From Thera to Scheria: Aegean Art and Narrative

Epic themes can be identified in genre scenes as well as those of battle, festival and exotic landscape; other connections to Homeric poetry and history involve the eruption of Bronze Age Thera and its relevance to Odyssey xiii.125-187 and the Ahmose stele. Finally, the status of the Thera wall paintings as domestic decoration is enriched by a comparison with the work of Theophilos Hatzimichael in Greek houses of the last century.

At the time of the Third International Congress on Thera and the Aegean world, I ventured an identification of epic narrative in the miniature frescoes of Thera, as a forerunner of Homeric tales of adventure and return which appear in hexameter verse a thousand years later (Morris 1989). In the years since that time, the corpus of such miniature frescoes has grown substantially in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean. The final publication of the West House frescoes by Christina Televantou (1994) has filled out the image of the city under siege on the north wall of West House Room 5 (Pl. 1). added an urban scene to the east wall landscape (Pl. 2), and proposes the first fragments for the missing west wall. The miniature frescoes from Kea (Ayia Irini) were explored in detail at the Third International Congress (Morgan 1990) (Figs. 1a, b) and we look forward to their final publication. New paintings from Miletus on the west coast of Asia Minor⁽¹⁾ expand the distribution of Aegean frescoes across the Cyclades to sites in the Dodecanese and Anatolia where Minoan presence or influence is manifest. Unexpected is the discovery of miniature frescoes decorating the walls, and painted plaster panels on the floors, of a Canaanite 'palace' at Kabri in northern Israel (Niemeier 1995; Niemeier and Niemeier here, vol. II). Last but not least, the Hyksos capital of Avaris in the delta of Egypt included a monumental building decorated with plaster painted in Minoan themes and techniques (Bietak 1996; Bietak, Marinatos and Palyvou this volume). These discoveries expand the frontiers of Aegean narrative frescoes in time as well as place, with inevitable complications. According to the excavators, the palace at Kabri was destroyed around 1600 BC, but the fragments from Egypt were buried in the early Eighteenth Dynasty with pumice, suggesting a close correlation in time and experience with the eruption of Thera in the LM IA period.⁽²⁾ What do these enrichments of the fresco corpus add to our understanding of narrative in the Bronze Age?

At the most basic level, the miniature frescoes belong to a widespread corpus of what might be termed 'peopled landscapes' of the Late Bronze Age, panoramas of Aegean life in city and country, in harbours and at sea. The miniature frescoes from Tylissos, for example (Shaw 1972), offer such scenes where figures and facades enliven nature with human activity(female dancers, male spectators: Fig. 2). What unites these frescoes in terms of their context is their appearance in private houses as well as 'palatial' settings (Cameron 1978, 588; Davis 1987). Here I draw support from the study of art in private contexts in the Roman world (Morris 1989, 513 n. 10; cf. Gazda 1991), to which I would add the Aegean in another era. I am thinking of the decoration of traditional private homes in nineteenth century Greece by Theophilos (Hatzimichail) and other painters in the vernacular tradition.⁽³⁾

In the saloni of a typical house at Klomidado (Napi) on Lesbos painted by Theophilos, now reassembled for display in the Museum of Folk Art in Athens, the 'dado' or three lowest courses consists of imitation marble panels, like those in the West House at Thera and elsewhere. The entrance is crowned by a festival (Fig. 4): scenes of May-day (Πρωτομαγειά)celebrations in Volos, Thessaly, with dancers in costume. The doorway is flanked inside by panels from the legend of Erotokritos (Fig. 4); the righthand wall celebrates the deeds of Katsantonis, a revolutionary war hero (Fig. 5) playing an instrument, much as Achilles does out of battle in the Iliad (ix.185-189). Other heroes, Kolokotronis (Fig. 8) and Botsaris (Fig. 7), appear on either side of the window opposite. Facing the door are ancient heroes (Alexander the Great) and gods (Artemis and Athena, in the window panels to the right of Alexander); a famous nineteenth century wrestler from Propontis, Panagiotis Koutalianos (Fig. 6), graces Alexander on the left, above a fountain scene. Heroic themes - a dragon, a lion hunt - crown Kolokotronis and Botsaris, on the lefthand wall, like epic similes expressed in visual form in early Mycenaean art, or in verse in the poetry of Homer. These frescoes are labelled by the painter, who takes considerable liberties with history: Katsantonis died in 1808 at the hands of Ali Pasha, but is portrayed in a scene of 1818; Alexander was also long dead in 222 BC, the year the painter claimed he faced the Persians. In another house decorated by the same painter in Volos, Thessaly, heroic scenes from the Greek war of independence are juxtaposed with Greek mythology (Athena), floral panels, riverine landscapes, and a portrait of the owner, all placed around doors, windows, stairwells and furirniture (Figs. 9-10).⁽⁴⁾ This mixture of heroic and historical themes, favourite landscapes and pastoral settings, mirrors the kind of aesthetic and thematic variety in domestic decoration we see in Aegean houses in prehistory, an analogy that does not claim identical purposes across the centuries. If the Third International Congress on Thera and the Aegean world placed Akrotiri and its material culture firmly in its Cycladic context, beyond the exclusive claims of Minoan and Mycenaean spheres,⁽⁵⁾ then perhaps this Symposium can give the iconography of Theran frescoes a more proximate setting in the Greek islands. At the very least, these parallels help us imagine an itinerant painter in historic times and confront a more decorative role for painted plaster in a domestic context, to keep us from turning every private room into a shrine.

