority (Knapp 1998). Webb (2005) suggests that those elites extended their authority beyond that site, by deploying exotic imagery on cylinder seals, while communicating messages cast in metaphorical and mythical terms that simultaneously denied the social differences and reified the emerging hierarchy—a rough parallel to the exotic gestures of women in Cretan costume. She observes that Enkomi was a center for glyptic production, with more than 200 cylinder seals (Webb 2002:140), and would have been able, through the use of these seals, to control the copper trade and access to foreign markets and luxury goods. While the evidence of the faience figurines, admittedly, is significantly more ambiguous than the data from Enkomi, the volume of faience and the distinctiveness of the figurines, in particular, may reflect the similar pattern of emerging elites engaged in asserting dominance by deploying exotic imagery and materials.” ref
The Deposition of the Faience Figurines
“In this context, the destruction and deposition of the faience figurines takes on a particular significance. Evans clearly imagined that the figurines were broken as a consequence of the earthquake, a view implicit in accounts of the deposition as a ritual disposal of the damaged figurines), and Hatzaki suggests that the figurines may have been broken intentionally, perhaps even manufactured for that purpose, ‘killed’ as a display of elite power over luxury goods, or a metaphor for human sacrifice. Similar suggestions have been made for the Neopalatial stone bull’s-head rhyta which are always found fragmented, and there is significant evidence of intentional breakage of an array of objects from other European sites. In this regard, it is curious that both HM 63 and HM 65 lack the left arm, and all three disembodied arms and the single hand were from the left. Obviously, there is no way to know what actually happened. Nevertheless, the notion that the elites at Knossos, in the wake of the earthquake and as part of the process of rebuilding in LM IA, invested significant resources of time and treasure for the manufacture of all these faience objects, particularly the figurines, solely for the purpose of destroying them seems unlikely, and even impracticable given the level of destruction in which craftsmen would have labored. More to the point, in trying to account for Cretan conduct vis-à-vis building/foundation deposits in general, we overlook the historical specifics and effective agency of these objects in particular. Why these objects—the figurines? Why this place—the Temple Repositories? Why this time—LM IA? These questions are particularly pertinent because the figurines’ imagery—their distinctive features, including HM 63’s association with snakes—are totally absent from Neopalatial art. The faience figurines, and most likely all the faience objects, were integral to the social project embodied by the New Palace. As Boivin (2008) argues, material culture does not stand for or represent something; it is active. The selection of faience as a medium and the introduction of exotic ‘signs’ in the figurines’ gestures conveyed the elites’ claim of legitimate authority, whether only locally or over a broader territory. Both buildings and figurines embodied access to, and control of, resources and specialized knowledge. The sudden destruction of the New Palace disrupted not just the building, but the social relationships embedded in its construction. Likewise, the figurines, whether broken in the earthquake or subsequently and intentionally, may have lost efficacy after the cataclysm. The decision to deposit the faience in the Temple Repositories, given their situation at the middle of the western edge of the now ruined Central Court, affirmed the connection between the figurines and the building. And just as those who rebuilt in LM IA rejected the daring monumentality of the New Palace, so too they excluded any reference to the imagery of the faience figurines.” ref
Ancient DNA Reveals Origin Of the
First Bronze Age Civilizations In Europe?
“The first civilizations to build monumental palaces and urban centers in Europe are more genetically homogenous than expected, according to the first study to sequence whole genomes gathered from ancient archaeological sites around the Aegean Sea. Despite marked differences in burial customs, architecture, and art, the Minoan civilization in Crete, the Helladic civilization in mainland Greece and the Cycladic civilization in the Cycladic islands in the middle of the Aegean Sea, were genetically similar during the Early Bronze age (5000 years ago).” ref
“The findings are important because it suggests that critical innovations such as the development of urban centers, metal use and intensive trade made during the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age were not just due to mass immigration from east of the Aegean as previously thought, but also from the cultural continuity of local Neolithic groups. The study also finds that by the Middle Bronze Age (4000-4,600 years ago), individuals from the northern Aegean were considerably different compared to those in the Early Bronze Age. These individuals shared half their ancestry with people from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, a large geographic region stretching between the Danube and the Ural rivers and north of the Black Sea, and were highly similar to present-day Greeks.” ref
“The findings suggest that migration waves from herders from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, or populations north of the Aegean that bear Pontic-Caspian Steppe-like ancestry, shaped present-day Greece. These potential migration waves all predate the appearance of the earliest documented form of Greek, supporting theories explaining the emergence of Proto-Greek and the evolution of Indo-European languages in either Anatolia or the Pontic-Caspian Steppe region. The team took samples from well-preserved skeletal remains at archaeological sites. They sequenced six whole genomes, four from all three cultures during the Early Bronze Age and two from a Helladic culture during the Middle Bronze Age.” ref
“The researchers also sequenced the mitochondrial genomes from eleven other individuals from the Early Bronze Age. Sequencing whole genomes provided the researchers with enough data to perform demographic and statistical analyses on population histories. Sequencing ancient genomes is a huge challenge, particularly due to the degradation of the biological material and human contamination. A research team at the CNAG-CRG, played an important role in overcoming this challenge through using machine learning.” ref
“According to Oscar Lao, Head of the Population Genomics Group at the CNAG-CRG, “Taking an advantage that the number of samples and DNA quality we found is huge for this type of study, we have developed sophisticated machine learning tools to overcome challenges such as low depth of coverage, damage, and modern human contamination, opening the door for the application of artificial intelligence to palaeogenomics data.” ref
“Implementation of deep learning in demographic inference based on ancient samples allowed us to reconstruct ancestral relationships between ancient populations and reliably infer the amount and timing of massive migration events that marked the cultural transition from Neolithic to Bronze Age in Aegean,” says Olga Dolgova, postdoctoral researcher in the Population Genomics Group at the CNAG-CRG.” ref
The Bronze Age in Eurasia was marked by pivotal changes on the social, political, and economic levels, visible in the appearance of the first large urban centers and monumental palaces. The increasing economic and cultural exchange that developed during this time laid the groundwork for modern economic systems–including capitalism, long-distance political treaties, and a world trade economy.” ref
“Despite their importance for understanding the rise of European civilizations and the spread of Indo-European languages, the genetic origins of the peoples behind the Neolithic to Bronze Age transition and their contribution to the present-day Greek population remain controversial. Future studies could investigate whole genomes between the Mesolithic and Bronze Age in the Armenian and Caucasus to help further pinpoint the origins of migration into the Aegean, and to better integrate the genomic data with the existing archaeological and linguistic evidence. The study has been published in the journal Cell.” ref
There is a distinct association of ancient J2 civilizations with Bull worship.
