Famously Greece also developed a cyclical and tragic counter-current alongside this: the Hesiodic decline narrative, the Stoic ekpyrōsis, the doctrine of eternal recurrence, the Platonic catastrophes of the Timaeus and Laws, the warning against hybris in Pindar and the tragedians and the recurring myth/mytheme of Icarus. Greek culture self-consciously bounded its own proto-futurist sensibility within a system of religious and tragic checks. They imagined human transcendence and warned themselves against it, evolving a double structure where aspiration became entwined with recoil.

My claim here is that Greek proto-scientific and speculative thought cannot be separated from their sophisticated material culture, which encompassed bloomery furnaces, struck coins, geared bronze, surveyed tunnels, ramming triremes, torsion-spring artillery and water-driven keyboards, amongst others. From the the Early Iron Age reorganisation that followed the Mycenaean palatial collapse, roughly 1200–1100 BC, through to the Ptolemaic-Alexandrian synthesis, Greeks and their diaspora (the Black Sea colonies of Olbia, Sinope, Panticapaeum, Magna Graecia, Tarentum/Taras in Apulia and Syracuse in Sicily, Massalia in southern Gaul, Cyrene and the Egyptian-Greek powerhouses of Naucratis and Alexandria) developed a technological culture which integrated theoretical mathematics and practical, sophisticated engineering. We’ll now turn to that culture, looking across multiple interlocking domains, paying attention to the chronology, archaeological evidence, cross-cultural transfers and controversies.

Metallurgy: From Bronze Recovery to the Alloying Sciences

The Greek Dark Ages (roughly 1100-800 BC) can potentially be described as a metallurgical reorganisation. The collapse of the Mycenaean palace economies severed the long-distance copper and tin trade, causing Greek smiths to respond by drawing on reconfigured local and regional ore/smithing networks across the Aegean, Cyprus, the Levant and western Anatolia. By 1050 BC, small local iron industries were widespread, and by approx 900 BC, almost all weapons in grave goods were made of iron. The classic argument made by Anthony M. Snodgrass in The Dark Age of Greece (1971), has been refined by recent Cambridge scholarship on Aegean iron technologies, consolidating the case that this was a genuine ‘iron revolution’. This revolution depended on building subtle, skilful metallurgical knowledge: yes, cold iron is mechanically inferior to bronze, but by mastering carburisation (intentional carbon enrichment, not universally done but the best smiths learnt), quenching and tempering, these smiths produced what is essentially a low-grade steel, capable of matching the qualities of bronze. Edged weapons were therefore available to less elite warriors, and on top of that, bronze was dependent on two separate, long-distance trade routes (and iron was not) meaning the metallurgical revolution was to have profound social consequences for Greece and for hoplite warfare.

Bronze was not abandoned though, rather its production and use became specialised. Chalcis, a settlement on the island of Euboea, boasted this trade, becoming a major bronze-working centre and exporter of the craft by the 8th century. The first western Greek colony at Pithekoussai (founded approx mid-8th century BC) was Euboean in origin. The legendary Roman descriptions of Corinthian bronze, or aes Corinthiacum, has teased generations with coveted, dark-patinated alloys of copper with gold, silver and tin in varying proportions, a sublime possible example of the Greek aesthetic mastery of alloy properties.

Casting by the lost-wax method reached an extraordinary scale and level of refinement (see my previous writing on Greek art), with the Riace bronzes (circa 460-450 BC), the Artemision Zeus and Hellenistic statues such as the Antikythera Youth showcasing indirect casting complete with internal armatures. Furthermore filigree, granulation and gilding appear at Vergina, then across Macedonian and Scythian-Greek workshops in the Black Sea, where Greek goldsmiths worked up to supplying the Scythian elite.

Silver and lead processing was based on a method called cupellation, which is the oxidation of argentiferous lead in a porous hearth, aiming to drive off lead oxide (litharge) and leave behind purified silver. The technique was already well-established (see Bronze Age Aegean and Anatolia) but it reached industrial heights around the southern Attican mines of Laurion, a place of such archaic longevity that Xenophon could not identify its origins in his Ways and Means (355 BC):

It is clear, I presume, to every one that these mines have for a very long time been in active operation; at any rate no one will venture to fix the date at which they first began to be worked.

