Other LH III
Figural Pottery

Throughout the area of Schliemann’s excavation-south of Grave Circle A, as well as in Wace’s trench beside the Lion Gate, there appeared vast quantities of ornamental LH III B-C pottery fragments. One system of decorating the LH III C pottery from that area (in fact, throughout the Mycenaean empire) is the “Close Style,” a term which art historians use to describe compact designs arranged in friezes of water fowl, rosettes, triangles, loops, semi-circles and other motifs, which fill all the exposed surface area of the pots. Lacy recently found it “interesting to notice that the same phenomenon occurred again four hundred years later in the profusion of ornaments” that covered the so-called Dipylon pottery of the eighth century.1 It is even more interesting that the individual motifs on the Close Style vases, as in the case of the Warrior Vase, find their most striking parallels to designs on the seventh-century “Orientalizing” pottery of Greece, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Sicily, Italy and the Eastern Aegean. That interest heightens when we recall that at a number of excavations throughout that same area (including Wace’s trench by the Lion Gate) eighth-seventh century pottery immediately overlay, was mixed with, or even lay beneath LH III B-C ware.2

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a number of Aegean specialists believed that Mycenaean civilization immediately preceded the seventh century B.C., but because of the discovery of Late Helladic (soon followed by Minoan) remains was so fresh, they had little other than the better-known works of the first millennium with which to compare them. Egyptologists noted that the earliest Mycenaean artifacts in Grave Circle A corresponded to the early Eighteenth Dynasty; Flinders Petrie found a large quantity of LH III A - early LH III B pottery in Pharaoh Akhnaten’s short-lived capital of Akhetaten in Egypt; and excavators outside Egypt began finding Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasty objects beside Mycenaean ware throughout the Levant and the Aegean. At Mycenae itself archaeologists discovered a number of Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptian objects, including some which bear the cartouches of Pharaoh Amenhotep II, Amenhotep III and his wife. Queen Tiy.3

Aegean archaeologists, confronted with Egyptian evidence, had to reassess their dates for Mycenaean culture. “Vehement disputes” erupted between those accepting Egyptian reckoning, and those challenging it as 500-700 years too early,4 some of which early controversies Velikovsky has chronicled above for Olympia, Tiryns, Enkomi and Mycenae. Those who rejected the Egyptian scheme usually branded the New Kingdom exports to the Aegean as centuries-old heirlooms.5 That explanation was weak for a number of reasons it assumed that the Mycenaeans only collected 500-700-year-old Egyptian artifacts to the complete exclusion of Egyptian items produced in their own day; it did not explain depictions of Mycenaean objects in Eighteenth-Dynasty murals; and it completely failed to explain the presence of LH pottery in bona fide Eighteenth Dynasty contexts in Egypt itself. None of those championing the heirloom theory even dared to consider that the very basis for dating the New Kingdom of Egypt might be incorrect. Cecil Torr was one Aegean specialist who did question the Egyptian chronological scheme,6 but Egyptologists countered with strong and at times unfair retorts,7 and Torr gained no appreciable following.

Most other Aegean prehistorians, realizing that the Late Helladic Period had to be as early as the Eighteenth-Nineteenth Dynasties of Egypt, and accepting the absolute dates furnished by the Egyptologists, pushed the beginning of the Mycenaean Age into the mid-second millennium B.C. Many, who felt that the inception of the period had to be that old, still wanted the end of the era to last long into the first millennium, and thereby connect directly with the similar products of the eighth-sixth centuries B.C. Beloch, and even Petrie who, through his discoveries and his writings was largely responsible for pushing back LH I-LH III A/ early LH III B to the sixteenth-fourteenth centuries, still had the remainder of the Mycenaean Age last into the eighth century.8

The LH III BC figural pottery, more than any other Mycenaean product, seemed to flow directly into the seventh-century ware of the Greek world. Since archaeologists agreed that Protogeometric and Geometric pottery also preceded the seventh century, many envisioned an overlap of LH III and Geometric styles, just as Böhlau, Wide and their followers had proposed a 500-year-earlier overlap of MH and LH styles. Furtwängler, one of the great pioneers in the study of pottery decoration was among that school’s foremost proponents.9 When further excavation revealed still more New Kingdom Egyptian material alongside the youngest Mycenaean vases, and showed that there was hardly enough LH III BC pottery to last from ca. 1350-700 B.C., art historians had to abandon the notion that LH III co-existed with geometric ware as late as the eighth-seventh century in Greece itself.

