post-minoan crete: proceedings of the first colloquium on post-minoan crete held by the british...

Crete and Egypt in the seventh century BC: Temple A at PriniasAuthor(s): L. Vance WatrousSource: British School at Athens Studies, Vol. 2, POST-MINOAN CRETE: Proceedings of theFirst Colloquium on Post-Minoan Crete held by the British School at Athens and the Instituteof Archaeology, University College London, 10-11 November 1995 (1998), pp. 75-79Published by: British School at AthensStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40960146 .

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8 Crete and Egypt in the seventh century BC:

Temple A at Prinias

L. Vance Watrous (For John Boardman)

Temple A at Prinias, the earliest building decorated with sculpture known in the Greek world, is important because it illustrates how and why the Greeks first used architectural sculpture. This paper approaches these questions by focusing on the façade of the building and the possible significance of its sculptural decoration.

During the last generation scholars have reconstructed a pattern of Cretan interaction with the East during the period 1100-600 BC. Near Eastern objects (and influence) have been recognized in tenth- and ninth-century Crete, including an inscribed Phoen- ician bowl, bronze stands, and a pictorial krater. During the eighth and seventh centuries the number of Syrian objects and imitations - bronze shields, bowls, jugs, cauldrons and relief work, ivory figurines, pyxides and plaques, gold jewellery - increases sharply (Boardman 1980: 54-60). Beginning in the seventh century, Cretan connections with Egypt and North Africa become closer. Numerous Egyptian objects - faience objects, ivory plaques, scarabs, figurines, and bronze jugs - have been recognized on Crete (Boardman 1980, 1 12-15, 141-53; Shaw 1980, 247-8). Egyptian architectural forms, such as the limestone palm capital from Arkades, appear on the island by mid-seventh century (Boardman 1980, fig. 170).

As a result of the early and impressive amounts of Syrian imports and imitations found on Crete, most scholars have tended to dismiss the possibility of Egyptian influence on the development of Cretan seventh-century architecture and sculpture (as Boardman 1961, 152, notes) and have almost exclu- sively interpreted them in Near Eastern terms (e.g. Ridgway 1977, 21; Stewart 1990, 106-07). F°r example, the early temple on the acropolis at Gortyn has been reconstructed along Near East- ern lines, with a sculptural orthostate façade (Rizza 1968, 23-67 and fig. 76). The life-sized Gortyn relief is based on a common Egyptian type (i.e. Stevenson Smith 1981, 114, fig. no), and restor- ing the sculpture, along the rear inner wall of the temple, along Egyptian lines (as in Stevenson Smith 1981, 105, fig. 99) is perhaps more likely to be correct.

A priori, the assumption that Archaic Cretan architecture and sculpture must be interpreted via Near Eastern sources is suspect for two reasons. First, while the Near East may have been a dominant influence in the production of small objects in LG and EO Crete, this cannot be assumed for the later seventh century, by which time Cretans had established direct relations with Egypt, and monumental sculpture and architecture had made their first appearance on the island. Second, Egyptianizing scenes and motifs on Crete have been understood as products of the artistically eclectic Syrian workshops that were transmitted to Crete via the Levantine coast. However, Egyptian and North African pottery now recognized on the S central coast of Crete, at Kommos (Watrous 1992 and Bikai apud Johnston 1993, 370-1), indicate that Cretan relations with Egypt could be direct and need not always have depended on Levantine intermedi- aries. Herodotus (iv 151, 2-3), for instance, records that it was a Cretan fisherman who, in the later seventh century, led Theran colonists to Cyrene on the coast of North Africa.

Let us turn now to Temple A at Prinias with these issues in mind. The temple sits at the centre of a long, flat-topped ridge known today as Patela. The site is located in central Crete, some 20 km sw of Knossos, and takes its modern name, Prinias, from the nearby village. During the Early Iron Age a Greek city, probably ancient Rhizenia or Rhettenia, occupied the entire ridge. Excavations during the 1960's in this area by Rizza have exposed a small portion of the town as well as a rich LM IIIc-Archaic cemetery (Rizza 1969).

