IDEOLOGY IN SPACE: MYCENAEAN SYMBOLS IN ACTION

 

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Brigitta Eder

 

    An ideology is a set of beliefs and ideas and the product of social practices; its normative character affecting the way things are perceived. However, as Castillo, DeMarrais and Earle argue

“(…)

ideology is as much the material means to communicate and manipulate ideas as it is the ideas themselves. Ideology has, therefore, both a material and a symbolic component. Because symbols are material objects, their distributions and associations, preserved in the archaeological record, reflect  broader patterns of social, political, and economic activity. These patterns inform archaeologists about unequal access to symbols of status or authority, the efforts of one social segment to promote its ideology over others, and the effects of these strategic activities on the dynamics

of social power.”

 

 

 

Materialised ideology

With the beginning of the Greek Late Bronze Age a large variety of foreign materials and objects of Minoan workmanship arrived on the Greek mainland and were buried in the Shaft Graves of Mycenae and comparable burials sites in the Argolid, Laconia, Messenia, Thessaly and probably Boeotia. The predominantly aniconic world of the Middle Bronze Age Mainland

was more or less suddenly enlivened with figurative representations of plants and flowers, land and sea animals, women and men and of cultic equipment such as altars, horns and double axes. Religious symbols and iconography were taken over from Minoan Crete where they were associated with palatial rule.

 

The appropriation of Minoan goods involved the integration of the figurative repertoire of religious symbols of Minoan Crete

into the social practices of mortuary display and social representation of a distinguished segment of early Mycenaean society.

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