Meanwhile, the expansion of the Aegean repertoire to examples from the eastern Mediterranean is astonishing in its demonstration of how widely these themes were appropriate outside of a strictly Aegean setting in the second millennium BC. The fragments discovered at Alalakh in Syria many years ago (see Niemeier and Niemeier here, vol. II) predicted what is now replicated at other sites, with Aegean floral motifs in strictly Aegean fresco techniques. Now, we can identify architectural facades and chequerboard floors at Kabri, bull leapers and hunting scenes at Tell el-Dab'a (Avaris), even what we used to call 'Nilotic' landscapes exotic on Thera, now found in Egypt itself. In fact, the winding branches of the Nile delta and its lush vegetation and fauna (Bietak 1996, figs. 1-2) are more appropriate as a direct inspiration for the Thera fresco than the broad, straight river as it defines Egypt from Memphis southward. Such culturally specific activities as bull leaping and wild animal hunting now appear in structures inhabited primarily by Egyptians and Syrians (Marinatos 1990; 1994). This phenomenon agrees with archaeological evidence for cultural and artistic interaction among the different regions of the eastern Mediterranean, here substantiating the idea that artisans and not just artefacts were mobile. Specialists may have been recruited as free agents, or dispatched as forced labour attached to elite households, to travel overseas for decorating foreign structures, as they did at home; here again we could learn much from nineteenth century painters of Greek mansions. But the excavations at Tell el-Dab'a have yielded some 60,000 pieces of painted plaster; sorting, joining and making sense of them will take years of patient work, and it is premature to select individual fragments for Aegean iconographic study before the excavators have completed their tasks. Eventually, a new challenge for Aegean scholars will be to understand the reception of Aegean images in foreign contexts (complementing Hiller 1996) without explicit links to native ritual or epic tradition, except among Minoans and Mycenaeans whom we imagine resident in Egypt and the Levant. Here I will concentrate on the contribution of the multiplied fresco corpus to the formation of a narrative tradition.

First we should consider recent scholarship on Homer, which has been pushing him relentlessly down into the Iron Age, a movement which began with Moses Finley's World of Odysseus over forty years ago. Homerists incline towards either the so-called 'Dark Ages' (Dickinson 1986; I. Morris 1986) or the eighth and seventh centuries (Janko 1981; West 1995) as the formative period for Greek epic, with the most recent challenge reviving the notion of an Archaic Athenian shaping of the final text (Nagy 1992; 1995). In an important analysis, Sue Sherratt has demonstrated the technique of 'stratifying Homer', both linguistically and archaeologically, across a formative period extending a thousand years (Sherratt 1990). For the purposes of Aegean art, it is not the final form of Greek epic which is relevant to prehistoric iconography, but the manifestation of epic themes in early art. Those that are prehistoric as well as heroic in nature are readily identifiable and have been repeatedly listed: lions and warriors (Fig. 3), duel and siege, old fashioned armour such as the boar's tusk helmet and oxhide shield, feasting and lyre playing, chariots in hunt and battle. No matter how late one places 'Homer', these images offer visual formulae which, when elaborated with specific names and places missing in Aegean art, developed into epic stories. Here our instincts as archaeologists, which emphasise the latest item in a deposit, may prevent us from appreciating themes 'redeposited' from earlier cultural levels. It is those images which continue to argue for the onset of an epic tradition in the early Mycenaean era, or the centuries before the eruption which buried Akrotiri.