Since the latest Mycenaean vases still resembled so closely 8th-7th century ones, and with Greece no longer a possible area of continuity, they postulated that somewhere in the far-flung Mycenaean empire, outside of the mainland, LH III pottery continued that late. They looked to islands like Sicily, Aegina, Melos, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus and the east coast of Turkey as places where the tradition could have survived no matter what occurred in Greece proper.10 Little by little, exploration of those areas revealed the same pattern as in Greece itself, with LH III C dying out by the late eleventh century, if not earlier still.11

According to Greek tradition, most of those places, like the Greek mainland itself, fell prey to Dorian invaders, whom early archaeologists - as well as some modern ones - have blamed for the obliteration of Mycenaean culture. Of all the places on the fringe of the Mycenaean world to which scholars looked for centuries-long retention of Mycenaean life and art, Cyprus afforded a unique setting for the continuation of Mycenaean figural art, as both early and modern excavators have hypothesized.12 It never fell victim to the Dorians;13 it imported tremendous quantities of LH III pottery, and during the LH III C period it received numerous Mycenaean colonists, including skilled artisans steeped in the art of their homeland;14 it was far enough away from the Aegean centers to escape the turmoil which they encountered, and near enough Phoenicia to share in its presumed prosperity; its people were extremely conservative, reflecting many features of Mycenaean culture well into the eighth-seventh centuries;15 its late eighth-seventh century pottery shows some close similarities to LH III C shapes and especially decoration;16 and throughout the period between the end of LH III in Greece and the eighth century, Cyprus enjoyed a “special relationship” with the Aegean world, importing and exporting finished products (including pottery), and influencing the pottery shapes and decoration of Greece.17

Despite all those positive factors, Cyprus, for some reason not fully understood, followed the same pattern as the rest of the Mycenaean world at the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age. It, too, suffered its own long period of destructions, abandonments, cultural desolation, archaeological obscurity, and historical darkness.18 P. Dikaios once claimed that its Iron Age ware, which scholars originally felt would continue the LH III tradition for centuries, in fact, made its appearance suddenly on the island, showing little connection with, and no evolution from the Late Bronze Age ware, which it supposedly superceded immediately. Even those who reject his opinion do not view it as a continuation of figural LH III.19 Dikaios and others (including his critics) noted some instances where Cypriote Iron Age ware, like its counterpart in Greece, seems to have bypassed Late Bronze Age ceramics, resembling instead 500-year-older Middle Bronze Age pottery.20

Since countless authorities have long noted, and still note, that the late eighth-seventh century pottery of Greece, Sicily, Aegina, Melos, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus and eastern Anatolia seems a direct continuation of LH III BC shapes and decoration;21 since they have not found artistic continuity in any of those areas; and since they see too many close resemblances for the similarities to be merely “fortuitous,”22 they view the phenomenon as a “renaissance.”23 Even so, with ca. 400 years separating the last LH III C figural ware from the earliest return to that bygone style, they need a mechanism to explain the revival. Since no corner of the Greek world kept the style alive during those centuries, some have conjectured that the Mycenaean ceramic and decorative traditions passed beyond the Greek world to Phoenicia, which provided the required continuity, and finally sent the Greek products, along with some Levantine accretions, in a “backwash” to their place of origin hundreds of years later. That theory is extremely popular24 and explains why art historians refer to seventh-century Aegean ware with its Levantine and renascent Mycenaean elements as “Orientalizing.”