The integration of the whole process (mining, smelting, cupellation) meant that coinage eventually became the technological pipeline that underwrote Athenian regional power.

Coinage and Monetary Technology

Coinage was an Anatolian invention adopted and transformed by the Greeks. The earliest stamped electrum lumps appear in the record from Lydia in the second half of the 7th century BC (630 BC) under the Mermnad dynasty, the principal mint found at Sardis. Herodotus also credits the Lydians, and the coins themselves, with their Lydian inscriptions, confirm the connection. Electrum‘s natural variability in gold content (spans 65-85%) might appear to us to be a defect, but recent scholarship has argued that the issuer’s monopolistic control over the alloy allowed the state to capture a seigniorage, or issuer’s premium, that buyers could not detect simply by weight or use of a touchstone. King Croesus’ introduction of a bimetallic gold-silver coinage (the Croeseids) around 560 BC was the first documented bimetallic system, its fineness and weight standards survived even his defeat by Cyrus.

Greek cities adopted coinage rapidly: Aegina (earliest stamped ‘stater’ στατήρ had the image of a turtle, created the widely-used Aeginetic standard, 6th century BC), Athens (first the silver Wappenmünzen, then the pure silver owls, with stable Attic standards by approx 510 BC), Corinth, and the Ionian cities. Coinage spread along key colonisation routes: Massalia, Syracuse, Olbia and Panticapaeum (Black Sea), Cyrene. Greek mints introduced two-die striking with engraved obverse and reverse. Die-cutters at Syracuse achieved miniature sculpture, their surviving decadrachms are now considered some of the finest engraving works of antiquity. The technology required hardened bronze or iron dies, struck blanks (flans) cast in moulds and skilfully manipulated to form.

Monetarily, coinage performed three social-technological functions: firstly it standardised value (a precondition for the Greek agora economy and the wage labour seen at Eleusis and the Erechtheion accounts); secondly it underwrote state finance (e.g. the Athenian Laurion silver paid Themistocles’ fleet of 200 triremes in 483 BC); thirdly it became an accepted instrument of statecraft. The Spartan occupation of Decelea, from 413 BC, damaged Athenian access to Laurion, eventually leading to the issuance of emergency bronze/plated coinage in 406-5 BC. Aristophanes’ Frogs (405 BC) records perhaps the first articulation of Gresham’s Law, that bad money drives out good …

She has good and ancient silver, she has good and recent gold.
These are coins untouched with alloys; everywhere their fame is told;
Not all Hellas holds their equal, not all Barbary far and near.
Gold or silver, each well minted, tested each and ringing clear.
Yet, we never use them! Others always pass from hand to hand.
Sorry brass just struck last week and branded with a wretched brand.

The monetary experimentation in Alexandria was both technologically and politically radical. Ptolemy I introduced a sophisticated capital-control regime, one where foreign merchants arriving in Egypt were forced to exchange their coin at royal banks, allowing the crown to pocket the difference in metal value. Ptolemy II attempted to anchor the domestic economy by introducing massive, heavy bronze coins. Finally a real ‘monetary revolution’ began in the 3rd century BC with La Grande Mutation. Facing civil war and a silver shortage, the state uncoupled their currency’s physical weight from its value. They re-tariffed cheap bronze tokens with large face values, beginning a decimal accounting system. It was the ancient world’s foremost example of a closed-loop economy, where a state held enough power to value, issue and accept what was essentially the ancestor of fiat currency.

Naval Technology

Greek shipbuilding was shell-first, meaning that planks were edge-joined by mortise-and-tenon joints, then internal frames inserted afterwards. This produced a stiff, light hull well suited to ramming. Merchant vessels (holkades, gauloi) could carry up to 400 tonnes by the late 4th century, the famous Kyrenia wreck was found to contain perhaps 400 or so amphorae of Rhodian wine and Cypriot almonds.