But what about the more ordinary figural scenes, far from the drama of warfare and wild animals? Have we neglected such scenes in terms of their epic significance, and can they be drawn into the sphere of Homer? I have resisted the use of the term 'genre' for such scenes, for its implicit denial of meaning or absence of certifiable ritual or narrative activity. Here I disagree, once again, with the ritual view of miniature frescoes espoused by (for example) Lyvia Morgan, who sees figures in the Kea frescoes (Figs. 1a, b: on shore between a building and a river, dockside near ships) as celebrating a 'festival' (Morgan 1990, 254-258).⁽⁶⁾ Such scenes are equally appropriate to the many epic episodes where characters load ships and set sail, prepare and consume a meal, the so-called 'typical scenes' in Homer where formulaic language is most highly concentrated (Arend 1993; Fenik 1968; Kirk 1990, 15-27). For example, in the Kea harbour scene where figures lift tripod cauldrons near two ships (Fig. 1b), they could be (un)loading gifts for/from a voyage, as when Odysseus embarks for Ithaka with gifts from his hosts, including tripods, then unloads at home (Odyssey xiii.7-24, 66-78, 96-124). The departure of the hero from Scheria involves a farewell feast with slaughter of oxen and singing by the bard (Odyssey xiii.24-28), a reminder of the more ordinary, daily occurrence of sacrifice and feasting without an official festival. Maria Shaw has recently called attention to the emphasis on preparation for such activities in the Kea and Tylissos frescoes, not just the banquet or festival itself, a detail I find highly Homeric (Shaw 1997, 482, 496). In our haste to claim these images for the more exotic agenda of religion, we may have overlooked connections just as significant to story telling, elaborate descriptions of costume and furniture, cooking and washing, which 'set the scene' as a poet supplies the visual details of his narrative. The figures with vessels near ships from Kea could illustrate such ordinary moments in ancient Aegean life, like similar sections of the miniature frescoes from Thera. For example, the herders and their animals in the north frieze (Pl. 1), if disembodied as fragments, might not show any explicit connection to the story of a siege which dominates the north wall. Would we associate them with a scene of sacrifice, in a rural setting such as a peak sanctuary, if we saw them as fragments? Would we suspect a context of warfare on land and at sea, inches away?

"Fragments are dangerous allies", declare archaeologists who work on sherds, words we should heed in examining frescoes, and the friezes from the West House on Thera represent our only sustained pictorial narrative in fresco art.⁽⁷⁾ Televantou's thorough publication allows us to see them in full for the first time, and we should reconsider older theories in the light of her final study. Among its important contributions is the fuller vista of the city under siege on the north wall (Pl. 1). The urban landscape must have filled much of that wall, including its coastal setting preserved in the shoreline fragments and in additional seacraft, now restored below the city. The masonry sections arranged on the coast, left of the city and near the sea battle, struck Televantou as defensive installations, much as I suggested that this could be the kind of wall built to defend the Greek ships in the Iliad (Morris 1989, 524-525; Televantou 1994, 409; Mannsperger 1995).⁽⁸⁾ More unexpected is the addition of a new town, found in fragments (Pl. 2) assigned by Televantou to the north end of the river scene, based on technical details which associate it with the Egyptian river landscape on the east wall (Televantou 1990, 320-322, fig. 13 (AN 77, 78); 1994, 266-267, fig. 36, pl. 52).⁽⁹⁾ New exploration of cities in the delta - not only Tell el-Dab'a (Avaris) but Tell Mashkuta, another Hyksos city, and the 'City of Ramses', Pi-Ramesses (Qantir) - enriches our appreciation of this new 'Town III'. If this fragment makes our Nilotic landscape inhabited, it suggests that the Aegean view of Egypt was not only specific to the Nile delta, as I suggested above, but included the kind of settlements known to Aegean merchants and mercenaries, and ultimately to poets. Here I cannot resist reviving those epic stories where heroes like Odysseus are lured to Egypt on an expedition, and run into more adventures than they bargained for. In a 'fictional' tale, one of those stories made up by Odysseus in disguise yet often more 'real' than his other adventures, he and his companions sail to Egypt from Crete in four days, an easy trip when the north wind follows (Odyssey xiv.257-270, Lattimore translation):

"On the fifth day we reached the abundant stream Aigyptos,

and I stayed my oarswept ships inside the Aigyptos River.

Then I urged my eager companions to stay where they were, there

close to the fleet, and to guard the ships, and was urgent with them

to send look-outs to the watching places; but they, following

their own impulse, and giving way to marauding violence,

suddenly began plundering the Egyptians' beautiful

fields, and carried off the women and innocent children,

and killed the men, and soon the outcry came to the city.