“Haplogroup J2 is thought to have appeared somewhere in the Middle East towards the end of the last glaciation, between 15,000 and 22,000 years ago. The oldest known J2a samples at present were identified in remains from the Hotu Cave in northern Iran, dating from 9100-8600 BCE (Lazaridis et al. 2016), and from Kotias Klde in Georgia, dating from 7940-7600 BCE or around 9,960 to 9,620 years ago (Jones et al. 2015). This confirms that haplogroup J2 was already found around the Caucasus and the southern Caspian region during the Mesolithic period. The first appearance of J2 during the Neolithic came in the form of a 10,000-year-old J2b sample from Tepe Abdul Hosein in north-western Iran in what was then the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (Broushaki et al. 2016).” ref
“Notwithstanding its strong presence in West Asia today, haplogroup J2 does not seem to have been one of the principal lineages associated with the rise and diffusion of cereal farming from the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia to Europe. It is likely that J2 men had settled over most of Anatolia, the South Caucasus, and Iran by the end of the Last Glaciation 12,000 years ago. It is possible that J2 hunter-gatherers then goat/sheepherders also lived in the Fertile Crescent during the Neolithic period, although the development of early cereal agriculture is thought to have been conducted by men belonging primarily to haplogroups G2a (northern branch, from Anatolia to Europe), as well as E1b1b and T1a (southern branch, from the Levant to the Arabian peninsula and North Africa).” ref
“Mathieson et al. (2015) tested the Y-DNA of 13 Early Neolithic farmers from the Barcın site (6500-6200 BCE or around 8,520 to 8,220 years ago) in north-western Anatolia, and only one of them belonged to haplogroup J2a. Lazaridis et al. (2016) tested 44 ancient Near Eastern samples, including Neolithic farmers from Jordan and western Iran, but only the above-mentioned sample from Mesolithic Iran belonged to J2. Likewise, over 100 Y-DNA samples have been tested from Neolithic Europe, covering most of the important cultures, and only two J2 sample was found, in the Sopot and Proto-Lengyel cultures in Hungary, dating from 7,000 years ago. J2 was also absent from all Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Indo-European cultures, apart from one J2a1b sample in Hungary dating from the end of the Bronze Age (c. 1150 BCE or around 3,170 years ago, see Gamba et al. 2014), in the minor Kyjatice culture, an offshoot of the Urnfield culture, which differs from typical Indo-European cultures by its use of cremation instead of single-grave burials.” ref
“No Neolithic sample from Central or South Asia has been tested to date, but the present geographic distribution of haplogroup J2 suggests that it could initially have dispersed during the Neolithic from the Zagros mountains and northern Mesopotamia across the Iranian plateau to South Asia and Central Asia, and across the Caucasus to Russia (Volga-Ural). The first expansion probably correlated with the diffusion of domesticated of cattle and goats (starting c. 8000-9000 BCE), rather than with the development of cereal agriculture in the Levant.” ref
“A second expansion would have occurred with the advent of metallurgy. J2 could have been the main paternal lineage of the Kura-Araxes culture (Late Copper to Early Bronze Age), which expanded from the southern Caucasus toward northern Mesopotamia and the Levant. After that J2 could have propagated through Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean with the rise of early civilizations during the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age.” ref
“Quite a few ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations flourished in territories where J2 lineages were preponderant. This is the case of the Hattians, the Hurrians, the Etruscans, the Minoans, the Greeks, the Phoenicians (and their Carthaginian offshoot), the Israelites, and to a lower extent also the Romans, the Assyrians, and the Persians. All the great seafaring civilizations from the Middle Bronze Age to the Iron Age were dominated by J2 men.” ref
“There is a distinct association of ancient J2 civilizations with bull worship. The oldest evidence of a cult of the bull can be traced back to Neolithic central Anatolia, notably at the sites of Çatalhöyük and Alaca Höyük. Bull depictions are omnipresent in Minoan frescos and ceramics in Crete. Bull-masked terracotta figurines and bull-horned stone altars have been found in Cyprus (dating back as far as the Neolithic, the first presumed expansion of J2 from West Asia). The Hattians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Canaanites, and Carthaginians all had bull deities (in contrast with Indo-European or East Asian religions). The sacred bull of Hinduism, Nandi, present in all temples dedicated to Shiva or Parvati, does not have an Indo-European origin, but can be traced back to Indus Valley civilization. Minoan Crete, Hittite Anatolia, the Levant, Bactria, and the Indus Valley also shared a tradition of bull leaping, the ritual of dodging the charge of a bull. It survives today in the traditional bullfighting of Andalusia in Spain and Provence in France, two regions with a high percentage of J2 lineages.” ref
Animism: Respecting the Living World by Graham Harvey
“How have human cultures engaged with and thought about animals, plants, rocks, clouds, and other elements in their natural surroundings? Do animals and other natural objects have a spirit or soul? What is their relationship to humans? In this new study, Graham Harvey explores current and past animistic beliefs and practices of Native Americans, Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and eco-pagans. He considers the varieties of animism found in these cultures as well as their shared desire to live respectfully within larger natural communities. Drawing on his extensive casework, Harvey also considers the linguistic, performative, ecological, and activist implications of these different animisms.” ref
My thoughts on Religion Evolution with external links for more info:
- (Pre-Animism Africa mainly, but also Europe, and Asia at least 300,000 years ago), (Pre-Animism – Oxford Dictionaries)
- (Animism Africa around 100,000 years ago), (Animism – Britannica.com)
- (Totemism Europe around 50,000 years ago), (Totemism – Anthropology)
- (Shamanism Siberia around 30,000 years ago), (Shamanism – Britannica.com)
- (Paganism Turkey around 12,000 years ago), (Paganism – BBC Religion)
- (Progressed Organized Religion “Institutional Religion” Egypt around 5,000 years ago), (Ancient Egyptian Religion – Britannica.com)
- (CURRENT “World” RELIGIONS after 4,000 years ago) (Origin of Major Religions – Sacred Texts)
- (Early Atheistic Doubting at least by 2,600 years ago) (History of Atheism – Wikipedia)
“Religion is an Evolved Product” and Yes, Religion is Like Fear Given Wings…
Atheists talk about gods and religions for the same reason doctors talk about cancer, they are looking for a cure, or a firefighter talks about fires because they burn people and they care to stop them. We atheists too often feel a need to help the victims of mental slavery, held in the bondage that is the false beliefs of gods and the conspiracy theories of reality found in religions.
Understanding Religion Evolution:
- Pre-Animism (at least 300,000 years ago)
- Animism (Africa: 100,000 years ago)
- Totemism (Europe: 50,000 years ago)
- Shamanism (Siberia: 30,000 years ago)
- Paganism (Turkey: 12,000 years ago)
- Progressed organized religion (Egypt: 5,000 years ago), (Egypt, the First Dynasty 5,150 years ago)
- CURRENT “World” RELIGIONS (after 4,000 years ago)
- Early Atheistic Doubting (at least by 2,600 years ago)
“An Archaeological/Anthropological Understanding of Religion Evolution”
It seems ancient peoples had to survived amazing threats in a “dangerous universe (by superstition perceived as good and evil),” and human “immorality or imperfection of the soul” which was thought to affect the still living, leading to ancestor worship. This ancestor worship presumably led to the belief in supernatural beings, and then some of these were turned into the belief in gods. This feeble myth called gods were just a human conceived “made from nothing into something over and over, changing, again and again, taking on more as they evolve, all the while they are thought to be special,” but it is just supernatural animistic spirit-belief perceived as sacred.
Quick Evolution of Religion?
Pre-Animism (at least 300,000 years ago) pre-religion is a beginning that evolves into later Animism. So, Religion as we think of it, to me, all starts in a general way with Animism (Africa: 100,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in supernatural powers/spirits), then this is physically expressed in or with Totemism (Europe: 50,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in mythical relationship with powers/spirits through a totem item), which then enlists a full-time specific person to do this worship and believed interacting Shamanism (Siberia/Russia: 30,000 years ago) (theoretical belief in access and influence with spirits through ritual), and then there is the further employment of myths and gods added to all the above giving you Paganism (Turkey: 12,000 years ago) (often a lot more nature-based than most current top world religions, thus hinting to their close link to more ancient religious thinking it stems from). My hypothesis is expressed with an explanation of the building of a theatrical house (modern religions development). Progressed organized religion (Egypt: 5,000 years ago) with CURRENT “World” RELIGIONS (after 4,000 years ago).
Historically, in large city-state societies (such as Egypt or Iraq) starting around 5,000 years ago culminated to make religion something kind of new, a sociocultural-governmental-religious monarchy, where all or at least many of the people of such large city-state societies seem familiar with and committed to the existence of “religion” as the integrated life identity package of control dynamics with a fixed closed magical doctrine, but this juggernaut integrated religion identity package of Dogmatic-Propaganda certainly did not exist or if developed to an extent it was highly limited in most smaller prehistoric societies as they seem to lack most of the strong control dynamics with a fixed closed magical doctrine (magical beliefs could be at times be added or removed). Many people just want to see developed religious dynamics everywhere even if it is not. Instead, all that is found is largely fragments until the domestication of religion.
Religions, as we think of them today, are a new fad, even if they go back to around 6,000 years in the timeline of human existence, this amounts to almost nothing when seen in the long slow evolution of religion at least around 70,000 years ago with one of the oldest ritual worship. Stone Snake of South Africa: “first human worship” 70,000 years ago. This message of how religion and gods among them are clearly a man-made thing that was developed slowly as it was invented and then implemented peace by peace discrediting them all. Which seems to be a simple point some are just not grasping how devastating to any claims of truth when we can see the lie clearly in the archeological sites.
