This month, Smithsonian magazine has a long article by Jo Marchant on an important Mycenaean tomb at Pylos, dubbed the tomb of the “Griffin Warrior.” In light of this article, I believe it is very much worth looking at the details of the tomb, as well as at how scholars and journalists are presenting it.
The Tomb
(Note: the most accurate and
detailed source of information on the tomb and its finds is an academic article
by the co-directors of the excavation, Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker of the
University of Cincinnati: “The Lord of the Rings: The Griffin Warrior of
Pylos,” in the journal Hesperia [85
no. 4] from October 2016.)
The tomb was discovered in
May 2015 at Ano Englianos, the site of ancient Pylos. This was the first season
of renewed excavations in the area of the palace at Pylos (the famous earlier
excavations by the University of Cincinnati, led by Carl Blegen, had discovered
the palace and its archive of Linear B tablets). The 2015 excavation carried on
past the scheduled season until the tomb was fully cleared (late October). In
2016, a second season of excavations including digging trenches alongside the
tomb in order to clarify the sequence of its construction.
The tomb contained a single
body with a wealth of finds: cups, pitchers, and basins of gold, silver, and
bronze – no ceramics; four gold seal rings and 50 seal stones carved with intricate
designs; bronze weapons with hilts of gold and ivory, and a helmet made of
boars tusks; hundreds of beads of gold, glass, and semi-precious stones; an ivory
plaque showing a griffin; six ivory combs; a bronze mirror with an ivory
handle; and a bronze bull’s head, originally topping a staff. Most of the
material is related to Minoan Crete, whether coming from Crete itself or made
in Cretan style. It is still unclear exactly how many objects were buried with
the deceased, though the number is certainly many hundreds. Some reports have
said 2,000+, but this refers to the total number of registration numbers given
out, and many objects were broken and have a registration number for each fragment.
The tomb is a large shaft
dug into the ground and lined with stone slabs and rubble. Shaft graves are best
known from Mycenae, where two grave circles (Grave Circle A and Grave Circle B)
with incredibly rich shafts were found by Schliemann in the 1870s and Greek
excavations under Papadimitriou and Mylonas in the 1950s – again with large
amounts of material related to Minoan Crete.
While there was no pottery
among the grave goods deposited with the body, the tomb could be dated by
pottery in the fills deposited during its construction. Late Helladic (LH)
I-IIA sherds were found in the fill laid to make the floor of the tomb as well
as in the fill along what was once the coffin and along the outer walls of the
tomb. We can therefore date the tomb by the latest pottery found in these
fills: LHIIA, c. 1500 BCE. This places the tomb at the tail end of the Grave
Circle phenomenon known from Mycenae, c. 1650 or 1600 to 1500 BCE.
This is one of the richest
Mycenaean tombs found since Schliemann’s Grave Circle A. And, because of
improvements in excavation and recording techniques, and because the Griffin
Warrior tomb was a single burial (unlike most of the Mycenae shaft graves), we
can learn still learn a great deal about shaft graves and burial practices from
this discovery.
The Publicity
The initial set of stories
on the tomb waited until the grave was fully excavated, in late October 2015. A
second set of stories followed almost a year later (early October 2016), marking
the publication of the first academic journal article on the tomb and
presenting some of the findings from that article. The Smithsonian followed
with a longer piece at the beginning of January 2017.
In these stories we see a
progression from more reserved to less reserved claims. We also see this trend
in the progression from academic article to popular news reports.
The first crop of news
articles made relatively understated claims, with several qualifications:
“could be,” will “help” understand the
emergence of Mycenaean palaces, will “deepen” our knowledge of the
relationship between Minoan Crete and the Mycenaean mainland. A year later,
after the initial analysis and preceding publication of first scholarly article:
the grave “throws light” on how
Minoan culture spread to the mainland, and “offers
evidence that Mycenaean culture recognized and appreciated Minoan culture more
than previously believed.” There are changes after the analysis:
Archaeologists “now believe” the rings and gemstones of the Griffin Warrior were
“possessions from his culture” and not “loot” from Crete; the analysis “points
to the exchange of ideas and goods” between Crete and the mainland. But the
discussion is still fairly restrained.