Warship evolution proceeded from the pentekonter (50-oared, single-banked, around 8th century BC), then the bireme (two banks, 7th century), moving to the trireme (triērēs, three banks). Thucydides credits the Corinthians with first adopting triremes around 700 BC on the Greek mainland, though as with many forms of Mediterranean technology they may be Phoenician in origin. The Athenian trireme was around 37m long, with a 5.5m beam, capable of displacing roughly 40 tonnes, manned by 170 oarsmen arranged in three tiers (thranites, zygites, thalamites) with one man to an oar. One reconstructed trireme (Olympias) from the 1980’s was viable and could reach high speeds, nearly 7 knots in early trials and higher sprint figures in later reporting. Larger Hellenistic polyremes (Ptolemy IV supposedly had a legendary ‘forty’) were not necessarily multi-banked but likely had multiple men per oar.

The embolon (bronze ram), with its three horizontal cutting blades, was the trireme’s key offensive weapon. A good example is the recovered Athlit ram (approx 200 BC, Israel coast), a mind-boggling 465 kg of carefully cast bronze. Greek ships used a single square sail (later added to with the foresail, artemon) which was primarily for transit, not battle. In the same way modern people are surprised the earliest horsemen rode to the battle but fought on foot, so the Greeks sailed from place to place, but deployed the oars when engaging the enemy.

Navigation depended on coastal piloting, references to the stars (the Lesser Bear, Phoenikē, was credited to Phoenician practice, while the Greeks used the Great Bear), wind knowledge and the creation of sail logs or periploi. These sailing manuals/records must have been invaluable, examples include the lost 6th-century BC Massaliote Periplus, which detailed the voyages taken to the French and British coastlines in search of tin. Blue sea navigation was avoided when possible, but the grain run from the Black Sea to Athens crossed large stretches of open water.

Harbour engineering reached an industrial scale at the Piraeus. Dragatsis and Dörpfeld’s excavations in the 1880’s and the recent work of marine archaeologist Bjørn Lovén together revealed the presence of ship sheds (neōsoikoi). These long, narrow (40 × 6m) structures cover roughly 110,000sq m across the three Piraeus basins. Carbon dating places the main phase between 520 and 480 BC, which matches the documented push by Themistocles for Athens to build a powerful navy. At her peak Athens possessed over 300 triremes. If we accept that building a hull took two to three months of skilled work, and each trireme contained roughly 6,000 individual wooden components, then it seems likely that this was the largest industrial production project in the classical world before the Roman Empire. Dry-dock hauling slips, fortified harbour entrances which could be locked down by chains, segregated commercial and military zones - Piraeus had become the prototype of all later naval bases in the Mediterranean.

Hydraulics and Hydrology

In my opinion the single most mind-blowing demonstration of Greek surveying and tunnelling skill is the Tunnel of Eupalinos on Samos. Built roughly between 530-520 BC by an engineer named Eupalinos of Megara, the aqueduct spans an entire kilometre through the solid rock of Mount Kastro. It lies 180m below the summit, a cross-section tunnel of approx 1.8 by 1.8m with a separate water channel cut into the floor. It was created by working from both ends (amphistomon), relying on a rigorous, geometric survey to make them meet accurately. The tunnelling teams met with a horizontal offset of barely a few metres and an astonishing vertical mismatch of just 64 cm. In 2009 a laser-scan survey confirmed an extraordinary 0.6% gradient on the channel. The aqueduct functioned for around 1,100 years.

However, this achievement was not an isolated event. Megara had its own aqueducts, Athens built the Peisistratid Enneakrounos fountain-house in the late 6th century and further monumental public fountain-houses (krenai) could be found in Olympia, Corinth and Cyrene. Large cisterns served the needs of the Acropolis, Lindos and various Hellenic fortresses. Water technology by the late Hellenistic period additionally included the ‘Archimedes screw’, the saqiya (compartmented water-wheel) and the tympanum (drum-wheel). These were standard equipment for irrigation in Egypt and for waste water extraction in Spanish mines, where Roman-period bronze components have been excavated.