I wish people fought as hard for the actual values as they fight for the group/clan names political or otherwise they think support values. Every amount spent on war is theft to children in need of food or the homeless kept from shelter.
Here are several of my blog posts on history:
- To Find Truth You Must First Look
- (Magdalenian/Iberomaurusian) Connections to the First Paganists of the early Neolithic Near East Dating from around 17,000 to 12,000 Years Ago
- Natufians: an Ancient People at the Origins of Agriculture and Sedentary Life
- Possible Clan Leader/Special “MALE” Ancestor Totem Poles At Least 13,500 years ago?
- Jewish People with DNA at least 13,200 years old, Judaism, and the Origins of Some of its Ideas
- Baltic Reindeer Hunters: Swiderian, Lyngby, Ahrensburgian, and Krasnosillya cultures 12,020 to 11,020 years ago are evidence of powerful migratory waves during the last 13,000 years and a genetic link to Saami and the Finno-Ugric peoples.
- The Rise of Inequality: patriarchy and state hierarchy inequality
- Fertile Crescent 12,500 – 9,500 Years Ago: fertility and death cult belief system?
- 12,400 – 11,700 Years Ago – Kortik Tepe (Turkey) Pre/early-Agriculture Cultic Ritualism
- Ritualistic Bird Symbolism at Gobekli Tepe and its “Ancestor Cult”
- Male-Homosexual (female-like) / Trans-woman (female) Seated Figurine from Gobekli Tepe
- Could a 12,000-year-old Bull Geoglyph at Göbekli Tepe relate to older Bull and Female Art 25,000 years ago and Later Goddess and the Bull cults like Catal Huyuk?
- Sedentism and the Creation of goddesses around 12,000 years ago as well as male gods after 7,000 years ago.
- Alcohol, where Agriculture and Religion Become one? Such as Gobekli Tepe’s Ritualistic use of Grain as Food and Ritual Drink
- Neolithic Ritual Sites with T-Pillars and other Cultic Pillars
- Paganism: Goddesses around 12,000 years ago then Male Gods after 7,000 years ago
- First Patriarchy: Split of Women’s Status around 12,000 years ago & First Hierarchy: fall of Women’s Status around 5,000 years ago.
- Natufians: an Ancient People at the Origins of Agriculture and Sedentary Life
- J DNA and the Spread of Agricultural Religion (paganism)
- Paganism: an approximately 12,000-year-old belief system
- Paganism 12,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Pre-Capitalism)
- Shaman burial in Israel 12,000 years ago and the Shamanism Phenomena
- Need to Mythicized: gods and goddesses
- 12,000 – 7,000 Years Ago – Paleo-Indian Culture (The Americas)
- 12,000 – 2,000 Years Ago – Indigenous-Scandinavians (Nordic)
- Norse did not wear helmets with horns?
- Pre-Pottery Neolithic Skull Cult around 11,500 to 8,400 Years Ago?
- 10,400 – 10,100 Years Ago, in Turkey the Nevail Cori Religious Settlement
- 9,000-6,500 Years Old Submerged Pre-Pottery/Pottery Neolithic Ritual Settlements off Israel’s Coast
- Catal Huyuk “first religious designed city” around 9,500 to 7,700 years ago (Turkey)
- Cultic Hunting at Catal Huyuk “first religious designed city”
- Special Items and Art as well as Special Elite Burials at Catal Huyuk
- New Rituals and Violence with the appearance of Pottery and People?
- Haplogroup N and its related Uralic Languages and Cultures
- Ainu people, Sámi people, Native Americans, the Ancient North Eurasians, and Paganistic-Shamanism with Totemism
- Ideas, Technology and People from Turkey, Europe, to China and Back again 9,000 to 5,000 years ago?
- First Pottery of Europe and the Related Cultures
- 9,000 years old Neolithic Artifacts Judean Desert and Hills Israel
- 9,000-7,000 years-old Sex and Death Rituals: Cult Sites in Israel, Jordan, and the Sinai
- 9,000-8500 year old Horned Female shaman Bad Dürrenberg Germany
- Neolithic Jewelry and the Spread of Farming in Europe Emerging out of West Turkey
- 8,600-year-old Tortoise Shells in Neolithic graves in central China have Early Writing and Shamanism
- Swing of the Mace: the rise of Elite, Forced Authority, and Inequality begin to Emerge 8,500 years ago?
- Migrations and Changing Europeans Beginning around 8,000 Years Ago
- My “Steppe-Anatolian-Kurgan hypothesis” 8,000/7,000 years ago
- Around 8,000-year-old Shared Idea of the Mistress of Animals, “Ritual” Motif
- Pre-Columbian Red-Paint (red ochre) Maritime Archaic Culture 8,000-3,000 years ago
- 7,522-6,522 years ago Linear Pottery culture which I think relates to Arcane Capitalism’s origins
- Arcane Capitalism: Primitive socialism, Primitive capital, Private ownership, Means of production, Market capitalism, Class discrimination, and Petite bourgeoisie (smaller capitalists)
- 7,500-4,750 years old Ritualistic Cucuteni-Trypillian culture of Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine
- Roots of a changing early society 7,200-6,700 years ago Jordan and Israel
- Agriculture religion (Paganism) with farming reached Britain between about 7,000 to 6,500 or so years ago and seemingly expressed in things like Western Europe’s Long Barrows
- My Thoughts on Possible Migrations of “R” DNA and Proto-Indo-European?
- “Millet” Spreading from China 7,022 years ago to Europe and related Language may have Spread with it leading to Proto-Indo-European
- Proto-Indo-European (PIE), ancestor of Indo-European languages: DNA, Society, Language, and Mythology
- The Dnieper–Donets culture and Asian varieties of Millet from China to the Black Sea region of Europe by 7,022 years ago
- Kurgan 6,000 years ago/dolmens 7,000 years ago: funeral, ritual, and other?
- 7,020 to 6,020-year-old Proto-Indo-European Homeland of Urheimat or proposed home of their Language and Religion
- Ancient Megaliths: Kurgan, Ziggurat, Pyramid, Menhir, Trilithon, Dolman, Kromlech, and Kromlech of Trilithons
- The Mytheme of Ancient North Eurasian Sacred-Dog belief and similar motifs are found in Indo-European, Native American, and Siberian comparative mythology
- Elite Power Accumulation: Ancient Trade, Tokens, Writing, Wealth, Merchants, and Priest-Kings
- Sacred Mounds, Mountains, Kurgans, and Pyramids may hold deep connections?
- Between 7,000-5,000 Years ago, rise of unequal hierarchy elite, leading to a “birth of the State” or worship of power, strong new sexism, oppression of non-elites, and the fall of Women’s equal status
- Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite & their slaves
- Hell and Underworld mythologies starting maybe as far back as 7,000 to 5,000 years ago with the Proto-Indo-Europeans?
- The First Expression of the Male God around 7,000 years ago?
- White (light complexion skin) Bigotry and Sexism started 7,000 years ago?
- Around 7,000-year-old Shared Idea of the Divine Bird (Tutelary and/or Trickster spirit/deity), “Ritual” Motif
- Nekhbet an Ancient Egyptian Vulture Goddess and Tutelary Deity
- 6,720 to 4,920 years old Ritualistic Hongshan Culture of Inner Mongolia with 5,000-year-old Pyramid Mounds and Temples
- First proto-king in the Balkans, Varna culture around 6,500 years ago?
- 6,500–5,800 years ago in Israel Late Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Period in the Southern Levant Seems to Express Northern Levant Migrations, Cultural and Religious Transfer
- KING OF BEASTS: Master of Animals “Ritual” Motif, around 6,000 years old or older…
- Around 6000-year-old Shared Idea of the Solid Wheel & the Spoked Wheel-Shaped Ritual Motif
- “The Ghassulian Star,” a mysterious 6,000-year-old mural from Jordan; a Proto-Star of Ishtar, Star of Inanna or Star of Venus?
