Identity, tradition, change and continuity: ritual practice and understanding

Furthermore, I would argue that there will have been changes over time during the Minoan and Mycenaean periods respectively, and that changes will also have taken place in the centuries between the fall of the Mycenaean citadels and the beginnings of classical Greece.

Furthermore, aside from changes over time, there will also have been regional differences within the Minoan and Mycenaean worlds. To take one example: peak sanctuaries are effectively rare in western Crete while being virtually typical for Minoan culture on the rest of the island (although there is an overall trend for most of them to be abandoned over time in favour of major shrines such as Mount luktas). The case of the distinctly different tomb types on the mainland in Attica and neighbouring Eleusis has already been mentioned. The general tendency for chamber tombs to become more common during the Mycenaean era was not mentioned, but is equally relevant. Thus the version of these worlds as presented here has been oversimplified. Yet we must continue along the same vein.

The Minoans were probably in a very different world where rituals may not have had the same strength and importance, but feasting will have played a very important role in both the Mycenaean and Minoan worlds. This brings us to one of the most controversial features of Aegean ritual: the possibility of human sacrifice and the practice of cannibalism. The archaeological evidence, as always, is ambiguous. There are, however, a number of references in the later Greek literature which imply ancient traditions of cannibalism associated with the Mycenaeans. These can be related to one specific find of Minoan date on Crete where the bones of small children were clearly cut. The marks on the bones can be con-strued as evidence of butchery, favouring ritual cannibalism rather than mere defleshing. This case is actually quite clear in that alternative explanations can probably be ruled out, and the practice can be related to the textual sources, as Warren (1981) argues. The clarity of this one find means that one should be diffident about dismissing other cases where the evidence is not compelling. More controversial, for example, is the argument for evidence of a Minoan human sacrifice in a shine at Anemospilia between Mount luktas and Knossos. The excavator (Sakellarakis & Sapouna-Sakellaraki 1981; 1997: 268-311) concluded that he could reconstruct a human sacrifice but the interpretation has been dismissed by Younger and Rehak (2008: 170). Significantly, the interpretation hinges upon understanding the building as having had an altar, but temples and shrines are highly exceptional in the Minoan and Mycenaean traditions. Yet the structure may have been unique because it served a unique purpose. In this case, speculation and critical study alike are required.

This tendency to avoid the ritual practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism represents a trend which combines a highly justifiable critical attitude towards the interpretation of archaeological reports with a tendency to skirt the issue where possible (for a detailed discussion and interpretation of the evidence, cf.

Obviously, we have difficulties combining the clear stylized naturalistic beauty of Minoan art with cannibalism. Yet Minoan art does tend to draw on the forms of the world around us (Vesa-Pekka 2006), with animals, plants and landscapes figuring far more prominently than was the case in the cultures of the Near East and Egypt. Among the only types of sanctuaries that can be recognized are the “peak sanctuaries”. These can be linked to the use of caves for burials and reflect a trend for the Minoans to embed themselves in their environment.

Nevertheless, the palaces representing Minoan culture imposed orthogonal organization on irregular nature. Thus, one does not know whether the Minoans were stressing the environment, or whether they simply used the environment as a background to ritual practices. By contrast, it is certain that Mycenaean art is dominated by a tendency to stylize and the creation of schematic renderings which are far from the more naturalistic tendencies of the Minoans. Where the Minoans aimed at a pleasure in detail, the Mycenaeans preferred schematic renderings. Such thoughts imply a religion that is far closer to the thoughts of the later Greeks.

Regardless, the earliest traces of both Minoan (Cretan) and Mycenaean (mainland) traditions are tombs. However, tombs play an important role in the later Mycenaean tradition associated with the citadels while they are, at most, of subsidiary importance in the earlier Minoan palatial tradition.

Thus the relationships with the numinous and the ancestors will not have been restricted to any particular social stratum, but rather part of an open social system in which the ruling classes will have had a vested interest in preserving their prerogatives and connections with the Beyond. Obviously, in the absence of widely disseminated competing written traditions, there will not have been any major dogmas. The houses of the gods were both literally peripheral and subsidiary to the palaces of the living and the tombs of the dead. Thus, the understanding of ritual probably did not go beyond the mere necessity of practice. Obviously, this ritual can probably be associated with the idea that efforts by humans could encourage the gods to be well disposed, but the paradoxical tale of divine interventions presented by Homer does not encourage one to believe in a coherent concept of pacifying the gods let alone complex theological developments.

There is thus no reason to believe that a discourse about concepts of belief will have existed in the Minoan and Mycenaean worlds, although there will have been a number of vague thoughts about death and the Beyond, as well as the relevance of the gods for the preservation of power. The Mycenaean texts and figurines clearly reveal the emergence of a worship of the major gods who would come to dominate later Greece; indeed, the post-Mycenaean era reveals the

changes in the importance of the princes, heroes and gods leading into the Greek religions of later times. Personal piety on a popular level increased with the end of the Bronze Age, symbolized by the abundance of cheap terracotta figurines deposited in the shrines. In the Bronze Age itself, however, most of this was only just beginning.

But the stage was set, and the trend developing during the Bronze Age would take the Greeks into a different religious universe. Many aspects of the religions of classical Greece and Rome can indeed be understood in terms of the changes and continuities from Bronze Age and archaic Greek religions. However, other aspects are new, related to developments in the Iron Age. Specific information on the religions of classical antiquity will be found in several of the chapters in the present volume. The following remarks are intended to contextualize that information in a broader historical context, linking the two worlds of the Bronze and Iron Ages.