Ptolemaic hydraulics in Egypt went further than most. The reclamation of the Fayum under Ptolemy II’s rule added around 1,200 sq km of agricultural land and was recorded for posterity. Water-lifting devices, sluices, dykes and canal locks became extensions of the Greco-fiscal-administrative state. Even the prize jewel, Alexandria herself, depended on a complex freshwater cistern and canal system fed from the Canopic branch of the Nile. In many ways these water management projects were more far-sighted and ingenious than today’s hydrological time-bombs, but that is for another day.

Agriculture and Land Management

Agricultural technology in Greece advanced slowly but surely over the centuries. The Mediterranean trio of wheat/barley, olives and grapes, had been established back in the Bronze Age, but the Archaic and Classical periods saw more intensive and organised production. In Hesiod’s Works and Days (700 BC-ish) the writer records two-field fallow rotation and the use of lunar timing. By the 4th century, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and Theophrastus’s two works (Historia Plantarum and De Causis Plantarum) record dozens of crop varieties, grafting techniques such as inarching, cleft and bud, methods of seed selection, soil typology and the practice of planned manuring.

Olive presses evolved from simple basin-and-trough installations through lever-and-weight presses to the screw press. Wine production used basin presses (the lēnos) and the familiar treading. Where Greece did push for innovation was in the storage and transport and wine, which included the pithos (a large fixed jar) for cold storing and the amphora for shipping. Amphora typology is a tedious but well-tested and rigorous tool within modern archaeology. Using their stamped handles (Rhodian, Knidian, Thasian, or Chiot) scholars have been able to map trade flows. Production centres at Knossos, Keratokampos, Ierapetra, and Achladokampos in Crete have been identified and researched. The Cretan and Cycladic data reveal that Hellenistic wine and oil production was organised on industrial estates whose output was ultimately tied to the symposium and to military supply economies.

Terracing was labour-intensive but became central to making the hilly and rough Aegean countryside cultivable. The practice is well attested from the Archaic period onwards, recent geoarchaeology in Boeotia and the Methana peninsula has dated Greek terrace systems to the late Archaic and Classical periods. Slave labour was crucial for large estate agriculture, and for the latifundia model exported to Sicily and Italy, but the small, free and virtuous citizen farm remained a moral ideal of the Greek polis. Similar tensions can be seen in other periods of overseas expansion, such as European agriculture and land holding in the Americas. The Greek institution of the symposium is often imagined and described in its social context, but the symposium economy was very important. Again echoing periods of modernity, elites drinking premium alcohol was a major demand-side driver of viticulture, as well as ceramics, metalwork and human entertainment. The latter also had upstream impacts on the slave economy, and in training and providing work for courtiers, musicians and artisan traders.

Mining and Boring

The previously mentioned Laurion silver mines in southern Attica are amongst the best documented industrial complex of the classical world. Worked from the Late Neolithic for copper and galena, they were then systematically exploited from the late 6th century BC under Peisistratos. By 483 BC, mining had reached around 100 m depth (according to Aristotle). A well-timed discovery of a rich vein at Maronea ended up funding Themistocles’ fleet, allowing Athens to draw around 100 talents of silver (estimated 2.6 tonnes) to build 100 ships according to Aristotle, or 200 according to Herodotus, for the Persian War. Both Aristotle (Athēnaiōn Politeia) and Demosthenes (Against Pantaenetus) record that the Athenian state owned the mines and leased them to citizens for 3 or 10 year terms.

At its peak an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 slaves worked in the Laurion complex. Thucydides records 20,000 deserting to Spartan-occupied Decelea during the late Peloponnesian War (413 BC). Annual production at max is estimated at 20 tonnes of silver and 8000 tonnes of lead. Slave life expectancy in the mines was about five years, and archaeological remains at the Thorikos and Agrileza barrack complexes corroborate their brutal chained, naked and branded conditions described by ancient sources.

Mine and gallery ventilation was achieved by pairs of shafts at opposite ends of a working area, with fires lit at one shaft to draw a draft inside. Light was provided by oil lamps, and thousands have been recovered. Ore was hauled in baskets up the shafts, then crushed with mortar stones and processed in washeries. These were large, water cycling installations which can still be seen today at Agrileza and Thorikos. The galena was smelted in furnaces which required vast amounts of charcoal, ultimately leading to the deforestation of all Attica.