- Religious/Ritual Ideas, including goddesses and gods as well as ritual mounds or pyramids from Northeastern Asia at least 6,000 years old, seemingly filtering to Iran, Iraq, the Mediterranean, Europe, Egypt, and the Americas?
- Maykop (5,720–5,020 years ago) Caucasus region Bronze Age culture-related to Copper Age farmers from the south, influenced by the Ubaid period and Leyla-Tepe culture, as well as influencing the Kura-Araxes culture
- 5-600-year-old Tomb, Mummy, and First Bearded Male Figurine in a Grave
- Kura-Araxes Cultural 5,520 to 4,470 years old DNA traces to the Canaanites, Arabs, and Jews
- Minoan/Cretan (Keftiu) Civilization and Religion around 5,520 to 3,120 years ago
- Evolution Of Science at least by 5,500 years ago
- 5,500 Years old birth of the State, the rise of Hierarchy, and the fall of Women’s status
- “Jiroft culture” 5,100 – 4,200 years ago and the History of Iran
- Stonehenge: Paganistic Burial and Astrological Ritual Complex, England (5,100-3,600 years ago)
- Around 5,000-year-old Shared Idea of the “Tree of Life” Ritual Motif
- Complex rituals for elite, seen from China to Egypt, at least by 5,000 years ago
- Around 5,000 years ago: “Birth of the State” where Religion gets Military Power and Influence
- The Center of the World “Axis Mundi” and/or “Sacred Mountains” Mythology Could Relate to the Altai Mountains, Heart of the Steppe
- Progressed organized religion starts, an approximately 5,000-year-old belief system
- China’s Civilization between 5,000-3,000 years ago, was a time of war and class struggle, violent transition from free clans to a Slave or Elite society
- Origin of Logics is Naturalistic Observation at least by around 5,000 years ago.
- Paganism 5,000 years old: progressed organized religion and the state: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Kings and the Rise of the State)
- Ziggurats (multi-platform temples: 4,900 years old) to Pyramids (multi-platform tombs: 4,700 years old)
- Did a 4,520–4,420-year-old Volcano In Turkey Inspire the Bible God?
- Finland’s Horned Shaman and Pre-Horned-God at least 4,500 years ago?
- 4,000-year-Old Dolmens in Israel: A Connected Dolmen Religious Phenomenon?
- Creation myths: From chaos, Ex nihilo, Earth-diver, Emergence, World egg, and World parent
- Bronze Age “Ritual” connections of the Bell Beaker culture with the Corded Ware/Single Grave culture, which were related to the Yamnaya culture and Proto-Indo-European Languages/Religions
- Low Gods (Earth/ Tutelary deity), High Gods (Sky/Supreme deity), and Moralistic Gods (Deity enforcement/divine order)
- The exchange of people, ideas, and material-culture including, to me, the new god (Sky Father) and goddess (Earth Mother) religion between the Cucuteni-Trypillians and others which is then spread far and wide
- Koryaks: Indigenous People of the Russian Far East and Big Raven myths also found in Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and other Indigenous People of North America
- 42 Principles Of Maat (Egyptian Goddess of the justice) around 4,400 years ago, 2000 Years Before Ten Commandments
- “Happy Easter” Well Happy Eostre/Ishter
- 4,320-3,820 years old “Shimao” (North China) site with Totemistic-Shamanistic Paganism and a Stepped Pyramid
- 4,250 to 3,400 Year old Stonehenge from Russia: Arkaim?
- 4,100-year-old beaker with medicinal & flowering plants in a grave of a woman in Scotland
- Early European Farmer ancestry, Kelif el Boroud people with the Cardial Ware culture, and the Bell Beaker culture Paganists too, spread into North Africa, then to the Canary Islands off West Africa
- Flood Accounts: Gilgamesh epic (4,100 years ago) Noah in Genesis (2,600 years ago)
- Paganism 4,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (First Moralistic gods, then the Origin time of Monotheism)
- When was the beginning: TIMELINE OF CURRENT RELIGIONS, which start around 4,000 years ago.
- Early Religions Thought to Express Proto-Monotheistic Systems around 4,000 years ago
- Kultepe? An archaeological site with a 4,000 years old women’s rights document.
- Single God Religions (Monotheism) = “Man-o-theism” started around 4,000 years ago with the Great Sky Spirit/God Tiān (天)?
- Confucianism’s Tiān (Shangdi god 4,000 years old): Supernaturalism, Pantheism or Theism?
- Yes, Your Male God is Ridiculous
- Mythology, a Lunar Deity is a Goddess or God of the Moon
- Sacred Land, Hills, and Mountains: Sami Mythology (Paganistic Shamanism)
- Horse Worship/Sacrifice: mythical union of Ruling Elite/Kingship and the Horse
- The Amorite/Amurru people’s God Amurru “Lord of the Steppe”, relates to the Origins of the Bible God?
- Bronze Age Exotic Trade Routes Spread Quite Far as well as Spread Religious Ideas with Them
- Sami and the Northern Indigenous Peoples Landscape, Language, and its Connection to Religion
- Prototype of Ancient Analemmatic Sundials around 3,900-3,150 years ago and a Possible Solar Connection to gods?
- Judaism is around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (“Paleo-Hebrew” 3,000 years ago and Torah 2,500 years ago)
- The Weakening of Ancient Trade and the Strengthening of Religions around 3000 years ago?
- Are you aware that there are religions that worship women gods, explain now religion tears women down?
- Animistic, Totemistic, and Paganistic Superstition Origins of bible god and the bible’s Religion.
- Myths and Folklore: “Trickster gods and goddesses”
- Jews, Judaism, and the Origins of Some of its Ideas
- An Old Branch of Religion Still Giving Fruit: Sacred Trees
- Dating the BIBLE: naming names and telling times (written less than 3,000 years ago, provable to 2,200 years ago)
- Did a Volcano Inspire the bible god?
- The Amorite/Amurru people’s God Amurru “Lord of the Steppe”, relates to the Origins of the Bible God?
- Dené–Yeniseian language, Old Copper Complex, and Pre-Columbian Mound Builders?
- No “dinosaurs and humans didn’t exist together just because some think they are in the bible itself”
- Sacred Shit and Sacred Animals?
- Everyone Killed in the Bible Flood? “Nephilim” (giants)?
- Hey, Damien dude, I have a question for you regarding “the bible” Exodus.
- Archaeology Disproves the Bible
- Bible Battle, Just More, Bible Babble
- The Jericho Conquest lie?
- Canaanites and Israelites?
- Accurate Account on how did Christianity Began?
- Let’s talk about Christianity.
- So the 10 commandments isn’t anything to go by either right?
- Misinformed christian
- Debunking Jesus?
- Paulism vs Jesus
- Ok, you seem confused so let’s talk about Buddhism.
- Unacknowledged Buddhism: Gods, Savior, Demons, Rebirth, Heavens, Hells, and Terrorism
- His Foolishness The Dalai Lama
- Yin and Yang is sexist with an ORIGIN around 2,300 years ago?
- I Believe Archaeology, not Myths & Why Not, as the Religious Myths Already Violate Reason!
- Archaeological, Scientific, & Philosophic evidence shows the god myth is man-made nonsense.
- Aquatic Ape Theory/Hypothesis? As Always, Just Pseudoscience.
- Ancient Aliens Conspiracy Theorists are Pseudohistorians
- The Pseudohistoric and Pseudoscientific claims about “Bakoni Ruins” of South Africa
- Why do people think Religion is much more than supernaturalism and superstitionism?
- Religion is an Evolved Product
- Was the Value of Ancient Women Different?
- 1000 to 1100 CE, human sacrifice Cahokia Mounds a pre-Columbian Native American site
- Feminist atheists as far back as the 1800s?
- Promoting Religion as Real is Mentally Harmful to a Flourishing Humanity
- Screw All Religions and Their Toxic lies, they are all fraud
- Forget Religions’ Unfounded Myths, I Have Substantiated “Archaeology Facts.”
- Religion Dispersal throughout the World
- I Hate Religion Just as I Hate all Pseudoscience
- Exposing Scientology, Eckankar, Wicca and Other Nonsense?
- Main deity or religious belief systems
- Quit Trying to Invent Your God From the Scraps of Science.