Per nier excavated Temple A in 1907 and 1908 and published his results in 1914 (Pernier 1914). He found a rectangular building with a cella, an eschara flanked by columns and a door leading out to a porch. Pernier reconstructed the temple as a flat-roofed structure, having a front door with recessed jambs and a pronaos with a central column in antis (Pernier 1915, pl. V). The excavator found reliable archaeological evidence for all parts of his restoration, except for the form of the façade and the placement of the sculpture. It is these parts of his reconstruction that have been chal- lenged by later scholars. His conjectural reconstruc-



76 L. VANCE WATROUS

tion of these elements, however, was based on certain facts. During his excavation at the front of the building, Pernier found what he described as 'a mass of rubble' at the centre of the thick E foundation (Pernier 1914, 21, fig. 3), which he interpreted as the remains of a stone base and pier. A visitor to the site today can see that the centre of the E foundation was treated dif- ferently from the rest of the foundation by its use of much larger limestone slabs. Given the relative thick- ness of the E foundation, the excavator reasoned that it must have supported something heavy, namely, the well-known frieze of large sculpted plaques that show a leftward procession of nine horsemen armed with spears and shields. Pernier restored the two seated figures on top of the block sculpted with lions and stags as a lintel arrangement over the inner doorway. This scheme, depicting a Potnia Theron with her animals, is generally accepted today. Fragments of thin stone plaques depicting a sphinx and volutes were reconstructed as acroteria. In 1934 Pernier wrote a second article on the temple, in which he answered the objec- tions raised by Weickert and Karo to his reconstruction (Pernier 1934). Following this exchange, Pernier's basic solution to the problem of the temple façade held the field for the next forty years.

All of this changed in the mid 1970s. In 1976 Immo Beyer proposed a radical reinterpretation of the temple and its sculpture. Beyer re-examined the sculptural fragments in the Herakleion Museum and showed that the goddesses held their right hands clenched in a fist on their lap (Beyer 1976, pl. 21, 1). This detail is quite common on Egyptian sculpture (e.g. Stevenson Smith 1980, 1 10, fig. 107) of all periods, but not, so far as I know, in the Near East. Beyer also identified two new blocks sculpted with female faces in relief (Beyer 1976, pl. 15, 1). He noted that the figures had the same width and concave background as the lion and stag frieze on the lintel. The width and concave background of the reliefs on these two fragments also matched the relief of a third block that depicts a quadruped on its long side and the feet of a human figure on its short side (Beyer 1976, pl. 15, 2). Because this third fragment is a full-sized block and shows an animal moving to the right whose hooves lack the fet- locks found on the rider frieze, Beyer disassociated the block from the rider frieze and reconstructed two door-jamb reliefs depicting a nude female figure in the door below the goddess lintel (Beyer 1976, pl. 22). This reconstruction seems convincing. The rest of Beyer's restoration is less believable. He suggested that the group of door sculptures were located at the front of the temple and that the façade consisted of an ashlar orthostate wall supporting a pitched roof. A frieze of sphinxes, stags and lions was restored along the orthostate and the rider plaques were relegated to the E end of the N wall as a second orthostate frieze.

Let us begin with the sculptures on and above the door. Beyer moved them to the front of the temple

because their width was half that of the inner wall, and an interior door with a rectangular transom is unparalleled in later Greek architecture. Nevertheless, Pernier's original placement of them above the inner door is more likely to be correct because the find-spot for most of this sculpture was directly in front of the inner door (Pernier 1914, 20, fig. 2, nos. 20, 21, 23 and 24 for the original find-spots). Pernier identified a block (Pernier 1914, 62, figs. 25 and 26) found on the inner threshold as a recessed door jamb. If this is correct, then there would be no discrepancy between the width of the relief and the inner wall. Moreover, Pernier noted that the lintel sculpture was less weath- ered than the rider frieze, which also suggests an interior placement.

Beyer reconstructed an orthostate façade along the E foundation of the temple (Beyer 1976, 24-25). He rejected Pernier's central column because he believed that it would have needed a monolithic stone base, rather than the separate slabs found by Pernier. However, recent excavations at Kommos on the S coast of Crete have produced a temple of the eighth and seventh centuries with a plan similar to that proposed by Pernier, a rectangular room furnished with a bench, a slab-enclosed hearth and a central pillar at its entrance supporting a flat roof. The pillar is set back slightly from the foundation - as was Pernier's column - and rests on levelling slabs like those found by Pernier (Shaw 1981, 232-41, fig. 5 and pl. 57 e). It should also be noted that the floor deposit from this temple at Kommos produced Egyptian faience figurines, and scarabs as well as North African amphoras (Shaw 1980, pls. 62 d-e and 65 e; Shaw 1981, 250 and pl. 60 d).