With the new Smithsonian
article, we see something very different. This starts with the headline: the
tomb “upended what we thought we knew about the roots of Western civilization”.
(Compare the earlier headlines: in the first round, the tomb “could be a
gateway to ancient civilizations”; in the second round, the rings “connect two
ancient Greek cultures.”) Based on no new evidence beyond what was known in
October 2016, there is a massive difference in both tone (definitive, and even
past tense) and scope (“upended,” and not just two cultures but the roots of
all of Western civilization). Of course, headlines are often meant to be
attention-grabbing, but this tone and scope is matched in the text of the
article. We read, for instance, that the tomb “offers a radical new
perspective,” not only on the two cultures but through them on “Europe’s
cultural origins” (though we read in the rest of the paragraph that the finds
match those from the shaft graves of Mycenae and on Crete). We find the
archaeologist Davis speculating that the relatively “egalitarian” society
(strange when considering the massive wealth of this individual man’s grave) of
Mycenaean Greece might have laid the foundation for the emergence of Athenian
democracy a millennium later, and for all democracies.
Compare this to the academic
article in Hesperia from October: The boldest claim made is in the conclusion:
“These and other associations that we will explore in future publications
promise to open new doors to our understanding of the Mycenaean belief system.
. .” But mostly we find something much different: the tomb provides “new data about Minoan/Mycenaean
iconography and Mycenaean burial customs.” The four gold signet rings “confirm” a more intensive relationship
at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age between Pylos and Minoan Crete than
thought before. In general, the statements are less absolute, much narrower in scope,
and instead of something radical the discovery “confirms” something we knew
before, just with “new data.”
So what is the evidence on
which the new Smithsonian article bases its major claims? It is mostly the same
evidence provided in the academic article: the analysis of the four rings and
the arrangement of the grave goods. Weapons were placed on the left side of the
body, rings and seal stones on the right. Davis and Stocker suggest that
individual items in the burial were matched to those depicted on the gold
rings: a mirror, a bull’s head from a staff.
Based on this, Marchant
writes in the Smithsonian article: “In their [Davis and Stocker’s] view,
the arrangement of objects in the grave provides the first real evidence that
the mainland elite were experts in Minoan ideas and customs, who understood
very well the symbolic meaning of the products they acquired. ‘The grave shows
these are not just knuckle-scraping, Neanderthal Mycenaeans who were completely
bowled over by the very existence of Minoan culture,” says [British
archaeologist John] Bennet. “They know what these objects are.’”
In Hesperia, Davis and
Stocker are very cautious – and rightly so – with the conclusions they draw.
They introduce their analysis with a skeptical quote from Emily Vermeule from
the 1970s: “Most prehistoric art is not really understandable. There is no
convincing way to relate designs on gold to burial rites or to religion or
community symbols of belief.” This is entirely correct: How can we know if the
Mycenaean Greeks understood Minoan symbolism, when we don’t understand much
about Minoan (or Mycenaean, for that matter) symbolism ourselves? If anything,
we should be even more cautious than Davis and Stocker are in the Hesperia
article. They believe that the people who buried the Griffin Warrior matched
specific items (a bull’s head from a staff, a mirror) to objects depicted on
the gold rings. Yet they use language that indicates the identification of those
objects on the rings isn’t certain: “seemingly horns”; “which we interpret as a
mirror.” So we must raise a question that Davis and Stocker do not: If the
mirror and the bull’s head had not been buried in the grave, would they have
interpreted the objects on the rings in the same way? That is, to what extent
was their interpretation of the rings guided by those finds? Even if Davis and
Stocker are correct about the matching of grave goods to the images on the
rings, it is possible that the Minoan craftsmen originally intended to
represent other objects, but that these were reinterpreted by the Mycenaean
buriers as a mirror and a bull’s head.
Either way, nothing
justifies the suggestion by Marchant that the people of Pylos understood Minoan
iconography. Davis and Stocker suggest otherwise in the academic article: they
write that Minoan gold rings on the mainland “were recontextualized in graves
like that of the Griffin Warrior” –new contexts, and therefore new meanings.