The Levant did receive quite a bit of LH III pottery, and made its own imitation of LH III C shapes and decoration (the so-called Philistine ware);25 it did send Oriental products (including the alphabet) to Greece in the ninth-seventh centuries; and it did inspire, some of the decoration found on seventh-century Greek pottery. Between the Mycenaean Age and the ninth century, when Greece was undergoing a Dark Age, literary sources give a much brighter picture for Phoenicia. A Twenty-first Dynasty document from Egypt, which the accepted scheme places in the eleventh century,26 indicates a very strong position for contemporary Lebanon; the Bible portrays tenth-century Phoenicia as an independent land, from which Kings David and Solomon purchased lumber and hired seafarers, stone masons, carpenters and a master craftsman. 27 Phoenicia therefore seemed an ideal place to foster LH III pottery until the seventh century.

The facts are that the Levant did not export painted pottery to seventh-century Greece; LH III shapes and decoration made only a very small impact on the Levantine ceramic industry as a whole} and even in Philistia, LH III C-type pottery did not last as long as it did in Greece itself—none of which helps the survival theory for the Levant any more than at all the other places suggested over the last century. Bothered by those facts some scholars, who still favor the theory, propose that Near Eastern metalwork, ivory carvings and decorated fabrics kept the designs (if not the pot shapes) alive over those centuries.28 For continuity of decorative ivories and metalware the situation in the Levant presents as big an obstacle as in Greece (and as big a source of consternation), since there is no evidence of either product from ca. 1200 to 900 B.C.29 The only Levantine medium for continuity that is left is patterned fabric, which several people now see as the most likely source for LH III motifs’ survival. While there certainly was ornamental cloth, and it could have preserved some LH III decoration, it lends itself more readily to geometrical patterns than to the curvilinear, naturalistic ornaments and figures of LH III C and seventh-century ware. Still, if one must limit oneself to only one medium for 400 years of continuous patterning, and disregards its nonappearance in other media, Greece is as probable a candidate as Phoenicia;30 in any instance, the case is completely unproveable, since all the cloth has vanished, and one can only speculate about its possible ornamentation. Yet another problem with Phoenicia, as the source of, retaining, then returning LH III decoration, is that some “Mycenaean” elements begin to appear in eighth-century Greece, before there are any signs of Oriental influence on Greek art; additionally many of the curvilinear motifs and naturalistic figures (especially human) found on seventh-century “Orientalizing” ware, and most reminiscent of the LH III C style, did not come from the Levant, but followed the same course as did the 500-year-earlier decorations, evolving directly from the stiffer forms of native Greek ornament which immediately preceded them.31 Despite the popularity of the notion of a Phoenician link to explain the close similarities of two sets of Aegean vases now dated half a millennium apart, there is still no evidence that the Levant fared any better than did Cyprus or Greece in continuing the LH III artistic tradition until the seventh century.

As an alternative to the still-popular hypothesis of survival, other scholars have postulated a native revival, whereby the Greeks of the late eighth-seventh centuries found 500-year-old vases, liked what they saw, and imitated some of the shapes and much of the ornamentation. 32 Such rediscoveries certainly fit the numerous cases where the later Greeks seem to have returned to cities, houses, wells, palaces, tombs and cult places supposedly abandoned for nearly half a millennium.33 Still, one had to explain why only then, and at no time during the previous 500 years did the Greeks decide to return to those palaces and copy the bygone art. There is a popular notion, to which we shall return that the later Greeks, hearing Homer’s epics, gained a new pride in their heritage, and consciously sought out the relics of the Trojan War heroes.34 Taking that antiquarian devotion one step further, some observers have proposed that the later Greeks recognized the LH III BC ware in those places as belonging to the “Age of Heroes,” and copied it to strengthen their ties of identity with their forebears.35 K. de Vries has challenged that view on the reasonable that the eighth-seventh-century Greeks would not have been knowledgeable enough to identify the particular type of pottery used in the Heroic Age after so long a gap.36