Beyer restored sphinxes, stags and lions along his orthostate frieze, and placed the rider frieze along the external N wall. There are problems with this sugges- tion. First of all, with the exception of the block sculpted with animal and human feet (which probably belongs to the jamb of the inner door), not a single piece of this large hypothetical frieze has ever been found. Second, placing the rider frieze on the N wall would mean that it would not have been visible to any- one entering the temple, which certainly seems unlikely. Third, Pernier's excavation plan shows that the plaques of the rider frieze were not found on the N side of the temple. They were found in a line along the E front of the temple (Pernier 1914, 20, fig. 2, nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, and 1 1), as one would expect, had they fallen from the façade. Fourth, these plaques are 83 cm high but only 15 cm thick, and they have a heavy flange at the base of their rear side that projects out 10 cm, so that in section the plaques resemble the shape of an L. This means that these plaques were not meant to be load-bearing orthostate slabs, but rather a standing parapet or sima as Dinsmoor and others have recognized (Dinsmoor 1950, 47; Bookides 1967, 272). In addition, the long-legged proportions of the



CRETE AND EG YPT IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY BC 77

horses are not necessarily a sign of an early seventh century date (pace Beyer), but are best understood as a deliberate attempt to compensate for the visual fore- shortening that their placement high on the temple façade would create. The armed warriors on the plaques have the same realistic proportions as the rest of the temple sculpture, which should be dated to the late seventh century. The exaggerated proportions of the horses also may have been intended to diminish the size of the riders, and therefore make them look young, a point we will return to below.

In 1978 another reconstruction (Stucchi 1978) of the temple façade was suggested, which inserted the sculpted corner block at the end of the sima frieze and restored an antithetical procession of riders. This seems impossible, since six of the nine leftward-moving riders are preserved, and the concave background of Stucchi's corner blocks do not match the flat background of the rider frieze.

So, putting all of the above information together, I would suggest the following reconstruction of the Prinias façade (FIG. 8.1). A central pillar is restored on the façade on analogy with other similar early Greek temples, such as at Kommos, Samos and Thermon. The two sphinxes indicated at the doorway are only there to indicate the presence of a sculpted orthostate. In actual fact, only the hooves of an unidentified animal are preserved. A flat roof, typical for Crete, seems

preferable to a pitched arrangement, because of the interior hearth and the absence of roof tiles on the site.

The decoration on temple A at Prinias is a sophis- ticated combination of frieze, orthostate, and lintel sculptures, and yet, so far as we know, it is the earliest example of architectural sculpture in Greece. This lack of development implies that the scheme may have been learned elsewhere. I suggest that this happened in Lower Egypt. Like the fifth century Herodotus (ii 125), seventh century Cretans would have journeyed to Egypt and may well have visited the famous pyra- mids at Giza and their necropolis of mastabas.

One such mastaba was the Sixth Dynasty example of Tjetu at Giza (fig. 8.2). Several of the features of the Prinias sculpture can be seen on the Giza structure (Simpson 1980, 7-15). The façade of Tjetu's mastaba consists of a porch with two pillars in antis. The pillars support a sculpted sima frieze finished above with a squared decorative moulding like that on the rider frieze. It should be noted that the sima frieze sculpted in relief is common on the stone architecture of Egypt and is rare on the mud-brick buildings of the Near East. Behind the pillars the inner wall of the mastaba is decorated with traditional false doors and relief scenes above a dado. As FIG. 8.2 shows, a person standing in the court outside the porch would have seen two of these scenes with their seated figures. The

Fig. 8.1 Suggested restoration of the façade of Temple Ay Prinias (only the legs are certain of the figures here restored as sphinxes).



78 L. VANCE WATROUS

Fig. 8.2 Sixth dynasty Mastaba ofTjetu at Giza {after Simpson 1980: pl. XIV).

false doors carry recessed door jambs sculpted with antithetical figures that run up to a lintel and a panel inserted in the position of a relieving rectangle, a fea- ture characteristic of Egyptian architecture (e.g. Badaway 1966, frontispiece). Boardman (1961, 170) has suggested that the similar arrangement on the Prinias lintel was a scheme borrowed from Egypt. The mastaba panel over the door is decorated with a typical Egyptian banquet scene showing the seated figure of the deceased. Some such Egyptian structure may have served as the stimulus for the organization of the Prinias sculpture, since several of the details at Prinias - the sculpted frieze, the goddesses seated on the lintel above the recessed and sculpted door jambs - find counterparts in the mastaba porch.

Nevertheless, the planner of the Prinias sculptures did not copy the scheme of Tjetu's mastaba. Copying across cultures is extremely rare in the history of art, for the simple reason that artists must modify foreign iconography in order to express their own cultural concepts. Instead, the Prinias artist seems to have absorbed some of Egyptian imagery and organization- al principles and adapted them to his own ideas. This process was eclectic, involving the use of Egyptian (the seated female figures), Cretan (the riders) and Near Eastern (the orthostate sculpture) imagery.