Other mining centres include Siphnos (gold and silver, was exhausted by the late 6th century after a flood), Thasos (silver, gold) and Pangaion in Thrace. Pangaion was exploited first by local kings and then by Philip II of Macedon, reportedly yielding 1,000 talents annually and funding his army. Macedonian gold from this source flowed through the whole Hellenistic monetary system. Aside from silver and gold, the Greeks also discovered and categorised many mineral products at Laurion. Some 265 minerals are recorded, and Greek miners could empirically distinguish cinnabar, ochre, pyrite and sphalerite, amongst others.

The tunnelling expertise of engineers like Eupalinos and of Macedonian engineers skilled in siege warfare was rooted in the same body of practical knowledge as deep-shaft mineral mining. Greek mining engineers were among the most technically demanding craftsmen of antiquity, and sought after for this combination of experience, skill and practical knowledge.

Mechanics and Gears

Surely the crowning evidence for the sophistication of Hellenistic mechanics is the world-famous Antikythera Mechanism, recovered from a shipwreck in 1901.

Read more

Archaeological science, like all science, is a function of the past and present. Past ideas and present concerns. Since the 1950’s it has undergone numerous shifts in perspective, veering from skepticism to active politicisation. I want to examine archaeology today with two values in mind, the two I believe vie with one another for the throne of importance - Truth and Democracy. Truth feels somewhat of an obvious choice for an academic discipline - but democracy? - since when has this been the supreme value outside of politics? In a sense the two are connected, but we must first look to the past to understand why.

Impious Renaissance

Chancing upon physical objects which clearly belonged to an older era is one of the confusing pleasures of being a thinking ape, one which can mentally project some time and place which is not the current moment. Fossils, animal bones, stone tools, pottery sherds, even entire ruins or buildings, all have been found and used in some way. A common reaction is to leave these places alone, lest evil spirits or misfortunes attached to them become hostile - even today we feel glimmers of this sentiment with tropes like ‘the abandoned insane asylum’ or old burial ground at night. Nascent antiquarian stirrings began in the most developed old civilisations - the Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese, Greek - all of which sought magico-religious power through manipulating old artefacts, or even resurrecting forgotten temples. Both the Chinese and the Greeks recognised a progression in change through the materials: older forms of pottery, bronze, iron, and so on. They also recognised cultural continuity. Later peoples would explain the existence of flint arrowheads and axes as the work of natural forces, thunderstones, or as proof of fairies, elves or other small beings.

It wasn’t until the Renaissance that we saw the genuine creation of a self-conscious concept of antiquity, which stands apart in all its glory as a separate and distinct epoch of human civilisation, one with continuity in the form of the Roman church, but also in law. Unearthing the pagan world changed the medieval world, the rediscovery of artworks, architecture, medicine, philosophy, military history, languages, poetry, literature… a searing vitality which coursed through Europe and altered its destiny. Antiquarianism nurtured a seed of disinterested scholarly research, overturning older approaches to written history. For example, when the Italian Renaissance humanist Polydore Vergil was invited by England’s Henry VII to write a history of his nation, Vergil began by demolishing all the chronicles - the Arthurian mythology, the imaginations of monks and the unverifiable royal pedigrees stemming from Athens and Egypt.

Men of antiquarian taste rushed to fill the historical gaps, supported by governmental initiatives to protect monuments and build collections of artefacts. 17th century Sweden, Denmark and England, amongst others, rebuilt their national stories through secular and progressively objective pursuits. With the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and European contact with non-literate peoples all over the world, antiquarianism had to move from a study of antiquity to the study of pre-history. Evolutionary thought provided a much clearer non-Biblical model for explaining the riddle of how some cultures were still using stone tools when European ships appeared on the horizon. Science was tied to progress, which was itself born of a vision of European Man, astride the globe, improving and driving it forwards. Archaeology was midwived into existence in response to the growing problem of ancient human remains and artefacts - stone tools in France, ancient skulls in Germany.