C.G. Starr recently called the similarities of late eighth-seventh-cerntury wares to LH III BC pottery “particularly puzzling and intriguing.”37 There have been several attempts to explain that phenomenon in terms of a fifth-century revival or survival, but none stands up to careful scrutiny. Some 75 years ago C.C. Edgar, who recognized that seventh-century ware resembled LH III C, just as eleventh-century Protogeometric resembled sixteenth-century Middle Bronze ware, felt that somehow the two revivals, after “obscure” 500-year gaps, followed the same pattern, arid probably had the same explanation, whatever it happened to be.38 Wide, Böhlau, Dörpfeld, Furtwängler and others, who favored survivals rather than revivals, sought to explain the similarities by synchronizing the Geometrical and Mycenaean styles, but they also ran afoul of 500 years.39 While I would not equate Middle Helladic with Protogeometric or LH III C with Orientalizing ware, since each group does have very distinctive shapes and designs which the other lacks, I would point out that, under a dating system which has eliminated 500 years, the early idea of co-existing styles would explain close similarities, which, under the current chronological framework, merely puzzle and intrigue.


References

  1. Lacy, (1967), p. 223.

  2. Cf. above “The Entrance to the Citadel,” ns. 8-13.

  3. J.D.S. Pendlebury, Aegyptiaca (Cambridge, 1930), pp. 53-57. More recently, see Hankey-Warren, (1974).

  4. Demargne, (1964), p. 8. 

  5. E.g. A.S. Murray, Excavations in Cyprus (London, 1900), pp. 21-24; D.G. Hogarth. Excavations at Ephesus (London, 1908). p. 242. 

  6. C. Torr, Memphis and Mycenae (Cambridge, 1896).

  7. E.g., H. Hall, (1901), pp. 56-59 (to which see Torr’s response in his review of Hall’s book in The Classical Review 16 (1902), pp. 182-187 (esp. p. 187). 

  8. References in Tsountas-Manatt, (1897), p. 321, n. 1. 

  9. A Furtwängler, “Die Bronzefunde aus Olympia and deren Kunstgeschichtliche Bedeutung,” Berlin Abhandlungen 4 (1879), pp. 45-47 (reprinted in Kleine Schriften I (Munich, 1911), pp. 373-375; F.Dümmler, “Zu den Vasen aus Kameiros,” JdI, 6 (1891), pp. 270-271; Murray, (1900), p. 23; Hall, (1901), p. 36, n. 1; cf. Demargne (1964, p. 271) and Cook (1972, pp. 310, 312-313) for modern comments. 

  10. Cook, loc. cit.; Hall, (1901), pp. 36, 45, 62-63, III, 132, 137, 221-222, 229, 246, 255 n. 1, 259-260, 264-265, 274, 279, 283; A. Evans, “A Mycenaean Treasure from Aegina,” JHS,13 (1892-3) pp. 224, 226. 

  11. Snodgrass, (1971), pp. 134-135. 

  12. H. Walters, “On Some Antiquities of the Mycenaean Age Recently Acquired By the British Museum,” JHS, 17 (1897), pp. 63-64, 77; Hall, (1901), pp. 36, 63, III, 132, 137, 221, 229, 264-265; More recently, cf. P. Amandry, “Plaques d’or de Delphes,” Ath. Mitt, 77 (1962), p. 54, and C. Berard, Eretria III (Bern, 1970), pp. 42-43; cf. ns. 15-16 below. 

  13. Hall, (1901), p. 221; V. Karageorghis, Cyprus (London, 1970), p. 67.

  14. Karageorghis, ibid., pp. 61-64; H. Catling, “Cyprus in the Late Bronze Age,” CAH3 II. 2 (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 198-201, 207-213; Snodgrass, (1971), pp. 29, 314, 365.

  15. H Karageorghis, ibid., p. 67; idem, “Notes on Some Mycenaean Survivals in Cyprus During the First Millennium B.C.,” Kadmos, I (1962), pp. 72-77; idem, (1967a), pp. 167-170 and (1969), p. 14; A.R. Burn, Minoans, Philistines and Greeks, etc (London, 1968), p. 230. 