They heard the shouting, and at the time when dawn shows, they came

on us, and all the plain was filled with horses and infantry

and the glare of bronze, and Zeus who delights in thunder flung down

a foul panic among my companions, and none was so hardy

as to stand and fight, for the evils stood in a close circle around them.

There they killed many of us with the sharp bronze, and others

they led away alive, to work for them in forced labor;"

I have suggested before how these lines are appropriate to battles of the Late Bronze Age commemorated by Ramesside pharaohs in reliefs at Medinet Habu in Thebes (compare the chest of Tutankhamun discussed by Regine Schulz (this volume)), not necessarily early Greek encounters with Egypt in the Iron Age (Morris 1992, 208; 1997, 615-616). New excavations at Qantir in the Pelusiac delta by the Pelizaeus Museum of Hildesheim have uncovered the stables, armoury and munitions factoryof one of these Ramesside cities remembered with awe by Greek adventurers and poets. Odysseus's vivid images of horses, soldiers and the 'glare of bronze' are a wonderful complement to the discoveries in the Ramesside capital, with their horsebits of bronze, chariot fittings of gold and alabaster as well as bronze parts, arrowheads of bronze and flint, short swords/daggers of bronze, even scale armour of bronze and a boar's tusk plaque presumed to be part of an Aegean helmet. Moreover, much of this arsenal was being made at the site in the delta, including shields of a shape we call 'Hittite' from those depicted in the battle of Kadesh reliefs. Some 30,000 square metres of workshops document metal smelting and hammering, the working of animal bone and stone, in the Ramesside period. If 'Hittite' shields were being made in the delta, as Aegean outfits appear in earlier combat scenes (the Amarna papyrus), the stories told by Odysseus sound even more plausible in prehistory, for they suit the Bronze Age as well as they fit Greek mercenaries recruited by Saite pharaohs a thousand years later.

On Thera, we only have two small fragments with buildings next to a river designated as 'Town III' (Pl. 2), but new archaeological activity in the delta encourages us to see this town in the light of Egyptian realities and Homeric memories. These memories are particularly provocative in their association of a trip to Egypt as a sequel to the Trojan war, for heroes like Menelaos (Odyssey iii.276-303; iv.81-89, 347-592), as well as for Odysseus. The new fragments of north and east friezes in the West House on Thera (Pls. 1-2) create a closer link between the seaside setting of the north town and the ships besieging it, and the mouth of the river depicted in the east frieze, resembling the narrative connection between the end of a siege (at Troy) and a trip to Egypt, in Homer. Finally, Televantou points out the similarity of the new town and its setting not only to the Nile delta but to other  towns near rivers in the eastern Mediterranean, including Alalakh and Kadesh on the Orontes, and other cities of the Syro-Palestinian coast (Televantou 1994, 267, 338-346, 410).⁽¹⁰⁾ She imagines an itinerary, "a painted epic" linking many locales of the eastern Mediterranean across these walls: the Aegean, Cyprus, Egypt, and towns like Akrotiri itself. Her scenario, now reinforced by new discoveries at Avaris and Kabri and new attention to Alalakh, finds a verse equivalent in epic adventures later preserved in Homer.

In turning to Maria Shaw's reconstruction of the Tylissos miniature fragments (Fig. 2), they seem to present a scene of public performance -female figures dancing, male spectators, and several male figures carrying vessels (red clay amphorae?) on long poles. At least one architectural fragment gives these figures a masonry facade as setting, as in the miniature frescoes from Knossos, to suggest a courtyard or open space near a palace. While some scholars would inevitably see this as a 'festival' and a scene of ritual significance, Maria Shaw suggested some form of game or competition, including dance, witnessed by spectators and culminating in the awarding of vessels as prizes (Shaw 1972). Both the Iliad and the Odyssey stage such events in the course of their narrative: in the former, at the funeral of Patroklos (Iliad xxiii), and in the latter at the court of the Phaeacians, where Odysseus is challenged to compete against local athletes (Odyssey viii.104-233). This event is introduced to cheer up the despondent guest, saddened by tales of Troy sung by Demodokos which remind him of his lost companions, and is thus initiated for entertainment, not ritual purposes. Poet, king and hero move to the 'agora', an open gathering place, followed by a crowd of young men; they compete in events such as running, boxing and wrestling, all attested in Minoan art. The hero out-throws his hosts with the discus to establish his kingly status; king Alkinoos then honours his guest with a performance of dance, an activity in which the Phaeacians (men) excel, accompanied here by Demodokos on his lyre. Female dancers in Homer to complement those in Cretan frescoes are restricted to the enigmatic choros of Ariadne, invoked in a simile describing the Shield of Achilles (Iliad xviii.590-592), but the legend of Ariadne has received new vitality from the fresco fragments found at Knossos by Peter Warren, depicting rows of painted garlands (Warren 1985; 1988, 9-11, 14, 24-25).