The early functions of archaeology

I would suggest that archaeology-proper in the 19th century had two main functions:

• To determine the age and chronology of mankind and its stages

• To understand the evolutionary forces which led to social and cultural change/progress

The development of a self-contained, systematic study of prehistory, as distinguished from the antiquarianism of earlier times, occurred as two distinct movements, the first of which began in the early nineteenth century and the second in the 1850s. The first originated in Scandinavia with the invention of a technique for distinguishing and dating archaeological finds that made possible the comprehensive study of prehistory. This development marked the beginning of prehistoric archaeology, which soon was able to take its place alongside classical and other text-based archaeologies as a significant component in the study of human development using material culture. The second wave, which began in France and England, pioneered the study of the Palaeolithic period and added vast, hitherto unimagined, time depth to human history.

-A History of Archaeological Thought (2006) Bruce Trigger

The concept of different ages was not new: Hesiod, Plato, Ovid, Virgil, Lucretius, Michele Mercati, Bernard de Montfaucon, Nicolas Mahudel and many others had developed models of the ‘ages of man’ - often linked to physical materials such as gold, bronze, iron, stone.

It took however, the diligence and hard work of a Danish scholar - Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) - to properly ground the three-stage model in reality. Thomsen was fortunate and canny enough to realise that Danish archaeologists had kept records of what artefacts were found on what site and what excavation/hoard/tomb. Knowing this he could carefully assemble a chronology of artefacts and demonstrate that they did indeed appear to process from stone to bronze to iron - a system we still teach children today. Thomsen’s work was made more difficult by the realisation that stone and bronze tools were still made during the iron age, so he patiently classified each type of object, noting when certain bronze tools appeared with iron ones, and which did not. His relative dating system was revolutionary.

Almost immediately the debate became a question of evolution vs introduction. Did these new technologies develop in Scandinavia, or were they brought there through waves of migration? The Scandinavians were unequivocal - change is a result of outside interference. This question has never been satisfactorily solved, and it likely never will. The evolutionist looks at the two forces of change - independent invention and diffusion - and adds migration, borrowing and parallel invention. Did two identical forms of kinship systems separated by oceans reflect a common ancestor or independent innovation? These were the types of arguments that have raged ever since.

Indeed, Lowie's highest accolades are reserved for Tylor's "serene willingness to weigh evidence" for and against diffusion in the following cases: Pan-European paleolithic tools; the piston bellows of Madagascar and Indonesia; North American and Old World pottery; the Old and New World bow and arrow; the Australian, African, and American theory that disease is caused by an intrusive stone or bone; the game of parcheesi as played in Mexico and India; and various myths found in both the Old and New Worlds.

-The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968) Harris

Another question lurking in the background here was psychic unity. Did all of Mankind share the same mental and psychological substrate? If so, then we can expect to see convergences of objects, social organisation and motivations.

By co-operating with geologists and paleontologists, early archaeologists developed and built models of prehistory which came into sharp conflict with the orthodox Biblical timeframe. Deep time was unsettling and exciting, prompting serious questions about how Man had developed from a lowly rude stone-wielding savage into the contemporary European middle class (to flatter archaeology’s main audience of the day). These questions have never been resolved - dating stuff, understanding the linear sequence of events and explaining how and why things changed?

Race, Nationalism and Culture - archaeology’s next function

The Napoleonic era helped provoke a backlash against Enlightenment values. The rise of romanticism and ethnic nationalism followed from French ambitions to rule Europe, each small province in previously multiethnic and multilingual regions began clamouring for independence. Alongside this the scientific community began to pay credence to the idea that Mankind was not all the same. Religious teachings about the Fall and split of Man were steadily replaced with competing theories about whether the different races were different species, whether all men had sprung from the same stock, or whether God had designed some other system of origins. European contact with the entire world by the beginning of the 19th century meant that, for the first time, anthropologists and doctors were looking at the total diversity of humanity - from Inuit to Mapuche, Maori to Ainu, Khoisan to Amerindian - and struggling to make sense of it. Darwinism provided a perfect framework for overlaying previous ideas of cultural evolution with biological ones. Biology and culture went hand-in-hand, and culminated in European man - the ladder of civilisation also mirrored the development of the body.