  16. Gjerstad, (1948), pp. 298-299; P. Dikaios, “Fifteen Iron Age Vases,” Report of the Department of Antiquities. Cyprus [henceforth RDAC], 1937-9 (pub’d, 1951), pp. 134, 137-138; idem, A Guide to the Cyprus Museum (Nicosia, 1961), p. 63; Karageorghis, (1962), p. 76; idem, Treasures in the Cyprus Museum (Nicosia, 1962), pp. 4, 16-17; idem, “Some Cypriote Painters of Bulls in the Archaic Period,” JdI, 80 (1965), pp. I, 10-12, 14. 

  17. Snodgrass, (1971), pp. 94 (source of the quote), 444 (list of references); Desborough, (1972), pp. 49-57, 145.

  18. Desborough, ibid., pp. 49-57 (pace the disclaimer on p. 57); Catling, (1968), pp. 53, 221, 301; idem, (1975), pp. 193-196, 209-213; Karageorghis, (1969), p. 23; idem, (1970), pp. 66, 151. 

  19. Dikaios, “An Iron Age Painted Amphora in the Cyprus Museum,” BSA, 37 (1936-7), p. 58 n. 3. Others (e.g. Gjerstad, (1948), pp. 282-287) disagree with that assessment. Again, as with Submycenaean (see above “Shaft Grave Art: Modern Problems,” n. 54), some Late Cypriote (LC) III pottery and other artifacts obviously follow LC II, and some obviously precede the Cypro-Geometric period, but I would question the continuity within, and the homogeneity of LC III (cf. J. Du Plat Taylor, “Late Cypriot III in the Light of Recent Excavations, etc.,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly [henceforth PEFQ], 88 [1956], p.30)
    The Iron Age Cypriots did paint representations on some of their pottery, but those were not as common as, and did not directly continue the LH III C figures. There were gaps—some huge—during which many familiar forms disappeared entirely, or else bore little or no similarity to the earlier style; the closest resemblances to LH III B-C motifs belong not to the earliest “post-Mycenaean” ware of Cyprus but to the eighth-seventh centuries, as if a renascence only then took place (Snodgrass, (1971), p. 94; Desborough, (1972), p. 51; Karageorghis-des Gagniers, (1966), pp. 4-6, 15, 47, 62, 94-95, 101, 107-112; cf. n. 16 above).

  20. P. Dikaios, “Principal Acquisitions of the Cyprus Museum, 1937-1939, RDAC, 1937-39 (pub’d, 1951), p. 200, idem, (1961), pp. 203-204; Gjerstad, (1948), pp. 216, 283 (for which, cf. SCE vol. II [Stockholm, 1935], p. 276), 293-294; J.F. Daniel, “Two Late Cypriote III Tombs from Kourion,” AJA, 41 (1937) pp. 71, 73-74 (to which see Catling’s objection, (1964), pp. 52-53).

  21. In addition to the citations of ns. 9, 16 above, see inter alia Cook, (1972), pp. 41, 44; Edgar, (1904), p. 106; Starr, (1961), p. 244; Broneer, (1939), p. 361; Berard, (1970), pp. 42-43; Friis Johansen, (1966), pp. 5, 9, 19, 34, 48-50, 55-56, 63-64, 131; J. P. Droop, “Dipylon Vases from the Kynosarges Site,” BSA, 12 (1905-6), pp. 84-85, 90-91; D. Burr, “A Geometric House and a Proto-Attic Votive Deposit,” Hesperia, 2 (1933), p. 632; J. Pendlebury, The Archaeology of Crete (London, 1939) p. 335; R. Young, Late Geometric Graves and a Seventh Century Well in the Agora (Athens, 1939), pp. 49. 177, 186-187. 217;W. Taylour, Mycenaean Pottery Italy and Adjacent Areas (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 113, 116, 120, 136, 142, 157; E. Vermeule “The Fall of the Mycenaean Empire,” Archaeology 13 (1960), p. 74; J. Boardman, The Cretan Collection in Oxford (Oxford, 1961) pp. 57-58, 144 (confusion and debates over dating), 151; E. Brann, The Athenian Agora VIII; Late Geometric and Protoattic Pottery (Princeton, 1962), pp. 15, 19, 43, 48, 51; E. Langlotz, Ancient Greek Sculpture of South Italy and Sicily (tr. A. Hicks) (New York, 1965), p. 15; G.K. Galinsky Aeneas, Sicily and Rome (Princeton, 1969), pp. 82-84, 89; J.L. Benson, Horse, Bird &Man (Amherst, 1970), (Amherst, 1970), pp. 5-6 and passim J. N. Coldstream, “The Cesnola Painter: A Change of Address,” BICS, 13 (1971), p. II; etc. etc.

