Minoan pottery

Minoan pottery is more than a useful tool for dating the mute Minoan civilization. Its restless sequence of rapidly-maturing artistic styles reveal something of Minoan patrons' pleasure in novelty while they help archaeologists assign relative dates to the strata of their sites. Pots that contained oils and ointments, exported from 18th century BC Crete, have been found at sites through the Aegean islands and mainland Greece, on Cyprus, along the coastal Syria and in Egypt, showing the wide trading contacts of the Minoans. The extremely fine palace pottery called Kamares ware, and the Late Minoan all-over patterned "Marine style" are the high points of the Minoan pottery tradition.

Traditional chronology

Sir Arthur Evans created a detailed chronology of the serial phases of the pottery styles in Minoan Crete, based on what he found at Knossos, with triple divisions each triply divided, a formula that has been retained, thus Early Minoan I II and III, Middle Minoan I II and III etc. Each subsection he divided into A and B, early and late. Usefully conceptualized in this artificially rigid serial organization, actual ceramics show blends of styles, either attesting gradual shifts in style or the conservative instincts of apprenticeship-trained potters and their patrons. A very general trend of facture was from dark decoration on a light background in the Early Minoan to white and red decorations on a dark wash of slip in Middle Minoan, and finally a return to the earlier manner of dark on light in Late Minoan.

New body shapes for vessels also emerged and various styles of decoration are evident within Evan's chronology.

Evans never intended to give exact calendrical dates to the pottery periods. He did correlate them roughly to better dated Egyptian periods using finds of Egyptian artifacts in association with Cretan ones and obvious similarities of some types of Cretan artifacts with Egyptian ones. Subsequent investigators checking Evans' work varied the dates of some of the periods a little, usually less than a few hundred years, but the chronological structure remains basically as Evans left it. It remains a solid framework for placing events of Aegean prehistory.

The one serious question concerns the date of the Knossos tablets. Allegations were made that Evans falsified the stratum in which the tablets were found to place the tablets at 1400 BCE when they ought to have been the same date as the Pylos tablets, 1200 BCE. This dispute became known as the Palmer-Boardman Dispute when it first appeared. Despite the intense debate that developed on the subject no conclusive evidence could be found to settle the question; by default, archaeologists tend to use Evans' dating.

**Minoan Chronology**
Name	Relative Chronology	Conventional Dates, BCE	Notes
Prepalatial, Platon: Pre-Palace; Matz, Hutchinson: Copper Age	EM	3000-2000 rough conventional dates
First Early Minoan	I	Evans: 3400-2800; Matz: 2600-2300; Hutchinson: 2500-2400; Gimbutas: 3200-2600	The main problem has been setting the end of the Neolithic; its layers destroyed by building at Knossos.
Second Early Minoan	II	Evans: 2800-2400; Matz: 2300-2200; Hutchinson: 2300-2100; Gimbutas: 2600-2300	Seals like those of Egyptian 1st Intermediate Period, Dynasties 6-11, 2345-1991.
Third Early Minoan	III	Matz: 2200-2000; Hutchinson: 2100-2000; Gimbutas: 2300-2160
	MM
Protopalatial	MM I-II	2000-1700
Neopalatial	MM IIIA-IIIB	1700-1600
	LM IA	1600-1500
	LM IB	1500-1450
	LM II	1450-1400
	LM IIIA	1400-1300
	LM IIIC	1200

Early Minoan: EMI, EMII, EMIII (3000–2100 BCE)

Early Minoan pottery evolved from the Final Neolithic without a severe break, one of many suggestions that Minoan civilization evolved in situ and was not imported from the East. Its other main feature is its consequent variety from site to site, which is suggestive of localism of Early Minoan social traditions.

The early hand-shaped round-bottomed jugs and bulbous cups and jars ("pyxes") were joined by "chalices", in which a cup combined with a funnel-shaped stand could be set on a hard surface without spilling: no ceremonial usage is implied. Favored decor includes burnished or incised line patterns. Painted parallel-line decors of Aghios Onouphrious ware were drawn with an iron-red clay slip that would fire red under oxidizing conditions in a clean kiln but under the reducing conditions of a smoky fire would turn black. Without much control over color, From this beginning, Minoan potters already concentrated on the linear forms of designs, perfecting coherent designs and voids that would ideally suit the shape of the ware.

In EMII the geometric slip-painted designs of Koumasa ware seem to have developed from the wares of Aghios Onouphrious. Vasilike ware named for the Minoan site in eastern Crete, has mottled glaze effects, early experiments with controlling color, but the elongated spouts drawn from the body and ending in semi-circular spouts show the beginnings of the tradition of Minoan elegance. In the latest brief transition (EMIII), wares in eastern Crete begin to be covered in dark slip with light slip-painted decor of lines and spirals; the first checkered motifs appear; the first petallike loops and leafy bands appear, at Gornia (Walberg 1986). In north central Krete, where Knossos was to emerge, there is little similarity: dark on light linear banding prevails; footed goblets make their appearance.