Read more

Some of the oldest pieces of circumsta…

Read more

Read more

the body was central to the visual culture of ancient Greece, reflecting an obsession with physical beauty, integrity, dynamism, and power​

-Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece (1997) A. Stewart

One could argue that the Greeks invented the human body. A civilisational moment in the human story where the body becomes idealised, trained, refined, sculpted and moulded - reaching for the divine - as opposed to the attitudes typical of elsewhere such as casual nudeness for men and women of all ages, or a shameful seclusion of the body in clothes. Debates over whether Greek art represents something real or imaginary have raged since the time of the Romans, and it is hard to point to another style and period of art which has had more cultural impact.

Personally I think the Greeks were well aware that their statues did not represent most people, nor did they want them to. These images were a tightrope, between man and the gods, between the human form broken under the weight of the world and the human form embodying the values of youthful, violent, freedom.

Why the body? What did it look like?

It was not until Egypt that art broke its enslavement to nature…

In Egypt is forged the formalistic Apollonian line that will end in modern cinema, master genre of our century. Egypt invented glamour, beauty as power and power as beauty. Egyptian aristocrats were the first Beautiful People. Hierarchy and eroticism fused in Egypt, making a pagan unity the west has never thrown off…

This masculine hardness is an abolition of female interiority. There are no warm womb-spaces in aristocratic Egyptian art. The body is a shaft of frozen Apollonian will. The flatness of Egyptian wall-painting and relief serves the same function, obliterating woman’s inner darkness. Every angle of the body is crisp, clean, and sunlit. Sagging maternal breasts of the Willendorf kind usually appear, oddly enough, only on male fertility gods like Hapi, the Nile god. Egypt is the first to glamourize small breasts. The breast as vernal adornment rather than rubbery milk sac, outline rather than volume: Apollonian Egypt made the first shift of value from femaleness to femininity, an advanced erotic art form.

- Sexual Personae (1990) C. Paglia

Camille Paglia describes in the second chapter of her magnum opus Sexual Personae, how the ancient Egyptians gave birth to the ‘western eye’, which was an Apollonian fixation with lines, surfaces, symmetry and hardness. The earliest Greek artworks which depict the human form are clearly influenced by this style, in what art historian Ernst Gombrich describes as ‘a Great Awakening’ and ‘the Greek Revolution’. The freestanding kouroi statues (male youths) show us a vision of the young male form, part way idealised, part following the rules of Egyptian sculpture. Diamonds sweep outwards from the central omphalos, and the body is proportioned unnaturally, with large staring eyes. In the hands of the Greeks it takes several centuries for this to become more natural. Between the 7th and 5th centuries BC the kouroi are swallowed up by the Greek expressive imagination and become life-like, even moving towards an uneven posture with remarkable skill.

One striking feature that should be highlighted though, is that the kouroi were virtually always naked - unlike their Egyptian counterparts - which tells us that Greek priorities when depicting human bodies emphasised nudity from the outset.

The Greeks discovered in the nude two embodiments of energy, which lived on throughout European art almost until our own day. They are the athlete and the hero; and from the beginning they were closely connected with one another.

-The Nude : A Study of Ideal Art (1957) K. Clark

The Greeks felt so strongly about nudity that it was thought to have a magical effect (c.f. the apotropaic use of the phallos, gestures against the evil eye, etc.). Their athletes were thought to be protected in some way by their nudity.

-Etruscan Dress (1975) L. Bonfante

The origins of nudity amongst warriors and athletes is contested, even within Greek sources, and they include: Acanthus the Lacedaemonian, Orsippos of Megara and orders by the Athenian archon Hippomenes. One particular niche type of kouroi often found in eastern Greece were depicted with a draped khiton-like garment, around 40 examples exist, but these stand out as exceptions to the rule.