The Homeric setting of the court of the Phaeacians invokes an old idea, that the imaginary land of Scheria, the court of Alkinoos, deploys a distant memory of Minoan culture, refracted across many centuries and through a post-Minoan poetic tradition, first Mycenaean (mainland), later epic and Ionian.⁽¹¹⁾ The image of a culture centred on seafaring, music, dance and athletic feats, renowned for escorting travellers across the sea but on uneasy terms with the god Poseidon, has recalled for many readers the palaces and towns of Crete and the Aegean in the Minoan second millennium. The description of the city of the Phaeacians (Odyssey vi.262-272) is one I cited in comparing the city of the south frieze at Akrotiri to those appropriate in epic poetry (Morris 1989, 519). This comparison involves an element of modern as well as ancient fantasy: until recently, we entertained the notion of a peaceful Minoan civilisation free of weapons and warfare, disrupted by a mainland warrior culture which destroyed them and appropriated their culture (Starr 1984; Evely 1996). Despite recent revision of a more complex, military Minoan culture, the fantasy which Crete continues to project in the modern imagination is not unrelated to ancient utopias like the island of Scheria.

One particular aspect of the Phaeacian tradition in Homer provides a specific link to Minoan(ising) culture revealed on Thera: the two lands share a common catastrophe in their demise. In the Odyssey, it was predicted to King Alkinoos by his father that one day their divine patron and kinsman, Poseidon, would lose his temper with his beloved people for their freedom to convey men and "bury their city under a mountain" (literally, wrap a mountain around it: μέγα... όρος πόλει άμφικαλύψαι). In the poem, this dire prediction nearly comes true when Odysseus is returned to Ithaka and escapes the wrath of Poseidon, angry at the hero's ruin of his son, Polyphemus. Poseidon threatens to stun the ship of Alkinoos as it returns to Scheria, and bury his city under a mountain; he is stayed by Zeus from the latter, but turns the Phaeacian ship into stone, and Alkinoos compromises by ending his escort service at sea (Odyssey xiii.125-187).

Ancient and modern understanding of this passage is entangled with later Greek arguments about the identity of Phaeacia. Since Homer's first readers, in the age of colonisation, the island of Corcyra became the accepted inspiration for Scheria, largely because of its location. The island lies at the proper distance from Ithaka for a short journey (overnight: Odyssey xiii.28-95), and is the westernmost Greek settlement still associated with the mainland before Magna Graecia proper: in Homeric terms, άπάνευθε... έσχατοι άνδρών (6.204-205). Its identity with a Homeric fantasy points to one of the creative effects of early Greek exploration which are relevant to the Odyssey. Certainly all ancient sources, from scholia on Homer to historians like Timaeus, Hellanicus, and Thucydides himself (i.25), agree on the prehistoric identity of Corcyra. Moreover, topographic features have been invoked to support this identity: an offshore outcrop of rock at Corfu, called Phalarion in antiquity and even 'Καράβι' (Ship) in modern Greek, certifies since antiquity (Pliny, Historia Naturalis 53) the connection with the Phaeacians and the Odyssey. Understanding the afterlife of Scheria in the Greek imagination requires a stand on the formation of this poem: if it postdates the Bronze Age, Corcyra (founded in the eighth century) makes a timely inspiration for heroic adventures, assuming they all lie in the west (Yiannoulidou 1977; Axioti-Sali 1992). But what if the roots of the Odyssey are older, as I believe? Is the legend of a city buried under a mountain not more appropriate to the fate of Thera and Akrotiri, buried beneath metres of pumice in the Bronze Age?