- Archaeological, Scientific, & Philosophic evidence shows the god myth is man-made nonsense.
- Ancient Alien Conspiracy Theorists: Misunderstanding, Rhetoric, Misinformation, Fabrications, and Lies
- Misinformation, Distortion, and Pseudoscience in Talking with a Christian Creationist
- Judging the Lack of Goodness in Gods, Even the Norse God Odin
- Challenging the Belief in God-like Aliens and Gods in General
- A Challenge to Christian use of Torture Devices?
- Yes, Hinduism is a Religion
- Trump is One of the Most Reactionary Forces of Far-right Christian Extremism
- Was the Bull Head a Symbol of God? Yes!
- Primate Death Rituals
- Christian – “God and Christianity are objectively true”
- Australopithecus afarensis Death Ritual?
- You Claim Global Warming is a Hoax?
- Doubter of Science and Defamer of Atheists?
- I think that sounds like the Bible?
- History of the Antifa (“anti-fascist”) Movements
- Indianapolis Anti-Blasphemy Laws #Free Soheil Rally
- Damien, you repeat the golden rule in so many forms then you say religion is dogmatic?
- Science is a Trustable Methodology whereas Faith is not Trustable at all!
- Was I ever a believer, before I was an atheist?
- Atheists rise in reason
- Mistrust of science?
- Open to Talking About the Definition of ‘God’? But first, we address Faith.
- ‘United Monarchy’ full of splendor and power – Saul, David, and Solomon? Most likely not.
- Is there EXODUS ARCHAEOLOGY? The short answer is “no.”
- Lacking Proof of Bigfoots, Unicorns, and Gods is Just a Lack of Research?
- Religion and Politics: Faith Beliefs vs. Rational Thinking
- Hammer of Truth that lying pig RELIGION: challenged by an archaeologist
- “The Hammer of Truth” -ontology question- What do You Mean by That?
- Navigation of a bad argument: Ad Hominem vs. Attack
- Why is it Often Claimed that Gods have a Gender?
- Why are basically all monotheistic religions ones that have a male god?
- Shifting through the Claims in support of Faith
- Dear Mr. AtHope, The 20th Century is an Indictment of Secularism and a Failed Atheist Century
- An Understanding of the Worldwide Statistics and Dynamics of Terrorist Incidents and Suicide Attacks
- Intoxication and Evolution? Addressing and Assessing the “Stoned Ape” or “Drunken Monkey” Theories as Catalysts in Human Evolution
- Sacred Menstrual cloth? Inanna’s knot, Isis knot, and maybe Ma’at’s feather?
- Damien, why don’t the Hebrews accept the bible stories?
- Dealing with a Troll and Arguing Over Word Meaning
- Knowledge without Belief? Justified beliefs or disbeliefs worthy of Knowledge?
- Afrocentrism and African Religions
- Crecganford @crecganford offers history & stories of the people, places, gods, & culture
- Empiricism-Denier?
I am not an academic. I am a revolutionary that teaches in public, in places like social media, and in the streets. I am not a leader by some title given but from my commanding leadership style of simply to start teaching everywhere to everyone, all manner of positive education.
ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref
Low Gods “Earth” or Tutelary deity and High Gods “Sky” or Supreme deity
“An Earth goddess is a deification of the Earth. Earth goddesses are often associated with the “chthonic” deities of the underworld. Ki and Ninhursag are Mesopotamian earth goddesses. In Greek mythology, the Earth is personified as Gaia, corresponding to Roman Terra, Indic Prithvi/Bhūmi, etc. traced to an “Earth Mother” complementary to the “Sky Father” in Proto-Indo-European religion. Egyptian mythology exceptionally has a sky goddess and an Earth god.” ref
“A mother goddess is a goddess who represents or is a personification of nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction or who embodies the bounty of the Earth. When equated with the Earth or the natural world, such goddesses are sometimes referred to as Mother Earth or as the Earth Mother. In some religious traditions or movements, Heavenly Mother (also referred to as Mother in Heaven or Sky Mother) is the wife or feminine counterpart of the Sky father or God the Father.” ref
“Any masculine sky god is often also king of the gods, taking the position of patriarch within a pantheon. Such king gods are collectively categorized as “sky father” deities, with a polarity between sky and earth often being expressed by pairing a “sky father” god with an “earth mother” goddess (pairings of a sky mother with an earth father are less frequent). A main sky goddess is often the queen of the gods and may be an air/sky goddess in her own right, though she usually has other functions as well with “sky” not being her main. In antiquity, several sky goddesses in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Near East were called Queen of Heaven. Neopagans often apply it with impunity to sky goddesses from other regions who were never associated with the term historically. The sky often has important religious significance. Many religions, both polytheistic and monotheistic, have deities associated with the sky.” ref
“In comparative mythology, sky father is a term for a recurring concept in polytheistic religions of a sky god who is addressed as a “father”, often the father of a pantheon and is often either a reigning or former King of the Gods. The concept of “sky father” may also be taken to include Sun gods with similar characteristics, such as Ra. The concept is complementary to an “earth mother“. “Sky Father” is a direct translation of the Vedic Dyaus Pita, etymologically descended from the same Proto-Indo-European deity name as the Greek Zeûs Pater and Roman Jupiter and Germanic Týr, Tir or Tiwaz, all of which are reflexes of the same Proto-Indo-European deity’s name, *Dyēus Ph₂tḗr. While there are numerous parallels adduced from outside of Indo-European mythology, there are exceptions (e.g. In Egyptian mythology, Nut is the sky mother and Geb is the earth father).” ref
Tutelary deity
“A tutelary (also tutelar) is a deity or spirit who is a guardian, patron, or protector of a particular place, geographic feature, person, lineage, nation, culture, or occupation. The etymology of “tutelary” expresses the concept of safety and thus of guardianship. In late Greek and Roman religion, one type of tutelary deity, the genius, functions as the personal deity or daimon of an individual from birth to death. Another form of personal tutelary spirit is the familiar spirit of European folklore.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Korean shamanism, jangseung and sotdae were placed at the edge of villages to frighten off demons. They were also worshiped as deities. Seonangshin is the patron deity of the village in Korean tradition and was believed to embody the Seonangdang. In Philippine animism, Diwata or Lambana are deities or spirits that inhabit sacred places like mountains and mounds and serve as guardians. Such as: Maria Makiling is the deity who guards Mt. Makiling and Maria Cacao and Maria Sinukuan. In Shinto, the spirits, or kami, which give life to human bodies come from nature and return to it after death. Ancestors are therefore themselves tutelaries to be worshiped. And similarly, Native American beliefs such as Tonás, tutelary animal spirit among the Zapotec and Totems, familial or clan spirits among the Ojibwe, can be animals.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Austronesian beliefs such as: Atua (gods and spirits of the Polynesian peoples such as the Māori or the Hawaiians), Hanitu (Bunun of Taiwan‘s term for spirit), Hyang (Kawi, Sundanese, Javanese, and Balinese Supreme Being, in ancient Java and Bali mythology and this spiritual entity, can be either divine or ancestral), Kaitiaki (New Zealand Māori term used for the concept of guardianship, for the sky, the sea, and the land), Kawas (mythology) (divided into 6 groups: gods, ancestors, souls of the living, spirits of living things, spirits of lifeless objects, and ghosts), Tiki (Māori mythology, Tiki is the first man created by either Tūmatauenga or Tāne and represents deified ancestors found in most Polynesian cultures). ” ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref
Mesopotamian Tutelary Deities can be seen as ones related to City-States
“Historical city-states included Sumerian cities such as Uruk and Ur; Ancient Egyptian city-states, such as Thebes and Memphis; the Phoenician cities (such as Tyre and Sidon); the five Philistine city-states; the Berber city-states of the Garamantes; the city-states of ancient Greece (the poleis such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth); the Roman Republic (which grew from a city-state into a vast empire); the Italian city-states from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, such as Florence, Siena, Ferrara, Milan (which as they grew in power began to dominate neighboring cities) and Genoa and Venice, which became powerful thalassocracies; the Mayan and other cultures of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (including cities such as Chichen Itza, Tikal, Copán and Monte Albán); the central Asian cities along the Silk Road; the city-states of the Swahili coast; Ragusa; states of the medieval Russian lands such as Novgorod and Pskov; and many others.” ref
