Chapter Twenty One - Cryptic Glyptic: Multivalency in Minoan Glyptic Imagery

Summary

Minoan glyptic imagery has been described as problematically ambiguous and has produced conflicting interpretations in scholarship. This chapter demonstrates how categorical classification of glyptic imagery reflects Western taxonomic structures, clustering image identification around central concepts, which both produces and marginalizes “ambiguous” imagery. This way of organizing knowledge conflicts with the fluidity of glyptic images. When organized as networks – rather than categories – of imagery, the “ambiguity” of Minoan glyptic is repositioned as multivalency, where multiple images can be elicited through a single, condensed form that draws on a network of comparanda. This condensed expression is both produced and supported by the physical properties of the glyptic medium, for example, Minoan lentoid and amygdaloid stamp seals can have ambiguous orientation, a quality that can be used to produce multiple images in different orientations. This is supported by the abbreviated forms used in glyptic imagery, which, owing to the lack of specificity through the omission of fine detail, can be readily fused into multivalent images. To situate this discussion within a wider context, this chapter briefly surveys other instances in which multivalent and ambiguous images have been created for a specific purpose, highlighting the possibility that Neopalatial Minoan seal engravers deliberately produced multivalent imagery in glyptic.