Another famously enigmatic motif within this period of artwork is the ‘Archaic smile’, that aloof, relaxed smile on the faces of all the kouroi. Many theories exist as to the meaning of this facial expression, one which serves to de-individualise each statue, including the notion that it was simply the easiest face to carve on stone at that time. I prefer Richard Neer’s explanation:

Read more

This chapter advances the hypothesis that the Little People myths and leg ends were carried to various islands of the Indo-Pacific as an integral part of the voyagers’ cultural package in the process…

Read more

“Putting human remains on display is unethical, especially when no consent has been given,” she added. “I think removing the display of these items ultimately changes the culture, goes some way to lo…

Read more

Read more

-Hohlenstein-Stadel and the Evolution of Human Conceptual Thought (2009) Wynn et al

In the last piece I wrote about Palaeolithic artwork, we looked at the Chauvet cave ‘Panel of Horses’ - a remarkable study of horses painted onto a prepared surface in a limestone cave around 30,000 years ago. The panel is striking for its naturalism and attention to detail, even more so when you consider the artist had to rely on their memory. This time we’ll look at the opposite type of Palaeolithic artwork. Rather than a static painting of natural phenomena, we instead have a portable ivory figurine representing something more ‘unnatural’.

The Löwenmensch or Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel is amongst the most famous Palaeolithic figurines, made more unusual by the fact that it has been slowly and painstakingly constructed over many decades from pieces of disintegrating and splintered ivory from the same deposition site. The Hohlenstein cave is located in the Swabian Jura mountain range in southern Germany. The area contains multiple limestone caves of incredible archaeological significance which have yielded numerous important artworks, including the Vogelherd horse and the Hohle Fels venus figurine. Hohlenstein itself has layers dating back to the Neanderthals, running through the Neolithic. The Lion-man sculpture was first identified in 1939, after excavations under Robert Wetzel and Otto Völzing. Numerous splintered pieces of ivory were recovered from the same context and then placed into storage. Thankfully their careful preservation meant that archaeologist Joachim Hahn was able to examine them in 1969 and reconstruct them into a figurine, measuring 31cm in height and displaying a curious hybridity between a human and an animal.

Further excavations, restorations and additions have led to the Lion-man being adjusted and further completed: in 1982, 1989 and between 2012-2013. Additional bones were found nearby which dated the layer the figure was found to between 35,000 and 41,000 years ago. This places it within the Aurignacian culture, one of the earliest Homo sapien peoples in Europe, and the first to fully colonise the region whilst the Neanderthals were disappearing. Unlike the Neanderthals, the Aurignacians developed a sophisticated art culture of animal and human figurines, naturalistic cave paintings and symbolic engraved artifacts.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

In 1915 a Danish peat cutter uncovered the body of an adult male, along with a wooden club and some pig bones. No doubt it wasn’t the first ancient thing he had discovered, since the bogs and peat marshes of northwest Europe were, and still are, brimming with archaeological finds. This skeleton was dubbed the Vittrup Man, a moniker to sit comfortably alongside the Tollund Man, the Koelbjerg Man and the Lindow Man. Bog bodies are an unusually popular archaeological artefact, no doubt due to the morbid combination of their leathery faces and typically violent deaths. The Vittrup Man was not considered to be anything special, until a Finnish conservation expert noticed one day that his skull was unusually archaic looking. The resulting flurry of work that came from this observation was published in February this year, under the title - Vittrup Man–The life-history of a genetic foreigner in Neolithic Denmark. 

Read more

Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (1996) Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire

The three authors of the above quote were the first human beings to enter through the entrance of Chauvet cave, hidden away amongst the Cevennes and Rhone valleys at Vallon Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche, France. Once inside they discovered the most breathtaking of images, retreating away from them in the darkness, covering the walls whilst the bones of cave bears crunched beneath their feet. One of the many beautiful panels of images they found has become known as the Panel of Horses, and stands up with the Ghent Altarpiece and the Last Supper as famous artworks one ought to know about.

But Palaeolithic art does not receive the same kind of treatment as later art, and its study is confined to a handful of specialists in academic research. On the one hand this makes sense, since it may not be accurate to call it ‘art’, with all the connotations of the observer, the artist, the panoply of functions which we ascribe to art. But on the other hand more people should learn about and appreciate these extraordinary images. So here it is, the Panel of Horses from Chauvet Cave, painted circa 30,000 years ago.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more