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landingtree) wrote2018-12-05 06:52 pm
landingtree) wrote2018-12-05 06:52 pm
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Phaistos disk is faery magic, agree ninety percent of CLAS 312 students
Two days ago we were in Thessaloniki, looking at the parts of Tetrarch Galerius' immense palace which aren't currently under commercial buildings, having walked along a waterfront where the sky and the sea met in a bright haze on which a container ship faintly floated. The Tetrarchy was a briefly stable variant on Roman imperium: co-emperors of east and west, each with a junior emperor as colleague and successor. I know very little late Roman history. Must fix that. Today we were on Crete, at Phaistos, a palatial complex from the other end of antiquity: Minoan, middle Bronze Age. I've studied that even less, but will get a lot more of it in the next week. On the day between, after a start that should have had our alarm clocks protesting criminal orders, we flew from one to the other, Thessaloniki to Heraklion, and I spent the rest of the day partly exploring and partly putting my notes on Corinth in order but mostly finishing Ancilliary Justice. Heraklion feels welcoming. It's comparatively small, cleaner, we're near a park, there are children moving around.
(Pause while I hear the other side of the Why Roomate Cannot Be Tolerated One Second Longer rant. I heard the first side over dinner, and the two balance each other neatly. Sigh).
We came to Phaistos over the orchard-dotted hills. A cultivated landscape looks very different when the format is dots instead of squares or lines. Phaistos was first found by an archaeologist looking for King Minos' palace, and he skewed his interpretations in that direction. We get 'Minoan' from him. And there was certainly no bigger or more impressive kind of building before it, great stone walls and courts visible from the whole plain below, a collective building project on an unprecedented scale. But they aren't known as palaces anymore, rather palatial complexes, where rulers sat and were glorified, but also where business was done, religion practiced, manufacturing. Villages in palaces. And the rulers may not have been king and queen so much as clan heads.
Before I came to Greece, if I'd ever heard of the Phaistos Disk, I'd forgotten it. But it's been available as neckace and earrings in jewellery shops wherever we've been. A double-sided clay disk stamped with symbols from Linear A and Cretan heiroglyphics, two untranslated writing systems, mixed with symbols found nowhere else. The best recent attempt to decypher it, culmination of a long process of study, takes it to be a prayer tablet, including the name of a mother goddess - at which point in the day's presentation Diana could be heard hitting herself over the head with the collected course notes. The person presenting went on to make it clear that no interpretation of the disk is generally accepted.
Except, "It's a forgery," Diana said after he'd finished talking about pier and door partitions and megarons. "The growing scholarly concensus is that it's a forgery. I would say I was certain, except I almost never like to say that about an issue in Classics. It's just too peculiar and would have been too easy to fake." Which prompted a very interesting discussion which may become a tutorial topic in Diana's next Art and Arxhitecture paper. Classical archaeology is awash with forgeries. The Getty museum has run an exhibition of all the forgeries it's ever unwittingly bought - and uncovered, that is. Our Victoria University Classics museum has a genuine sarcophagus the carving of which is forged, (a purchasing decision made before my time, put in Jeff), which was uncovered by a visiting Norwegian scholar who realised that its inscription had been directly copied from a different sarcophagus. A decree now accepted as genuine was suspected a forgery for the first five years after it was unearthed, on the grounds that it was unrealistically informative. The Getty has a kouros whose feet and head seem to be eighty years apart in their art styles; it held a colloquium on the artifact's authenticity and got one expert in the field saying "As soon as I saw it I felt a sense of wrongness" while a second praised its majestic workmanship and said it clearly had a master's touch. Stone isn't easily dated. The best they can do with marble like the kouros is try to replicate the patina on it - if the patina can be replicated quickly and cheaply, it was probably forged, because forgers wouldn't tend to be able to spend years working on a piece. They haven't replicated the Getty kouros yet. And there are so many forged Cycladic figurines, while so few of the distinctive figurines like 'man drinking from cup' have provenances, that some scholars have declared those figurines can no longer in fact be studied usefully. Those little tall people with only noses on their faces, another thing seen in all the souvenir shops.
Meanwhile the tour guide for the other group there was heard speaking authoritatively about the Phaistos Disk's ritual significance, which may very well have centered on the zodiac. If anything found from the Bronze Age is a little peculiar, said Diana, someone will be saying it had ritual significance. The past is a large and fuzzy place.
