WOMEN ATHLETES; WOMEN WARRIORS: No B∅YS Allowed!

Toreador Fresco, Knossos, Crete; c. 1550-1450 BC

This episode: NO CHINA SHOPS ON CRETE!

The Toreador, or Bull-Leaping, Fresco in the Palace of Minos at Knossos, Crete is one of the most famous pieces of art in the world.  And no wonder!  It is a color-saturated, exuberant – almost cartoonish – fresco that conveys both fluidity and movement.
And it boasts a subject matter that no one has ever been able to agree upon.  What are these people doing?  Are they ancient matadors?  Bull-baiters?  Suicidal primitives?
Was this a sport?  Maybe an archaic ancestor of the original Olympic Games?  Or something more arcane?  Like a religious ceremony?
What is immediately apparent – if this was an actual exercise or ritual and not some hypothetical representation (like "Initiates Dance with the Great Bull God": Film at 11) – is that the two women (and one man) in the fresco were tremendous athletes and that the bull held a place of enormous importance in Minoan society.
The Minoans were named for a theoretical ancestor, Minos, whose wife, Pasiphaë, slept with a bull and produced the hideous half-man, half-bull monster, the Minotaur.  (He is also famous for inventing the labyrinth in which to keep her: a disciplinary action directly correlated to her cuckolding of the ancient king.  There is more than that to the story - isn't there always? - but no need to get into it here).  No one knows if Minos really lived or not, or what the Minoans called themselves; this name was assigned them much later in life by archaeologist extraordinaire, Sir Arthur Evans.  But decades of archaeological work have laid bare the Minoans’ undoubted reverence for the bull.
For centuries, the bull has been a religion-related animal.  At the Neolithic site of Çatal Huyük, Turkey, archaeologists found altars shaped like bull’s horns.  From the Bronze Age Aegean occupied by the Minoans, no labyrinth is extant, but bulls are everywhere.  More altars like those in Turkey inhabit what might have been either a palace or temple complex at Knossos.  There are Bull-Head rhytons (drinking horns).  And there is that fresco.
(I mentioned in an earlier blog that there is another one much like it, also done by the Minoans, at a settlement in the Nile Delta.  So, whatever else it might have been, this was a widespread, recognized activity or motif to the Bronze Agers, otherwise known as "Generation -00000000").
To judge from their art and literature, the Greeks who inhabited the Aegean Islands long after the Minoans had evaporated into myth considered the Amazons to be both warriors and athletes.  By the same lights, the bombastically colorful Minoan frescoes boast women who are clearly both high-ranking and athletic, playing a dangerous and strenuous sport alongside male competitors of great prowess.
Tuesday: The Ass-Kicking Amazons.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

POSEIDON AND DEMETER: HAPPY COUPLE, OR VIOLATOR AND VICTIM?

Image
By Alvesgaspar - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43569142 Although the above sculpture depicts the rape of Demeter’s beloved daughter, Persephone, or Proserpina, by Hades, God of the Underworld, in the myths of the ancient world there was another, earlier rape: that of the earth goddess, Demeter, herself. In Demeter’s case, the rapist was the god of earthquakes, water, and horses, as well as the Underworld: Poseidon. I chose to use Bernini’s  The Rape of Proserpine  as the illustration of this post because I felt it vividly depicted the shock and horror of this ancient outrage. The two stories might have been a “twinning”, i.e.: Persephone’s later rape by Hades may just possibly have been a retelling of the original violation of Demeter by Poseidon. Here’s the initial story:   When Demeter was wandering in search of her daughter [Persephone], she was followed, it is said, by Poseidon, who lusted after her. So, she turned, the story runs, into a m
Read more

ACHILLES AND PENTHESILIA: NECROPHILIA, OR SACRED MARRIAGE?

Image
  By ArchaiOptix - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88625666 Rage. The great bard, Homer, employed wrath as the driving force behind the events of his  Iliad , including the deaths of his leading man, Achilles – the warrior-hero of the Greeks – and the Amazon Wonder Woman, Penthesilea. For, had the warrior woman not first killed one of her own, she would not have been compelled to find redemption in battle against the Greeks. Perhaps, she would instead have died somewhere on her native steppes, unremembered. Such a death – our loss, as well as that of Penthesilea and her people – would have been sad, indeed. Her name would have then been forever lost to time and anonymity. That ancient name conveyed some connotation of sadness:  penthos  meant “sorrow” in Ancient Greek. The second syllable of the warrior queen’s name is not so easy to decipher. Maybe, it came from the Latin verb for “silence”:  sileo . Or perhaps it was some Scythian derivative of
Read more