Some support is available for this connection through toponyms: a former name of Corcyra, before it was 'Scheria' or a Corinthian colony, was Δρεπάνη or 'Sickle' (Timaeus Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum I, 203 no. 54; cf. Hellanicus), a common name in Greek topography. The island that defines the clearest sickle shape is the hollow caldera of Santorini, ancient Thera. No such name survives for Thera, whose precolonial name was Kalliste (Herodotus iv.147), unless there was a migration of identity for Drepane. The historic claims of Corcyra could have eliminated older connections with Thera, in an intriguing case of competition between those different layers of epic memory explored by Sherratt (1990). It remains a mystery that such a cataclysmic event, whose widespread effect on climate and atmosphere are well documented, disappeared from Greek memory without a trace. Some would say this proves how 'late' is the epic tradition, how distant from prehistoric events, but Poseidon's destruction of Scheria - averted in Odyssey xiii but fulfilled in volcanic history - will always conjure up the fate of Santorini. The fact that Scheria, real or imaginary, no longer existed in historic times even suggests that the prophecy came true in a later narrative. In their final appearance, we leave the Phaeacians standing around the altar propitiating Poseidon (Odyssey xiii.184-187), "their fate uncertain forever", as Stanford observes in his commentary on the poem. This leaves Akrotiri and other lost towns of Thera the best candidates for a culture ended by Poseidon, even when poetic purposes keep the Phaeacians on Fantasy Island, rather than any real locale. ⁽¹²⁾

Other scenarios for the destruction of Thera in Greek legend have been proposed. Now discounted is the identification of the legend of Atlantis from Plato's Timaeus and Critias with the collapse of Thera (Doumas 1983, 151-156).⁽¹³⁾ Carlo Gallavotti finds in the primeval flood which opens Iliad xii a vision of the future destruction of Troy and its walls, the poetic equivalent of the eruption (Gallavotti 1974).⁽¹⁴⁾ But in combing Greek sources for possible accounts, we have neglected, until recently, contemporary documents which could indicate knowledge of the event, such as those in Egypt. At the Third International Congress, Ellen Davis drew attention to the stele erected by Ahmose, first pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, which describes a destructive flood (Davis 1990). Her challenge was taken up by an Aegean archaeologist and an Egyptologist earlier last year, with a new reading of the Egyptian text describing what they call "a near-classic eyewitness report" of the eruption (Polinger Foster and Ritner 1996, with new translation in their appendix A, 11-12:⁽¹⁵⁾

"The gods [caused] the sky to come in a tempest of r(ain],

with darkness in the western region and the sky being

unleashed without [cessation, louder than] the cries of the masses,

more powerful than [...], [while the rain raged(?)] on the mountains

louder than the noise of the cataract which is at Elephantine."

(lines 8-10)

Houses were left floating on the water "like skiffs of papyrus" (line 11), and his Majesty, exclaiming "How much greater this is than the wrath of the great god, than the plans of the gods!", declared the Egyptian equivalent of a Federal Disaster Area, restoring fallen temples and flooded tombs (no mention of repairing the homes of more ordinary folk). While the account may be coloured by pharaonic hyperbole - the greater the damage, the more munificent his royal restoration - it remains a good candidate for a contemporary vision of the effect of the Thera eruption on lands as distant as Egypt, sending floods of tsunami proportions and dark clouds of pumice hundreds of miles away.

A major point of these recent studies is chronological: the stele indicates a date for the eruption just before 1500 BC, consonant with the 'traditional' chronology (and with a secondary peak in the radiocarbon probability density around 1530 BC). Polinger Foster and Ritner point out the neat convergence of the frescoes found at Avaris with Aegean pumice in the early Eighteenth Dynasty and the Ahmose stele; others will disagree (Niemeier 1990; Niemeier and Niemeier here, vol. II).⁽¹⁶⁾ Meanwhile, it is Egypt and not Greece which offers a potential 'narrative' statement for Aegean prehistory.

This inspires me to explore other non-Greek sources for textual enlightenment of Aegean archaeology, including its frescoes. The artistic legacy of Egypt and especially its new frescoes have been much in evidence at this symposium and in Aegean scholarship over the years. More recently, Near Eastern scholars have redirected Aegean attention to the northern Levant. A few years ago Joan Aruz reminded us of a Syrian cylinder seal in Vienna with a provocative scene of a goddess on a throne holding a sword, attended by a recumbent lion and goat, with a griffin perched behind (Aruz 1995, 41-42, fig. 33), an arrangement too close to the presentation scene in Xeste 3 (Doumas 1992, 158, fig. 122 (Pl. 12) for coincidence. Its connections to Aegean art are manifold, particularly two Keftiu-like figures in long hair and loincloths who approach the throne.⁽¹⁷⁾ The presence of imitation hieroglyphs and a Near Eastern crescent in the field makes this seal as typically confusing an amalgam of eastern Mediterranean art as we would expect from Syria in the Bronze Age,⁽¹⁸⁾ but I hope for Aegean responses to her juxtaposition.

