Continuity and discontinuity of Minoan visual representations in Homeric Epics: The spirals of Okeanos

Result code in IS VaVaI

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Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Continuity and discontinuity of Minoan visual representations in Homeric Epics: The spirals of Okeanos

Original language description

I suggest that the experience of Minoan visual culture was transmitted through oral epics during the “Dark Ages” that followed the Bronze Age collapse, in the same way that scholars usually assume the transmission of various narrative motifs across different cultures and areas. This experience then emerges in some of the many descriptions, similes and ekphrases of the Homeric Epics. Here, it is not usually possible to detect original Minoan iconographic motifs, but rather similar representational strategies and the intermingling and transformation of original contexts and meanings. Using the example of Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles, and especially its last two passages, the “Knossian dance” and the image of Okeanos, I first show their mutual visual resonance mediated by geometric motifs of circles, lines, and most especially spirals and whirls. I then argue that Okeanos does not have a cosmogonic dimension in Homer, but rather offers an ekphrastic image of spatial and cognitive unapproachability. I proceed to show how the three specific original contexts from which we know Minoan spiral ornaments – the association with figure-of-eight shields, their use as a kind of ornamental frame and their occurrence near the Knossian miniature frescoes (associated with the Shield of Achilles as early on as by Evans) – can crystallise into a new thematic element, the visual image of Okeanos. Finally, I suggest that it is the ornamental, whose structuring quality inextricably links meaning to its form and context, that can conveniently transmit cultural content across the cultural seam between the Minoan Bronze Age and Archaic Greece, when no stable preferred medium of representation such as painting or poetry is at hand.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

D - Article in proceedings

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60304 - Religious studies

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Article name in the collection

Proceedings of the 13th International Congress of Cretan Studies

ISBN

978-960-9480-55-0

ISSN

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e-ISSN

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Number of pages

13

Pages from-to

1-13

Publisher name

Society of Cretan Historical Studies

Place of publication

Agios Nikolaos

Event location

Agios Nikolaos

Event date

Oct 5, 2022

Type of event by nationality

WRD - Celosvětová akce

UT code for WoS article

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