  22. Vermeule, (1960), p. 74. 

  23. Demargne, (1964), p. 271. 

  24. J. Droop, “The Pottery from Arcadia, Crete,” Liverpool Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology, 12 (1925), p. 11 (whence the term “backwash” ); M. Hartley, “Early Greek Vases from Crete,” BSA, 29 (1930-1), pp. 62, 64, 86-37; D. Levi, “Early Hellenic Pottery of Crete,” Hesperia 14 (1945), pp. 1, 9-10; Cook, (1972), p. 41; R. Higgins, Minoan and Mycenaean Art (New York, 1967), p. 190. 

  25. Snodgrass, (1971), pp. 107-109; F. Stubbings, Mycenaean Pottery from the Levant (Cambridge, 1951); V. Hankey, “Mycenaean Pottery in the Middle East,” BSA, 62 (1967), pp. 104-147; idem, “Mycenaean Trade with the South-Eastern Mediterranean,” Melanges de L’Universite Saint Joseph, 46.2 (1970), pp. 11-30. 

  26. Velikovsky, (1977, pp. 129-138 and 1978, pp. 80-81) has redated that document and the entire dynasty to the Persian Period. 

  27. II Sam. 5:11; I Kings 5:15-32, 7:13-46; II Chron. 2:1-15. 

  28. Benson, (1970), p. 5; Cook, (1972), p. 41; Robertson, (1975), pp. 23-24. 

  29. For ivories, see below “Ivory Carvings,” ns. 6-7; For metalware, many authorities have long noted that ninth-seventh-century Phoenician decorated bowls “continue the tradition” of similar bowls from Ugarit of Eighteenth Dynasty date (e.g., H. Frankfort, The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient [Baltimore, 1963], pp. 150, 195; Strong, (1966), p. 53; S. Moscati, The World of the Phoenicians [tr. A. Hamilton] [London, 1968], pp. 67-68), and closely resemble Nineteenth-Dynasty metalware from Tell Basta in Egypt (e.g., W.K. Simpson, “The Vessels with engraved designs and the Repoussé Bowl from the Tell Basta Treasure,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies [henceforth JNES], 24 [1965], p. 28).
    As in the case of Greek figural art (cf. “Shaft Grave Art: Modern Problems,” ns. 57-66 and ns. 1-28 above). Orientalists treating decorated metalware have split into two camps. Those who have championed survival attribute extraordinary conservatism to Phoenician artisans who, without leaving a trace, somehow continued to produce metalware in the ninth-sixth centuries, which differed little, if at all, from Eighteenth-Nineteenth Dynasty antecedents (e.g., Murray, (1900), pp. 27-29; Hall, (1901), pp. 137, 251-252; C. Schaeffer, Ugaritica II [Paris, 1949], p. 47). Those advocating revival proposed a conscious copying of 500-year-old forms (e.g., J.L. Myres, Handbook of the Cesnola Collection of Antiquities from Cyprus [New York, 1914], p. 275; cf. Hall, “Oriental Art of the Saite Period” in CAH1 - III [Cambridge, 1925] [ed. J.B. Bury et al.], p. 327; Dikaios, (1951), p. 137; Strong, (1966), p. 53; for a fuller discussion, cf. Isaacson, (1974), p. 15).
    Some of the metal bowls from uncertain contexts have provoked heated debates between those who, seeing Minoan Mycenaean and Egyptian New Kingdom analogies, have assigned them to the Late Bronze Age (e.g., Myres, Ibid, pp. 457-460; Fr. von Bissing, “Eine Bronzeschale mykenischer Zeit,” JdI, 13 [1898], p. 37; idem, Ägyptisch oder Phoinikisch?,” JdI, 25 [1910], pp. 193-199; idem, “Untersuchungen fiber die ’phoinikischen’ Metal schen,” JdI, 38-39 [1923-1924], p. 190), and those who, acknowledging the 500-year-older elements, still insisted on ninth-sixth-century dates for those same items (e.g. Murray, ibid., pp. 27-29; Hall, ibid., [1901], pp. 137, 251-252, [1925], p. 327; F. Studniczka, “Der Rennwagen in Syrisch-phoinikischen Gebiet,” JdI, 22 (1907), p. 75; H. Schäfer, Ägyptische Goldschmiedearbeiten [Berlin, 1910], p. 66; E. Gjerstad, “Decorated Metal Bowls from Cyprus,” Op. Arch., 4 (1946), pp. 2-17). For similar problems with Aegean bronzes, cf. below “A Terracotta Figurine and a Terracotta Head,” n. 16. 