Middle Minoan I, II and III (c. 2050 – 1675 BCE)

(Evans' "Old Palace" period corresponds with MMIB–MMIIIA.) The rise of the palace culture, of the "old palaces" of Knossos and Phaistos and their new type of urbanized, centralized society with redistribution centers required more storage vessels and ones more specifically suited to a range of functions. In palace workshops, standardization suggests more supervised operations and the rise of elite wares, emphasizing refinements and novelty, so that palace and provincial pottery become differentiated. In the palace workshops, the introduction from the Levant of the potter's wheel in MMIB enabled perfectly symmetrical bodies to be thrown from swiftly-revolving clay. The well-controlled iron-red slip that was added to the color repertory during MMI could be achieved only in insulated closed kilns that were free of oxygen or smoke. New styles emerge at this time: an Incised Style, the tactile Barbotine ware, studded with knobs and cones of applied clay in bands, waves and ridges, sometimes reminiscent of sand-dollar tests and barnacle growth, and the earliest stages of Kamares ware. Spirals and whorls are the favorite motifs of Minoan pottery from EM III onwards (Walberg). A new shape is the straight-sided cylindrical cup.

Burials in undecorated jars (pithoi) make their earliest appearance just before MMI begins and continue into Late Minoan, becoming very rare by LMIII. The jars seems to have been ordinary storage vessels, not purpose-made.

MMIA wares and local pottery imitating them are found at coastal sites in the eastern Peloponnese, though not more widely in the Aegean until MMIB; their influence on local pottery in the nearby Cyclades has been studied by Angelia G. Papagiannopoulou (1991). Shards of MMIIA pottery have been recovered in Egypt and at Ugarit.

Kamares ware

Kamares ware is named for finds in the cave santuary at Kamares, in fact one of the few non-palatial sites where this ware has been found. It is the first of the virtuoso wares of Minoan pottery, though the first expressions of recognizably proto-Kamares decor predate the introduction of the potter's wheel. Finer clay, thrown on the wheel, permitted extravagantly thin bodies, which were covered with a dark-firing slip and exhuberantly painted with slips in white, reds and browns in fluent floral designs, of rosettes or conjoined coiling and uncoiling spirals. The best of thes elite Kamares ware were never equalled in the Bronze Age Aegean. Four stages of Kamares ware were identified by Gisela Walberg (1976), with a "Classic Kamares" palace style sited in MMII, especially in the palace complex of Phaistos. New shapes were introduced, with whirling and radiating motifs.. In MMIIB the increasing use of motifs drawn from nature heralded the decline and end of the Kamares style.

The end of MMIIB is marked ca1750 by the catastrophe, probably an earthquake, that levelled the palaces. In the ensuring MMIII, when the palaces were rebuilt, pottery lost its status as an elite vehicle for artistic expression, though this is the period of Minoan expansion that inspired the Greek tradition of a great Minoan thalassocracy.

Late Minoan pottery, I, II and III (c. 1500 – 1000 BCE)

LMI marks the highwater of Minoan influence throughout the southern Aegean (Peloponnese, Cyclades, Dodecanese, southwestern Anatolia). Late Minoan pottery was being widely exported; it has turned up in Cyprus, the Cylades, Egypt and Mycenae. Fluent movemented designs drawn from flower and leaf forms, painted in reds and black on white grounds predominate, in steady development from Middle Minoan. In LMIB there is a typical all-over leafy decoration, for which first workshop painters begin to be identifiable through their characteristic motifs; as with all Minoan art, no name ever appears. In LMIB the Marine Style also emerges; in this style, perhaps inspired by frescoes, the entire surface of a pot was covered with sea creatures, octopus, fish and dolphins, against a background of rocks, seaweed and sponges. The Marine style was the last purely Minoan style; towards the end of LMIB, all the palaces except Knossos were violently destroyed and many of the villas and towns.

During LMII, though palace pottery at Knossos continued in Floral Style and the Marine Style until a break between LMIIIB and C, Mycenean influence began to be apparent during LMIII, apparent in shapes and styles, such as the practice of confining decor in reserves and bands, emphasizing the base and shoulder of the pot and the movement towards abstraction.

Minoan-Mycenaean

Minoan-Mycenean wares were in use at the partly-rebuilt palace of Knossos In this late manifestation of a "palace style", fluent and spontaneous earlier motifs stiffened and became more geometrical and abstracted. Egyptian motifs like papyrus and lotus are prominent.

Votive figures

Aside from wares, another use of ceramics was to fashion votive objects, which are recovered in Crete's many Minoan cave sanctuaries.

Reference

Preziosi, Donald and Louise A. Hitchcock 1999 Aegean Art and Architecture ISBN 0-19-284208-0

External links

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Dartmouth College: Prehistorical Archaeology of the Aegean website (providing dates used in this article):
Stanford University: Minoan pottery
[http://www.ou.edu/finearts/art/ahi4913/aegeanhtml/minoanpottery1.html University of Oklahoma: Gallery of outstanding Minoan pottery vases, pouring vessels and rhyta.
Doumas Kristos' description of local pottery and Cretan imports from the excavations at Akrothiri (Santorini) (in English)
GiselaWalberg finds little influence between Minoan vase-paintings and glyptic motifs (in English)