Ultimately, perhaps the most interesting question we can ask about the Prinias sculpture concerns its original meaning. Scholars have focused on the lintel sculpture, identifying the seated figures and the animals as a representation of the Mistress of Animals (or Potnia Theron), that is, Artemis. In Crete this Artemis was connected with childbirth and the rear-

ing of the young and as such she was commonly called Artemis Eileithyia or Kourotrophos (Nilsson 1950, 503-512). Inscriptions indicate that Artemis was one of the most important deities in Crete, and that she had temples in at least six Cretan cities, at Aptara, Axos, Arkadia, Eleutherna, Phaistos and Soulia (Willetts 1962, 272-275).

On the other hand, the relevance of the rider frieze to the Prinias temple has remained obscure. A possible clue to this question comes from the Archaic temple of Dictaean Zeus at Palaikastro. This temple was a famous cult centre and attracted many votives during the seventh to the fifth centuries, including miniature shields and armour (Bosanquet 1904-05, 306). Inside the temple stood statues of Artemis, Athena, Hera as well as of Zeus (Willetts 1 961, 211). In the sixth century, its exterior was decorated with sculpture, including antefixes depicting a Medusa-like figure framed with snakes, and a sima frieze which, like the one at Prinias, showed a procession of armed warriors (Bosanquet 1904-05, 303. fig. 20 and pl. 15).

According to the myths that tell the story of Dictaean Zeus' birth and upbringing on Crete, Zeus was associated with Rhea and the Kouretes (Bosanquet 1908-09; Willetts 1962, 199-220). The Kouretes are described as young male deities armed with weapons and shields, who hid and protected the infant Zeus, and who helped bring him up as a youth. They were attendants of Rhea and were nine (as at Prinias) in number. (Pherekydes cited in Strabo x 472-473). Like the nymphs, the Kouretes were thought to live in the wild (Diodorus Siculus v 65). The name Kouretes is simply the plural of the Greek



CRETE AND EGYPT IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY BC 79

word for a young man, especially a warrior (Iliad xix 193). Hesiod refers to the Kouretes as lovers of sports and dancing (Strabo x 471). They were involved in cult as well; in Crete they had their own shrines, at Gortyn and near Lato (IC I 25, 3 and 31,7; ibid. 16, 5).

The ceremony performed for Dictaean Zeus can be partly reconstructed from the inscribed hymn found near his temple at Palaikastro. The hymn describes worshippers gathered in front of his temple for a fes- tival at which they pray for the prosperity of their lands, their cities and of their youthful citizens. Epigraphical and archaeological evidence link this fes- tival to an important ceremony known in many other parts of Crete that marked the coming of age of young men. Literary sources record that Cretan boys were initiated into adult society at about the age of eighteen (Willetts 1955, 120-123). After a period of seclusion in the wild, they were given their armour and weapons, entered their tribe and were married. This ceremony probably included a procession, ath- letic games and dances. In these rites the Kouretes would have served as mythical prototypes for the young males undergoing initiation. In some cities this initiation took place as part of the cult of Zeus. We know that in other cities it was connected with differ- ent deities - at Phaistos, it was part of the cult of Lato. It seems likely that this ceremony was the occa- sion for the dedication, probably by young men, of the votive weapons and shields found at the Palaikastro temple. The Palaikastro frieze then may refer to the Kouretes and their Cretan initiates.

Not all such initiation ceremonies were linked to Zeus. In some cult centres it was Artemis who supervised the upbringing of young men and women. At Sparta, boys were initiated into manhood before Artemis Orthia (Pausanias iii 16 11). The Archaic votives dedicated at her sanctuary depict her as Mistress of Animals (like the Prinias sculpture over the door). At many of her sanctuaries Artemis also oversaw the transition of girls into womanhood before their marriage. The best known rite of this type took place at the sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia, where girls prior to their marriage dedicated their dolls, and their girlish clothes, girdle buckles and pins.

Pernier recorded that votive miniature shields and pins (Pernier 1914, 74, fig. 42) like those found at Palaikastro and the Spartan shrine of Artemis Orthia were also dedicated at Temple A at Prinias. This would seem to indicate that a similar initiation ceremony was celebrated at Prinias. If this is correct, then the nine armed young male figures on the Prinias frieze may also refer to the Kouretes. The sculpture at Temple A, then, would have been designed to show the deities, Artemis and the Kouretes, who supervised the local cult ceremony and whose myths explained the specific rituals carried out at the temple. If so, Temple A at Prinias is the earliest known example of

this practice, which is subsequently found on later Greek temples, and culminates in the pedimental and frieze sculpture on the Parthenon.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the help of D. Arnold, F. Cooper, S. Paley and L. A. Turner who discussed var- ious aspects of this paper with me.

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