{"id":58081,"date":"2024-02-19T09:39:50","date_gmt":"2024-02-19T09:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/?p=58081"},"modified":"2024-02-19T09:39:51","modified_gmt":"2024-02-19T09:39:51","slug":"multimedia-at-minoan-myrtos-pyrgos-crete","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2024\/02\/19\/multimedia-at-minoan-myrtos-pyrgos-crete\/","title":{"rendered":"Multimedia at Minoan Myrtos\u2013Pyrgos, Crete"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It is rare in the scholarship of Bronze Age Crete, during a period as old as the third and second millennia BCE, to present an inclusive account and analysis of all the seals, seal impressions and sealing practices, together with tablets and inscriptions in Linear A, from the whole life of a settlement. This new paper, however, achieves this in publishing comprehensively the evidence for sealing and inscribing practices at the prosperous and long-lived settlement at Myrtos\u2013Pyrgos on the south coast of Crete. Twenty-four documents of Pyrgos are published here, and one discussed from Tel Haror in Israel that is likely to come from Pyrgos or nearby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This diachronic approach places the documents in their changing contexts during the life of Pyrgos for around a millennium from Early Minoan II to Late Minoan IB, showing the development in the provinces of Crete of seal use \u2014 and writing \u2014 from simple soft-stone designs, through hard- and soft-stone prisms with Cretan Hieroglyphic signs, to complex figurative scenes with boars, and lions and bulls, that were found with Linear A documents in the shrine treasury of the Country House at Pyrgos when it was destroyed by fire in the 15th century BC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is noteworthy that Linear A inscriptions were found at the site. While still undeciphered, the script shows that administrative processes were in action at Pyrgos, with some level of sophistication. The seals, too, are tied to the workings of the Pyrgos bureacracy. Seals are small semiprecious and common stones cut into standard shapes, polished, pierced, and then engraved with ornamental patterns, figures, or, more rarely, inscriptions. When pressed into clay, the seal leaves a legible impression in relief (\u2018a sealing\u2019). \u00a0They were used as identity markers, and also worn as conspicuous jewellery (read more about Aegean seals and sealings online at Oxford Classical Dictionary<\/em>, 2021<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These documents also illustrate the changing cultural \u2014 and probably political \u2014 relationships of the Pyrgos settlement: in the late Prepalatial period with both central Crete around Knossos and the probably separate polity of Malia, to a strong connection with Malia (on the other side of the Lasithi Mountains) and the Malia\u2013Lasithi\u2013Mirabello cultural and probably political region in late Protopalatial, and then reverting to ties with Knossos in Neopalatial Late Minoan I \u2014 when the Country House and its Knossian-style architecture looks to have been an outpost of Knossos\u2019s rule in Crete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The multimedia of Myrtos\u2013Pyrgos make an intriguing story that is valuable for being seen from a provincial perspective outside the immediate hinterland of Knossos and Malia and enriches our understanding of how Minoan Crete functioned and what could be achieved anywhere in the island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photographs of Early Minoan II two-faced sealstone from Myrtos-Pyrgos. Multimedia catalogue # 3. Among the earliest Minoan seals, a mottled green steatite seal with incurving sides, engraved top and bottom with simple geometrical designs. Photographs courtesy of CMS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Photographs of Late Minoan IB roundel (a Minoan mini-document thought to be a receipt of some kind) stamped on its rim five times by two different seals. Multimedia catalogue # 20; PYR Wc 4, impressed three times by a cushion seal, CMS II.6, no. 235, engraved with a cult scene and twice by a hard-stone lentoid, CMS II.6, no. 234, depicting two lions flanking their kill, a bovine. All five seal impressions are slashed with a mark indicating the number \u20181\u2019. Drawing and photograph of CMS II.6, no. 234, and\u00a0drawing CMS II.6, no. 235 courtesy of CMS.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Photograph of Late Minoan IB clay tablet (uncertain if burnt in conflagration and\/or intentionally fired beforehand) inscribed in the Linear A script. Multimedia catalogue # 22. PYR 1. The tablet records receipt or delivery of 90 units of wine (Wine ideogram plus 9 horizontal strokes). Photograph: D. Walker.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Multimedia at Minoan Myrtos\u2013Pyrgos, Crete<\/a><\/em> by Judith Weingarten, Silvia Ferrara and Gerald Cadogan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is rare in the scholarship of Bronze Age Crete, during a period as old as the third and second millennia BCE, to present an inclusive account and analysis of all the seals, seal impressions and sealing practices, together with tablets and inscriptions in Linear A, from the whole life of a settlement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":823,"featured_media":58231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,6],"tags":[6400,9313,466,2276],"coauthors":[11077,11078,11079],"class_list":["post-58081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classics","category-humanities","tag-annual-of-the-british-school-at-athens","tag-ath","tag-classic","tag-humanities"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/823"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58081"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58235,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58081\/revisions\/58235"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58081"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=58081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}