“The Uruk period (ca. 4000 to 3100 BCE; also known as Protoliterate period) of Mesopotamia, named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia and the Sumerian civilization. City-States like Uruk and others had a patron tutelary City Deity along with a Priest-King.” ref
“Chinese folk religion, both past, and present, includes myriad tutelary deities. Exceptional individuals, highly cultivated sages, and prominent ancestors can be deified and honored after death. Lord Guan is the patron of military personnel and police, while Mazu is the patron of fishermen and sailors. Such as Tu Di Gong (Earth Deity) is the tutelary deity of a locality, and each individual locality has its own Earth Deity and Cheng Huang Gong (City God) is the guardian deity of an individual city, worshipped by local officials and locals since imperial times.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Hinduism, personal tutelary deities are known as ishta-devata, while family tutelary deities are known as Kuladevata. Gramadevata are guardian deities of villages. Devas can also be seen as tutelary. Shiva is the patron of yogis and renunciants. City goddesses include: Mumbadevi (Mumbai), Sachchika (Osian); Kuladevis include: Ambika (Porwad), and Mahalakshmi. In NorthEast India Meitei mythology and religion (Sanamahism) of Manipur, there are various types of tutelary deities, among which Lam Lais are the most predominant ones. Tibetan Buddhism has Yidam as a tutelary deity. Dakini is the patron of those who seek knowledge.” ref
“A tutelary (also tutelar) The Greeks also thought deities guarded specific places: for instance, Athena was the patron goddess of the city of Athens. Socrates spoke of hearing the voice of his personal spirit or daimonion:
You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me … . This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and this is what stands in the way of my being a politician.” ref
“Tutelary deities who guard and preserve a place or a person are fundamental to ancient Roman religion. The tutelary deity of a man was his Genius, that of a woman her Juno. In the Imperial era, the Genius of the Emperor was a focus of Imperial cult. An emperor might also adopt a major deity as his personal patron or tutelary, as Augustus did Apollo. Precedents for claiming the personal protection of a deity were established in the Republican era, when for instance the Roman dictator Sulla advertised the goddess Victory as his tutelary by holding public games (ludi) in her honor.” ref
“Each town or city had one or more tutelary deities, whose protection was considered particularly vital in time of war and siege. Rome itself was protected by a goddess whose name was to be kept ritually secret on pain of death (for a supposed case, see Quintus Valerius Soranus). The Capitoline Triad of Juno, Jupiter, and Minerva were also tutelaries of Rome. The Italic towns had their own tutelary deities. Juno often had this function, as at the Latin town of Lanuvium and the Etruscan city of Veii, and was often housed in an especially grand temple on the arx (citadel) or other prominent or central location. The tutelary deity of Praeneste was Fortuna, whose oracle was renowned.” ref
“The Roman ritual of evocatio was premised on the belief that a town could be made vulnerable to military defeat if the power of its tutelary deity were diverted outside the city, perhaps by the offer of superior cult at Rome. The depiction of some goddesses such as the Magna Mater (Great Mother, or Cybele) as “tower-crowned” represents their capacity to preserve the city. A town in the provinces might adopt a deity from within the Roman religious sphere to serve as its guardian, or syncretize its own tutelary with such; for instance, a community within the civitas of the Remi in Gaul adopted Apollo as its tutelary, and at the capital of the Remi (present-day Rheims), the tutelary was Mars Camulus.” ref
Household deity (a kind of or related to a Tutelary deity)
“A household deity is a deity or spirit that protects the home, looking after the entire household or certain key members. It has been a common belief in paganism as well as in folklore across many parts of the world. Household deities fit into two types; firstly, a specific deity – typically a goddess – often referred to as a hearth goddess or domestic goddess who is associated with the home and hearth, such as the ancient Greek Hestia.” ref
“The second type of household deities are those that are not one singular deity, but a type, or species of animistic deity, who usually have lesser powers than major deities. This type was common in the religions of antiquity, such as the Lares of ancient Roman religion, the Gashin of Korean shamanism, and Cofgodas of Anglo-Saxon paganism. These survived Christianisation as fairy-like creatures existing in folklore, such as the Anglo-Scottish Brownie and Slavic Domovoy.” ref
“Household deities were usually worshipped not in temples but in the home, where they would be represented by small idols (such as the teraphim of the Bible, often translated as “household gods” in Genesis 31:19 for example), amulets, paintings, or reliefs. They could also be found on domestic objects, such as cosmetic articles in the case of Tawaret. The more prosperous houses might have a small shrine to the household god(s); the lararium served this purpose in the case of the Romans. The gods would be treated as members of the family and invited to join in meals, or be given offerings of food and drink.” ref
“In many religions, both ancient and modern, a god would preside over the home. Certain species, or types, of household deities, existed. An example of this was the Roman Lares. Many European cultures retained house spirits into the modern period. Some examples of these include:
- Brownie (Scotland and England) or Hob (England) / Kobold (Germany) / Goblin / Hobgoblin
- Domovoy (Slavic)
- Nisse (Norwegian or Danish) / Tomte (Swedish) / Tonttu (Finnish)
- Húsvættir (Norse)” ref
“Although the cosmic status of household deities was not as lofty as that of the Twelve Olympians or the Aesir, they were also jealous of their dignity and also had to be appeased with shrines and offerings, however humble. Because of their immediacy they had arguably more influence on the day-to-day affairs of men than the remote gods did. Vestiges of their worship persisted long after Christianity and other major religions extirpated nearly every trace of the major pagan pantheons. Elements of the practice can be seen even today, with Christian accretions, where statues to various saints (such as St. Francis) protect gardens and grottos. Even the gargoyles found on older churches, could be viewed as guardians partitioning a sacred space.” ref
“For centuries, Christianity fought a mop-up war against these lingering minor pagan deities, but they proved tenacious. For example, Martin Luther‘s Tischreden have numerous – quite serious – references to dealing with kobolds. Eventually, rationalism and the Industrial Revolution threatened to erase most of these minor deities, until the advent of romantic nationalism rehabilitated them and embellished them into objects of literary curiosity in the 19th century. Since the 20th century this literature has been mined for characters for role-playing games, video games, and other fantasy personae, not infrequently invested with invented traits and hierarchies somewhat different from their mythological and folkloric roots.” ref
“In contradistinction to both Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor, who defended theories of animistic origins of ancestor worship, Émile Durkheim saw its origin in totemism. In reality, this distinction is somewhat academic, since totemism may be regarded as a particularized manifestation of animism, and something of a synthesis of the two positions was attempted by Sigmund Freud. In Freud’s Totem and Taboo, both totem and taboo are outward expressions or manifestations of the same psychological tendency, a concept which is complementary to, or which rather reconciles, the apparent conflict. Freud preferred to emphasize the psychoanalytic implications of the reification of metaphysical forces, but with particular emphasis on its familial nature. This emphasis underscores, rather than weakens, the ancestral component.” ref
“William Edward Hearn, a noted classicist, and jurist, traced the origin of domestic deities from the earliest stages as an expression of animism, a belief system thought to have existed also in the neolithic, and the forerunner of Indo-European religion. In his analysis of the Indo-European household, in Chapter II “The House Spirit”, Section 1, he states:
The belief which guided the conduct of our forefathers was … the spirit rule of dead ancestors.” ref
“In Section 2 he proceeds to elaborate:
It is thus certain that the worship of deceased ancestors is a vera causa, and not a mere hypothesis. …
