Ancient civilizations-2

Religion

Little is known about religion in the Cyclades and on the mainland before the period when they came under strong Cretan influence. An open-air sanctuary filled with marble figurines on the island of Kéros (Káros) is assignable to the Early Bronze Age. In Crete during the Early Palace Period, there were many open-air sanctuaries on the tops of hills and mountains. Some of these had small shrines in them, and shrines with one or more rooms and benches for offerings and cult statues are found in the countryside and in the towns in Crete. Parts of the palaces and of large houses there were also set apart for cult. Shrines not unlike Cretan ones existed in settlements in the Cyclades and on the mainland in the Late Bronze Age; however, hilltop sanctuaries are not well attested there, and most of those in Crete appear to have gone out of use after the mainland conquest, about 1450. Caves also were used as sanctuaries in Crete, and cults in some of these persisted until the end of the Bronze Age and later.

The chief deity everywhere in the Aegean during the Bronze Age was evidently a goddess. Perhaps there were several goddesses with different names and attributes. The extant texts refer to a Potnia (“Lady” or “Mistress”), to whom they give several epithets like “horse” or “grain.” Most mainland palaces have paintings of processions in which people bring gifts to a goddess. On Thera, frescoes show girls picking saffron crocus and offering it in baskets to a seated goddess. Clay statues of goddesses, often with upraised arms and attributes such as horns of consecration, doves, snakes, or poppies have been found in Crete; these range in date from the 14th to the early 12th century, providing evidence of a strong tradition. A shrine with large clay goddesses, which once were stuccoed and painted, existed at Ayía Iríni on the island of Ceos, and a smaller, later one at Phylakopi on Melos, with both male and female figurines. The shrine at Mycenae seems to have been devoted to powers of grain and the sword. A later shrine at Tiryns had small clay goddesses with upraised arms. Many cult statues may have been made of wood, and mythic traditions of simple wooden logs or planks (xoana) dropping from heaven or being found in thickets have become attached to several later sanctuaries.

The texts show a more elaborate set of divinities than do the surviving idols, with many later Greek divinities already in place, including Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, Artemis, Ares, Hermes, and Dionysus. The Cretan birth goddess Eleuthia and war goddess Eyno were transmitted to the mainland Greeks, and natural forces, like the winds, were occasionally worshiped. There can be no doubt about the continuity of religions and cult from the Late Bronze Age into later Greek times, as well as of the language itself. Some divinities, like the female Zeus and the female Poseidon figures known at Pylos, do not reappear in later times, however. The culture was reshaping itself as it passed from generation to generation.

The normal gifts to divinities were scented oils, textiles, and, in Greece at least, animal sacrifice of cattle, sheep, and pigs. The burial of a horse or a dog may either signify a sacrifice or simply express the attachment between the animal and its master. Two ideas about the realm of death existed, a rarer one of an overseas Elysian paradise where the dead were restored to a new life of bodily blessed ease and a more common one, transmitted in the epic tradition, of a dark underground realm (Hades) inhabited by weak shades with poor memories. These two ideas, representing the Cretan and the Mycenaean tradition, were not fused but survived in separate sets of songs and tales. M. Sinclair F. Hood Emily D. Townsend Vermeule

Citation Information

Article Title: Aegean civilizations

Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Date Published: 18 March 2019

URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aegean-civilization

Access Date: August 07, 2019

Additional Reading

General overviews include Emily Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age (1964, reissued 1974), the standard work; Hans-Günther Buchholz and Vassos Karageorghis, Prehistoric Greece and Cyprus: An Archaeological Handbook (1973; originally published in German, 1971); Spyridon Marinatos and Max Hirmer, Kreta, Thera, und das mykenische Hellas, 3rd ed. (1976), also available in an English translation of an earlier edition, Crete and Mycenae (1960); William Taylour, The Mycenaeans, rev. ed. (1983); N.K. Sandars, The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean, 1250–1150 B.C., rev. ed. (1985); and Peter Warren, The Aegean Civilizations (1975, reissued 1989). Ancient Crete is discussed in Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos, 4 vol. (1921–35, reissued 1964), still basic; Arthur Evans, Mark Cameron, and Sinclair Hood, Knossos Fresco Atlas (1967); Sinclair Hood, The Minoans (1971); and J. Walter Graham, The Palaces of Crete, rev. ed. (1987). John Boardman, The Cretan Collection in Oxford (1961), describes Cretan antiquities in the Ashmolean Museum. The Cycladic civilizations are examined by Jürgen Thimme (ed.), Art and Culture of the Cyclades (also published as Art and Culture of the Cyclades in the Third Millennium B.C., 1977; originally published in German, 1976), an extensive exhibition catalog; Christos G. Doumas, Thera, Pompeii of the Ancient Aegean (1983); and R.L.N. Barber, The Cyclades in the Bronze Age (1987). Ancient civilization on the Greek mainland is the focus of George E. Mylonas, Mycenae and the Mycenaean Age (1966), for the Late Bronze Age and Mycenaean Shaft Grave Circle B; Emily Vermeule, The Art of the Shaft Graves of Mycenae (1975); and J.T. Hooker, Mycenaean Greece (1976). Religion and religious sites are discussed in Martin P. Nilsson, The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and Its Survival in Greek Religion, 2nd rev. ed. (1950, reprinted 1971), still the standard work; and Bogdan Rutkowski, The Cult Places of the Aegean (1986). Information on ancient pottery and seals may be found in Arne Furumark, The Mycenaean Pottery: Analysis and Classification (1941, reissued 1972); Friedrich Matz et al., Corpus der Minoischen und Mykenischen Siegel (1964– ); and John Boardman, Greek Gems and Finger Rings (1970). Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 2nd ed. (1973), is essential for information on the writing and decipherment of Linear B, including transcriptions, translations, and commentary on selected tablets. For the Aegean Bronze Age as a background to Homer, see the series Archaeologia Homerica: die Denkmäler und das frühgriechische Epos, ed. by Friedrich Matz and Hans-Günter Buchholz (1967– ). Sinclair Hood, The Arts in Prehistoric Greece (1978, reissued 1988), is the best standard work on this subject. William S. Smith, Interconnections in the Ancient Near-East: A Study of the Relationships Between the Arts of Egypt, the Aegean, and Western Asia (1965). M. Sinclair F. Hood Emily D. Townsend Vermeule