  30. For decorated Phoenician textiles as the chief medium of continuous transmission, cf, inter al., H. Payne, Necrocorinthia (Oxford, 1931), p. 54; Benson, (1970), pp. 55, 111-113, 122-123; Cook, (1972), p. 41. From the extremely rare specimens of later Greek cloth that have survived, one sees that, at least by the classical period, the Greeks could and did transfer curvilinear and naturalistic designs to cloth from paintings on smooth surfaces, where such motifs are far quicker and easier to create (cf. G. Richter, A Handbook of Greek Art [New York, 1969], pp. 380-383).
    It is somewhat hazardous to reconstruct the actual designs of textiles from their depictions in paintings, since the latter may show a style less rigid than, and possibly completely different from those on the cloth itself. (H. Kantor, “The Aegean and the Orient in the Second Millennium B.C.?” AJA, 51 (1947), pp. 43-44); nevertheless, to judge by Mycenaean Age frescoes, Aegean textile workers had already begun to adorn cloth with representational designs including floral motifs, monsters and animals, which seem to have vanished from Dark Age pottery, only to “return” in the seventh century (cf. E. Evans, (1935), vol. II [1928], fig. 456, pls. 25-27, and vol. III [1930], figs. 25-26—if correctly restored and interpreted; Vermeule, (1971), p. 193 and pi. 28A-B; S. Marinatos, Excavations at Thera VII [Athens, 1976], p. 36 and pi. 65).
    While it is true that Homer mentioned “colorful” Phoenician cloth (II. VI; 289-295), he does not describe its design, which might merely have been woven stripes; he does, however, describe the representational adornments of battle scenes and flowers which Helen and Andromache created on cloth (II. III;125-128; XXII:441). If the “taboo” on figural pottery did not extend to textiles, Greek artisans could have kept the styles alive as easily as the Phoenicians allegedly did. 

  31. Benson, (1970), passim; Snodgrass, (1971), pp. 54, 417-418; Cook, (1972), pp. 41-43. But cf. J. Carter, “The Beginning of Narrative Art in the Geometric Period,” BSA, 67 (1972) pp. 25-58, who seeks to push back the earliest Oriental influence. 

  32. Benson, ibid., passim; Brann, (1962), p. 19.

  33. Cf. above “The Entrance to the Citadel,” n. 13 and “Later Use of the Grave Circles,” n. 14; below “The Palace,” ns. 6-8 and “The Design of the Palace,” n. 31.

  34. Cf. n. below. 

  35. Benson, (1970) passim; Karageorghis, (1962), pp. 72, 76-77. 

  36. K, de Vries, review of Benson’s Horse. Bird & Man, AJA,76 (1972), pp. 99-100. 

  37. Starr, (1961, p. 244.)

  38. Edgar, (1904, p. 106.) 

  39. Cf. “Shaft Grave Art: Modern Problems,” n. 60 and n. 9 above.