In the other European nations, the Slavs, the Teutons, and the Kelts, the House Spirit appears with no less distinctness. … [T]he existence of that worship does not admit of doubt. … The House Spirits had a multitude of other names which it is needless here to enumerate, but all of which are more or less expressive of their friendly relations with man. … In [England] … [h]e is the Brownie. … In Scotland this same Brownie is well known. He is usually described as attached to particular families, with whom he has been known to reside for centuries, threshing the corn, cleaning the house, and performing similar household tasks. His favorite gratification was milk and honey.” ref
Hinduism around 3,700 to 3,500 years old. ref
Judaism around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (The first writing in the bible was “Paleo-Hebrew” dated to around 3,000 years ago Khirbet Qeiyafa is the site of an ancient fortress city overlooking the Elah Valley. And many believe the religious Jewish texts were completed around 2,500) ref, ref
Judaism is around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (“Paleo-Hebrew” 3,000 years ago and Torah 2,500 years ago)
“Judaism is an Abrahamic, its roots as an organized religion in the Middle East during the Bronze Age. Some scholars argue that modern Judaism evolved from Yahwism, the religion of ancient Israel and Judah, by the late 6th century BCE, and is thus considered to be one of the oldest monotheistic religions.” ref
“Yahwism is the name given by modern scholars to the religion of ancient Israel, essentially polytheistic, with a plethora of gods and goddesses. Heading the pantheon was Yahweh, the national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with his consort, the goddess Asherah; below them were second-tier gods and goddesses such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, all of whom had their own priests and prophets and numbered royalty among their devotees, and a third and fourth tier of minor divine beings, including the mal’ak, the messengers of the higher gods, who in later times became the angels of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yahweh, however, was not the ‘original’ god of Israel “Isra-El”; it is El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon, whose name forms the basis of the name “Israel”, and none of the Old Testament patriarchs, the tribes of Israel, the Judges, or the earliest monarchs, have a Yahwistic theophoric name (i.e., one incorporating the name of Yahweh).” ref
“El is a Northwest Semitic word meaning “god” or “deity“, or referring (as a proper name) to any one of multiple major ancient Near Eastern deities. A rarer form, ‘ila, represents the predicate form in Old Akkadian and in Amorite. The word is derived from the Proto-Semitic *ʔil-, meaning “god”. Specific deities known as ‘El or ‘Il include the supreme god of the ancient Canaanite religion and the supreme god of East Semitic speakers in Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic Period. ʼĒl is listed at the head of many pantheons. In some Canaanite and Ugaritic sources, ʼĒl played a role as father of the gods, of creation, or both. For example, in the Ugaritic texts, ʾil mlk is understood to mean “ʼĒl the King” but ʾil hd as “the god Hadad“. The Semitic root ʾlh (Arabic ʾilāh, Aramaic ʾAlāh, ʾElāh, Hebrew ʾelōah) may be ʾl with a parasitic h, and ʾl may be an abbreviated form of ʾlh. In Ugaritic the plural form meaning “gods” is ʾilhm, equivalent to Hebrew ʾelōhîm “powers”. In the Hebrew texts this word is interpreted as being semantically singular for “god” by biblical commentators. However the documentary hypothesis for the Old Testament (corresponds to the Jewish Torah) developed originally in the 1870s, identifies these that different authors – the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source – were responsible for editing stories from a polytheistic religion into those of a monotheistic religion. Inconsistencies that arise between monotheism and polytheism in the texts are reflective of this hypothesis.” ref
Jainism around 2,599 – 2,527 years old. ref
Confucianism around 2,600 – 2,551 years old. ref
Buddhism around 2,563/2,480 – 2,483/2,400 years old. ref
Christianity around 2,o00 years old. ref
Shinto around 1,305 years old. ref
Islam around 1407–1385 years old. ref
Knowledge to Ponder:
Stars/Astrology:
- Possibly, around 30,000 years ago (in simpler form) to 6,000 years ago, Stars/Astrology are connected to Ancestors, Spirit Animals, and Deities.
- The star also seems to be a possible proto-star for Star of Ishtar, Star of Inanna, or Star of Venus.
- Around 7,000 to 6,000 years ago, Star Constellations/Astrology have connections to the “Kurgan phenomenon” of below-ground “mound” stone/wood burial structures and “Dolmen phenomenon” of above-ground stone burial structures.
- Around 6,500–5,800 years ago, The Northern Levant migrations into Jordon and Israel in the Southern Levant brought new cultural and religious transfer from Turkey and Iran.
- “The Ghassulian Star,” a mysterious 6,000-year-old mural from Jordan may have connections to the European paganstic kurgan/dolmens phenomenon.
“Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Different cultures have employed forms of astrology since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications. Most, if not all, cultures have attached importance to what they observed in the sky, and some—such as the Hindus, Chinese, and the Maya—developed elaborate systems for predicting terrestrial events from celestial observations. Western astrology, one of the oldest astrological systems still in use, can trace its roots to 19th–17th century BCE Mesopotamia, from where it spread to Ancient Greece, Rome, the Islamicate world and eventually Central and Western Europe. Contemporary Western astrology is often associated with systems of horoscopes that purport to explain aspects of a person’s personality and predict significant events in their lives based on the positions of celestial objects; the majority of professional astrologers rely on such systems.” ref
Around 5,500 years ago, Science evolves, The first evidence of science was 5,500 years ago and was demonstrated by a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world. ref
Around 5,000 years ago, Origin of Logics is a Naturalistic Observation (principles of valid reasoning, inference, & demonstration) ref
Around 4,150 to 4,000 years ago: The earliest surviving versions of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which was originally titled “He who Saw the Deep” (Sha naqba īmuru) or “Surpassing All Other Kings” (Shūtur eli sharrī) were written. ref
Hinduism:
- 3,700 years ago or so, the oldest of the Hindu Vedas (scriptures), the Rig Veda was composed.
- 3,500 years ago or so, the Vedic Age began in India after the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization.
Judaism:
- around 3,000 years ago, the first writing in the bible was “Paleo-Hebrew”
- around 2,500 years ago, many believe the religious Jewish texts were completed
Myths: The bible inspired religion is not just one religion or one myth but a grouping of several religions and myths
- Around 3,450 or 3,250 years ago, according to legend, is the traditionally accepted period in which the Israelite lawgiver, Moses, provided the Ten Commandments.
- Around 2,500 to 2,400 years ago, a collection of ancient religious writings by the Israelites based primarily upon the Hebrew Bible, Tanakh, or Old Testament is the first part of Christianity’s bible.
- Around 2,400 years ago, the most accepted hypothesis is that the canon was formed in stages, first the Pentateuch (Torah).
- Around 2,140 to 2,116 years ago, the Prophets was written during the Hasmonean dynasty, and finally the remaining books.
- Christians traditionally divide the Old Testament into four sections:
- The first five books or Pentateuch (Torah).
- The proposed history books telling the history of the Israelites from their conquest of Canaan to their defeat and exile in Babylon.
- The poetic and proposed “Wisdom books” dealing, in various forms, with questions of good and evil in the world.
- The books of the biblical prophets, warning of the consequences of turning away from God:
- Henotheism:
- Exodus 20:23 “You shall not make other gods besides Me (not saying there are no other gods just not to worship them); gods of silver or gods of gold, you shall not make for yourselves.”
- Polytheism:
- Judges 10:6 “Then the sons of Israel again did evil in the sight of the LORD, served the Baals and the Ashtaroth, the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the sons of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines; thus they forsook the LORD and did not serve Him.”
- 1 Corinthians 8:5 “For even if there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords.”
- Monotheism:
- Isaiah 43:10 “You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me.
Around 2,570 to 2,270 Years Ago, there is a confirmation of atheistic doubting as well as atheistic thinking, mainly by Greek philosophers. However, doubting gods is likely as old as the invention of gods and should destroy the thinking that belief in god(s) is the “default belief”. The Greek word is apistos (a “not” and pistos “faithful,”), thus not faithful or faithless because one is unpersuaded and unconvinced by a god(s) claim. Short Definition: unbelieving, unbeliever, or unbelief.