The Smithsonian article does
introduce one new piece of evidence for its dramatic claims, but not from the
tomb itself. The 2016 excavations at Pylos revealed fragments of wall paintings
at mansion houses (that the palace was later built over) – these are suggested
to be the oldest wall paintings found on mainland Greece. The paintings show
strong Minoan influence, with nature scenes including papyrus flowers.
According to Marchant: “Together, the grave goods and the wall paintings
present a remarkable case that the first wave of Mycenaean elite embraced
Minoan culture. . . This has led Davis and Stocker to favor the idea that the
two cultures became entwined at a very early stage.”
But does the evidence, and
Davis and Stocker’s conclusion, really “upend” our understanding of how
Mycenaean culture developed? For most of the last two centuries, there have
been perhaps two major understandings of this emergence:
1. Mycenaean culture is simply Minoan culture spread to
mainland Greece; it was brought Cretan colonists. This was the view of Arthur
Evans, and was dominant in the first half of the twentieth century.
2. The Minoan-related wealth of early Mycenaean culture
is elite emulation: mainland Greek elites adopting the trappings of the
then-dominant culture, Minoan Crete. This view became more popular in the
second half of the twentieth century, after the decipherment of Linear B (the
writing of the mainland Greek palaces) showed it to be used to write Greek (as
opposed to Linear A, the earlier writing of the Cretan palaces).
How does the new evidence –
Minoan-style wealth in the Griffin Warrior grave and Minoan-style wall
paintings on the early houses of Pylos – not fit into either of these two reconstructions?
The reality is that the new
idea that Davis and Stocker favor is not all that new. As Marchant describes
it, it is a form of what is called “entanglement.” Entanglement is the idea
that the interaction of two cultures leads to a blending of those cultures, not
the imposition or adoption of one over the other (especially in the case of
colonialism). This idea has been increasingly influential in the archaeology of
the Aegean Bronze Age over the last several years. Marchant even hints at this:
immediately after presenting it as a new idea, she writes that it “fits recent
suggestions” about the end of the Minoan palaces on Crete.
Reading between the lines,
we see that the new evidence plays little role in the adoption of the theory of
entanglement here. (This is even more evident when we remember that the Griffin
Warrior tomb does not present “the Mycenaean belief system at the moment of its
creation,” as Davis and Stocker write in Hesperia, but comes roughly a century
after the start of the Shaft Grave phenomenon.)
Entanglement, like
colonization and emulation, is a model. The goal of scholarship is generally
not to determine what actually happened in the past (which is often impossible),
but to improve our understanding of the past – to come up with the best models
possible.
As we see in this case,
models are often driven not so much by new evidence as by new scholarly
developments, the emergence of new theories. New evidence may be the immediate
catalyst, but the process of change is much deeper.
Entanglement, at least in
many cases, is probably a better model than what came before: it is a more
sophisticated approach to understanding how cultures interact than simply
asserting the dominance of one culture over another. But it is still a model,
an imperfect explanation. Thirty or forty years from now, few scholars will be
talking about entanglement; we will have new models, presumably better models,
or we may even be asking different questions entirely.
All of this means that the
interpretations we make are driven as much by our own beliefs as by the
evidence of the past – as much by the present as by the past. Far from
timeless, our models are very much of our time.
For evidence of this, we
need to look only at the end of Marchant’s Smithsonian article. There we see Davis
and Stocker tying their discovery to the emergence of democracies –that is, to
us. We see the journalist tying entanglement in with rise of nationalism and
xenophobia today. And we find a British archaeologist (John Bennet) looking at
the interaction of Mycenaeans and Minoans and seeing the European Union. All of
this reflects much of the current response of liberalism to Brexit, anti-immigration
policies, and the election of Trump, projected into the past. The specific
models and analogies used here seem forced and stretched.
Of course, it is good that scholars
try to relate the past to the present. This is essential work, and an essential
reason why scholarly work is relevant. But – and this is a huge caveat – we
should be suspicious when we look into the past and see a reflection of
ourselves, as if in a mirror.
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