In my article on the miniature frescoes from Akrotiri, I considered Anatolian archaeology and epigraphy - Hittite documents,  newdiscoveries from the Aegean coast of Turkey - to suggestone locale for the adventures commemorated on the walls of the West House. The discovery of wall paintings at Miletus noted above (Gates 1996) makes for closer connections between Aegean frescoes and Anatolia, which I would like to amplify with Hittite evidence, ritual this time rather than historical. The Hittite religious calendar included a spring festival named for a plant - An.tah.šum - which has been identified with a crocus, and deserves comparison to the saffron gathering scenes in Xeste 3 or the Lilies fresco of House Δ2, whose season has been called both spring and autumn, when bulb plants flower in Greece.⁽¹⁹⁾ The spring festival in Hittite Anatolia required the king and queen to visit all the cult temples in the capital area, a tour of duty extending for thirty-eight days. An autumn festival (nuntarriyašhaš) involved the closing and blessing of the grain jars full of the year's harvest, stored resources to nourish the community through the winter. Such traditions deserve comparison to seasonal landscapes and storage facilities at Akrotiri, as well as the famous collection of saffron from crocuses for offering to a goddess, depicted in Xeste 3. We often turn to Egyptian festivals to explain Theran images (e.g. Polinger Foster 1988), but perhaps we have neglected Anatolia, with its closer connections to Cretan and Aegean culture.

More intriguing in Hittite texts are ritual contests and performances incorporated into festivals, particularly the ritual enactment of a mock battle against the people of Tiššaruli(ya), as part of the Ki.Lam festival (van den Hout 1991-92; Carter 1988). In another mock battle (Keilschrifturkunden aus Bogbazköi 17.35, iii, 9-17), the "men of Hatti" fought the "men of Masa", the former armed with bronze weapons, the latter equipped only with instruments of reeds (cane?). Such documents have inspired me to rethink the boxing boys at Akrotiri, often compared to Egyptian boxers, but also the nature of combat scenes in Aegean art. The north frieze of the West House on Thera shows scenes of city siege closely allied with similar scenes in other early Mycenaean art, particularly from the Shaft Graves, as has frequently been demonstrated (Morris 1989, 528-531). But fragmentary battles from Mycenaean palaces, descendants of the early frescoes on Thera, appear in a new light. The fresco found at Pylos showing warriors in armour fighting 'barbarians' in animal skins (Fig. 3) has been compared to a specific battle of the western Peloponnese, recalled by Nestor (Iliad vii.133-137) (Yalouris 1989; Morris 1992, 207-208; cf. Lang 1987). Yalouris identified the wavy band in the background as a river, essential to the Homeric battle, and adds the evidence of Linear B (di-pte-ra-po-ro: 'skin-wearers', or are they leather sellers?) to his argument. The Hittite mock battle between warriors with bronze and reed weapons suggests how historical events could have entered the visual arts through ritual re-enactment, in song and even performance. The centrality of poet and audience in the throne room scene at Pylos suggests many epic themes painted on its other walls -hunt, battle, chariots, even sacrifice - could have been sung by poets as well as incorporated into visual arts. Their repetition throughout mainland palaces - and now as far away as Egypt (the hunting scenes from Avaris) -could reflect not so much a standard thematic repertoire or travelling fresco painters, but shared traditions reinforced through performance, in poetry or ritual. The painting of history we still seek in vain in Aegean Bronze Age art, so unlike Egyprian and Mesopotamian art, and it may never have played as active a role as the transformation of history into song.

In contemplating our progress in understanding a narrative tradition behind the Thera frescoes, it is appropriate that we have widened our vistas beyond the Aegean. Homeric poetry itself is greatly enriched by comparison to other epic traditions, especially from the Near East (Morris 1997). The iconography of Aegean life should reflect the international conditions under which the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean shared traditions along with materials and artefacts, mercenaries and marriageable brides. What remains distinctive about the Thera frescoes, and companion paintings from other Aegean sites, is a unique vista of human and animal activity, nature and built environment, ritual and leisure. What is still absent is a focus on individuals, beyond a single female cult figure, or any signs of a hero, whether mythical or historical. (Even Theophilos labels his scenes and characters more helpfully). This prevents us from exploring more closely the similarities between Aegean and Near Eastern narrative (Marinatos 1993; Cain 1997, especially chapter 2; see also respectively Kemp and Russmann this volume, Winter here, vol. II). It also keeps the Aegean Bronze Age at a distance from Greek history, much though scholars like myself seek connections to later eras, while confirming its special status in the corpus of world art.