Expressions of Atheistic Thinking:
- Around 2,600 years ago, Ajita Kesakambali, ancient Indian philosopher, who is the first known proponent of Indian materialism. ref
- Around 2,535 to 2,475 years ago, Heraclitus, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Anatolia, also known as Asia Minor or modern Turkey. ref
- Around 2,500 to 2,400 years ago, according to The Story of Civilization book series certain African pygmy tribes have no identifiable gods, spirits, or religious beliefs or rituals, and even what burials accrue are without ceremony. ref
- Around 2,490 to 2,430 years ago, Empedocles, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. ref
- Around 2,460 to 2,370 years ago, Democritus, Greek pre-Socratic philosopher considered to be the “father of modern science” possibly had some disbelief amounting to atheism. ref
- Around 2,399 years ago or so, Socrates, a famous Greek philosopher was tried for sinfulness by teaching doubt of state gods. ref
- Around 2,341 to 2,270 years ago, Epicurus, a Greek philosopher known for composing atheistic critics and famously stated, “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?” ref
This last expression by Epicurus, seems to be an expression of Axiological Atheism. To understand and utilize value or actually possess “Value Conscious/Consciousness” to both give a strong moral “axiological” argument (the problem of evil) as well as use it to fortify humanism and positive ethical persuasion of human helping and care responsibilities. Because value-blindness gives rise to sociopathic/psychopathic evil.
While hallucinogens are associated with shamanism, it is alcohol that is associated with paganism.
The Atheist-Humanist-Leftist Revolutionaries Shows in the prehistory series:
Show two: Pre-animism 300,000 years old and animism 100,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show tree: Totemism 50,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show four: Shamanism 30,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show five: Paganism 12,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”
Show six: Emergence of hierarchy, sexism, slavery, and the new male god dominance: Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite and their slaves!
Prehistory: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” the division of labor, power, rights, and recourses: VIDEO
Pre-animism 300,000 years old and animism 100,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO
Totemism 50,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO
Shamanism 30,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism”: VIDEO
Paganism 12,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Pre-Capitalism): VIDEO
Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite and their slaves: VIEDO
Paganism 5,000 years old: progressed organized religion and the state: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Kings and the Rise of the State): VIEDO
Paganism 4,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (First Moralistic gods, then the Origin time of Monotheism): VIEDO
I do not hate simply because I challenge and expose myths or lies any more than others being thought of as loving simply because of the protection and hiding from challenge their favored myths or lies.
The truth is best championed in the sunlight of challenge.
An archaeologist once said to me “Damien religion and culture are very different”
My response, So are you saying that was always that way, such as would you say Native Americans’ cultures are separate from their religions? And do you think it always was the way you believe?
I had said that religion was a cultural product. That is still how I see it and there are other archaeologists that think close to me as well. Gods too are the myths of cultures that did not understand science or the world around them, seeing magic/supernatural everywhere.
I personally think there is a goddess and not enough evidence to support a male god at Çatalhöyük but if there was both a male and female god and goddess then I know the kind of gods they were like Proto-Indo-European mythology.
This series idea was addressed in, Anarchist Teaching as Free Public Education or Free Education in the Public: VIDEO
Our 12 video series: Organized Oppression: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of power (9,000-4,000 years ago), is adapted from: The Complete and Concise History of the Sumerians and Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia (7000-2000 BC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szFjxmY7jQA by “History with Cy“
Show #1: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Samarra, Halaf, Ubaid)
Show #2: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power
Show #3: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Uruk and the First Cities)
Show #4: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (First Kings)
Show #5: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Early Dynastic Period)
Show #6: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power
Show #7: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Sargon and Akkadian Rule)
Show #9: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Gudea of Lagash and Utu-hegal)
Show #12: Mesopotamian State Force and the Politics of Power (Aftermath and Legacy of Sumer)
The “Atheist-Humanist-Leftist Revolutionaries”
Cory Johnston ☭ Ⓐ Atheist Leftist @Skepticallefty & I (Damien Marie AtHope) @AthopeMarie (my YouTube & related blog) are working jointly in atheist, antitheist, antireligionist, antifascist, anarchist, socialist, and humanist endeavors in our videos together, generally, every other Saturday.
Why Does Power Bring Responsibility?
Think, how often is it the powerless that start wars, oppress others, or commit genocide? So, I guess the question is to us all, to ask, how can power not carry responsibility in a humanity concept? I know I see the deep ethical responsibility that if there is power their must be a humanistic responsibility of ethical and empathic stewardship of that power. Will I be brave enough to be kind? Will I possess enough courage to be compassionate? Will my valor reach its height of empathy? I as everyone, earns our justified respect by our actions, that are good, ethical, just, protecting, and kind. Do I have enough self-respect to put my love for humanity’s flushing, over being brought down by some of its bad actors? May we all be the ones doing good actions in the world, to help human flourishing.
I create the world I want to live in, striving for flourishing. Which is not a place but a positive potential involvement and promotion; a life of humanist goal precision. To master oneself, also means mastering positive prosocial behaviors needed for human flourishing. I may have lost a god myth as an atheist, but I am happy to tell you, my friend, it is exactly because of that, leaving the mental terrorizer, god belief, that I truly regained my connected ethical as well as kind humanity.
Cory and I will talk about prehistory and theism, addressing the relevance to atheism, anarchism, and socialism.
At the same time as the rise of the male god, 7,000 years ago, there was also the very time there was the rise of violence, war, and clans to kingdoms, then empires, then states. It is all connected back to 7,000 years ago, and it moved across the world.
Cory Johnston: https://damienmarieathope.com/2021/04/cory-johnston-mind-of-a-skeptical-leftist/?v=32aec8db952d
The Mind of a Skeptical Leftist (YouTube)
Cory Johnston: Mind of a Skeptical Leftist @Skepticallefty
The Mind of a Skeptical Leftist By Cory Johnston: “Promoting critical thinking, social justice, and left-wing politics by covering current events and talking to a variety of people. Cory Johnston has been thoughtfully talking to people and attempting to promote critical thinking, social justice, and left-wing politics.” http://anchor.fm/skepticalleft
Cory needs our support. We rise by helping each other.
Cory Johnston ☭ Ⓐ @Skepticallefty Evidence-based atheist leftist (he/him) Producer, host, and co-host of 4 podcasts @skeptarchy @skpoliticspod and @AthopeMarie
Damien Marie AtHope (“At Hope”) Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist. Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Poet, Philosopher, Advocate, Activist, Psychology, and Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Historian.
Damien is interested in: Freedom, Liberty, Justice, Equality, Ethics, Humanism, Science, Atheism, Antiteism, Antireligionism, Ignosticism, Left-Libertarianism, Anarchism, Socialism, Mutualism, Axiology, Metaphysics, LGBTQI, Philosophy, Advocacy, Activism, Mental Health, Psychology, Archaeology, Social Work, Sexual Rights, Marriage Rights, Woman’s Rights, Gender Rights, Child Rights, Secular Rights, Race Equality, Ageism/Disability Equality, Etc. And a far-leftist, “Anarcho-Humanist.”
I am not a good fit in the atheist movement that is mostly pro-capitalist, I am anti-capitalist. Mostly pro-skeptic, I am a rationalist not valuing skepticism. Mostly pro-agnostic, I am anti-agnostic. Mostly limited to anti-Abrahamic religions, I am an anti-religionist.
To me, the “male god” seems to have either emerged or become prominent around 7,000 years ago, whereas the now favored monotheism “male god” is more like 4,000 years ago or so. To me, the “female goddess” seems to have either emerged or become prominent around 11,000-10,000 years ago or so, losing the majority of its once prominence around 2,000 years ago due largely to the now favored monotheism “male god” that grow in prominence after 4,000 years ago or so.
My Thought on the Evolution of Gods?
Animal protector deities from old totems/spirit animal beliefs come first to me, 13,000/12,000 years ago, then women as deities 11,000/10,000 years ago, then male gods around 7,000/8,000 years ago. Moralistic gods around 5,000/4,000 years ago, and monotheistic gods around 4,000/3,000 years ago.
Damien Marie AtHope (Said as “At” “Hope”)/(Autodidact Polymath but not good at math):
Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist, Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Jeweler, Poet, “autodidact” Philosopher, schooled in Psychology, and “autodidact” Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Pre-Historian (Knowledgeable in the range of: 1 million to 5,000/4,000 years ago). I am an anarchist socialist politically. Reasons for or Types of Atheism
My Website, My Blog, & Short-writing or Quotes, My YouTube, Twitter: @AthopeMarie, and My Email: damien.marie.athope@gmail.com