Book contents
- Minoan Zoomorphic Culture
- Minoan Zoomorphic Culture
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- One Life among the Animalian in Bronze Age Crete and the Southern Aegean
- Two Craftiness and Productivity in Bodily Things
- Three Stone Poets
- Four Likeness and Integration among Extraordinary Creatures
- Five Singular, Seriated, Similar
- Six Moving toward Life
- Concluding Thoughts
- References
- Index
Five - Singular, Seriated, Similar
Helmets, Shields and Ikria as Intuitive Animalian Things
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2024
- Minoan Zoomorphic Culture
- Minoan Zoomorphic Culture
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- One Life among the Animalian in Bronze Age Crete and the Southern Aegean
- Two Craftiness and Productivity in Bodily Things
- Three Stone Poets
- Four Likeness and Integration among Extraordinary Creatures
- Five Singular, Seriated, Similar
- Six Moving toward Life
- Concluding Thoughts
- References
- Index
Summary
entities stand as crystallizations of a distinctly Aegean manner of animalian compositeness that is highly intuitive in its integration. These entities – the boar’s tusk helmet, ox-hide shield and ikrion (ship cabin) – embody this dynamic in an arrant fashion, since, while each is prominently animalian and bodily, they do not themselves take the shapes of animal physiques. Instead, they brought novel, conventional object-forms to animalian presences in the Aegean. By not standing as animals themselves, they starkly draw out the potent relational dynamics that could be realized between creatures, and between creatures and things. Discussion ultimately concerns the added complexity introduced to the statuses of these entities when rendered in movable representational media like glyptic and painted ceramics; particular attention comes to their frequent rendering in series. While seriation is often read as simplifying something’s status to the merely ornamental, I argue, instead, that articulation of shields, helmets and ikria in series imbued them with a peculiar, complex dynamism.
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- Minoan Zoomorphic CultureBetween Bodies and Things, pp. 246 - 309Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024