Of course, I know better. I and my kind were there at the time. But we mostly keep quiet about that.
(Pause while I hear the other side of the Why Roomate Cannot Be Tolerated One Second Longer rant. I heard the first side over dinner, and the two balance each other neatly. Sigh).
We came to Phaistos over the orchard-dotted hills. A cultivated landscape looks very different when the format is dots instead of squares or lines. Phaistos was first found by an archaeologist looking for King Minos' palace, and he skewed his interpretations in that direction. We get 'Minoan' from him. And there was certainly no bigger or more impressive kind of building before it, great stone walls and courts visible from the whole plain below, a collective building project on an unprecedented scale. But they aren't known as palaces anymore, rather palatial complexes, where rulers sat and were glorified, but also where business was done, religion practiced, manufacturing. Villages in palaces. And the rulers may not have been king and queen so much as clan heads.
Before I came to Greece, if I'd ever heard of the Phaistos Disk, I'd forgotten it. But it's been available as neckace and earrings in jewellery shops wherever we've been. A double-sided clay disk stamped with symbols from Linear A and Cretan heiroglyphics, two untranslated writing systems, mixed with symbols found nowhere else. The best recent attempt to decypher it, culmination of a long process of study, takes it to be a prayer tablet, including the name of a mother goddess - at which point in the day's presentation Diana could be heard hitting herself over the head with the collected course notes. The person presenting went on to make it clear that no interpretation of the disk is generally accepted.
Except, "It's a forgery," Diana said after he'd finished talking about pier and door partitions and megarons. "The growing scholarly concensus is that it's a forgery. I would say I was certain, except I almost never like to say that about an issue in Classics. It's just too peculiar and would have been too easy to fake." Which prompted a very interesting discussion which may become a tutorial topic in Diana's next Art and Arxhitecture paper. Classical archaeology is awash with forgeries. The Getty museum has run an exhibition of all the forgeries it's ever unwittingly bought - and uncovered, that is. Our Victoria University Classics museum has a genuine sarcophagus the carving of which is forged, (a purchasing decision made before my time, put in Jeff), which was uncovered by a visiting Norwegian scholar who realised that its inscription had been directly copied from a different sarcophagus. A decree now accepted as genuine was suspected a forgery for the first five years after it was unearthed, on the grounds that it was unrealistically informative. The Getty has a kouros whose feet and head seem to be eighty years apart in their art styles; it held a colloquium on the artifact's authenticity and got one expert in the field saying "As soon as I saw it I felt a sense of wrongness" while a second praised its majestic workmanship and said it clearly had a master's touch. Stone isn't easily dated. The best they can do with marble like the kouros is try to replicate the patina on it - if the patina can be replicated quickly and cheaply, it was probably forged, because forgers wouldn't tend to be able to spend years working on a piece. They haven't replicated the Getty kouros yet. And there are so many forged Cycladic figurines, while so few of the distinctive figurines like 'man drinking from cup' have provenances, that some scholars have declared those figurines can no longer in fact be studied usefully. Those little tall people with only noses on their faces, another thing seen in all the souvenir shops.
Meanwhile the tour guide for the other group there was heard speaking authoritatively about the Phaistos Disk's ritual significance, which may very well have centered on the zodiac. If anything found from the Bronze Age is a little peculiar, said Diana, someone will be saying it had ritual significance. The past is a large and fuzzy place.
Of course, I know better. I and my kind were there at the time. But we mostly keep quiet about that.
no subject
I am just charging my kindle before heading out for the day, so I can read some of The Kept Forest if any of the people I'm meeting turn up late. (I have finished, or at any rate temporarily finished with, The Subtle Door; though it may now need a different title, having rather less of the door in it than it did once. Damn Philip Pullman for making fantastical uses of the word "subtle" seem derivative).
"Dots" is an interesting word to describe plantings. But maybe I need more visual information. How large are these dots, as seen from where you saw them?
no subject
I look forward to reading whatever The Subtle Door is next called.
(In case I vanish from the internets in the near future, I left the kindle charger at the last hotel. But the last hotel is also the hotel of two days from now, so I may get it back. In any case, my kindle is getting less and less happy with being an internet tool).
no subject