(1). Gates (1996, 302, fig. 17) illustrates a fragmeut depicting a white lily on a red background, from excavations at Miletus by W.-D. and B. Niemeier.

(2). While the scientific evidence of sulphate deposits in ice cores, bristle-cone pine growth rings and calibrated radiocarbon dates indicates a cataclysmic and global event in the seventeenth century (1686 or 1628 BC), no sure sign yet certifies that event as the eruption of Thera.

(3). Commercial Bank of Greece 1967, figs. 95-97. I am very grateful to the Director of the Museum of Greek Folk Art in Athens, Eleni Rhomaiou-Karastamati, for her help in obtaining illustrations of this room, permission to publish them, and for her kind assistance with my research. I also thank Craig and Marie Mauzy for help in obtaining and preparing these illustrations.

(4). Οί "Έλληνες Ζωγράφοι" (1975), 460-463, figs. 23-24. Cf. Prokovas 1982, 111, 119, 124-128 for painted interiors of mansions in Thessaly. 

(5). Here I would like to apologise for my misapplication (Morris 1989, 513 n.10) of Malcolm Wiener's 'Versailles effect' (Wiener 1984, 25): in fact, his point was that there is much more than Minoan influence active on Thera (unlike the 'Versailles effect' on mainland Greece), now confirmed by the presence of Linear A inscriptions.

(6). Her 'procession' of men (Morgan 1990, fig. 4) is a row of fragments with figures, without discernible arrangement (are they indeed on the same ground level?); several wear robes, one carries two spears, another a pitcher, but few others can be securely identified as to attribute. This group resembles the 'meeting on a hill' in the West House north frieze from Thera, but that 'meeting' could as well be military or strategic as ritual (Morris 1989, 522-523).

(7). The much vaunted Town Mosaic composition from Knossos lacks most of the narrative potential Evans saw in it: see its deconstruction by Waterhouse (1994), and my own performance of this task (Morris 1989, 519-520).

(8). The full version of the north frieze eliminates my earlier suggestions about a cattle raid or a possible τειχομαχίη (Morris 1989, 527-529).

(9). The placement of new fragments on the east wall was disputed by Morgan (Televantou 1990, 325); I have similar reservations about the west wall fragments (below, n.10).

(10). Two fragments called Town I (Δ24-25, one found as two joining pieces near the south end of the west wall: Televantou  1994,61-62, 265-267) are assigned to the missing west wall; could they belong to missing portions of the south frieze (K8-K9: the structure on the hill outside the large town), rather than a separate narrative? On the black triangular projections on rooftops in these fragments, see now Strasser 1997.

(11). This idea surfaced soon after Evans's discoveries on Crete (Shewan 1919, 4-11, 57-67), although Plato's Atlantis (below, n.13) was compared to Minoan Crete since its excavation (Frost 1909; 1913).

(12). Cook 1992; Schubert 1996, especially 262: "Schérie reste un lieu utopique, impossible à placer sur une carte geographique."

(13). Luce (1969) joined earlier views (n.11) of Minoan Crete as the inspiration for Atlantis. Recent attempts to identify Atlantis and Troy seem unfortunate: for a lengthy refute of Zangger 1992, see Bloedow 1993.

(14). This same flood has most recently been coordinated with Sennacherib's destruction of Babylon in 689 BC (West 1995).

(15). Cf. Goedicke 1992; Malcolm Wiener and Jim Allen (1998) have recently published a critique of Davis's and Polinger Foster's and Ritner's interpretation of this text and its connection with the Thera eruption.

(16). A thorough study of the Avaris frescoes and their implications for Aegean chronology lies ahead. For other Egyptian reasons, the Late Bronze Age may begin somewhat earlier (in the sixteenth century), not after 1500 BC: see E. Vermeule's review of Kemp and Merrillees 1980 (Vermeule 1986).

(17). Aruz (1995, 42): "Could we have on the Vienna seal a reflection of the depictions of Minoan embassies, such as we find in Egyptian tomb paintings starting in the reign of Hatshepsut?"

(18). Described in Bleibtreu 1981, 70 no. 83 as "Middle Syrian, Egyptianizing style with Minoan influence".

(19). Hittite festivals: Güterbock 1960; Houwinck Ten Cate 1986; Zinko 1987. Marinatos 1984, 63-64, on Room Delta 2 and its religious connotations: Polinger Foster 1995; contra Hollinshead 1989.

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