Minoan art and archaeology

This volume presents the papers of an international colloquium on the archaeology of houses and households in ancient Crete held in Ierapetra in May 2005. The 38 papers presented here range from a discussion of household activities at Final Neolithic Phaistos to the domestic correlates of "globalization" during the early Roman Empire. These studies demonstrate a variety of methodological approaches currently employed for understanding houses and household activities. Key themes include understanding the built environment in all of its manifestations, the variability of domestic organization, the role of houses and households in mediating social (and perhaps even ethnic) identity within a community or region, household composition, and of course, household activities of all types, ranging from basic subsistence needs to production and consumption at a supra-household level.

From Crete, the second brightest star in the sky – Canopus – appears just above the horizon. This was already the case in antiquity, considering the precession. If you climb a mountain you get a better view of the star. You look around the curvature of the earth, so to speak. Since the Minoans had many mountain shrines, this phenomenon
will not have escaped their attention. But with a greater height of the star, there is also a greater arc from its rise to its fall. This arc increases much faster than the height of the star. At low heights above the horizon (up to two degrees), the arc grows ten times faster than the height. This correlation of height to arc can be measured at different mountain heights. By constant repetition the results improve.
The mountain heights do not have to be known for this. You get a table of star heights and their corresponding observation arcs.
Now one measures the arc of the star from the coast of Crete, for example Ierapetra, and the island of Crissi exactly south of it. The arcs are converted into star heights with the help of the table. The difference of the star heights is the latitude angle difference of the two observation points. The distance can be measured exactly by a thread that is unrolled with the help of a ship crossing. From this one can determine
the circumference of the earth.
With the help of this method one can also easily determine differences in latitude, for example to ports in the Mediterranean Sea. Thus, the labyrinth of seafaring on the Mediterranean Sea and beyond was unravelled, as the size of the earth is known, at least in an approximate value. The myth of the thread of Ariadne could have its origin here.

Old World iconography from the Upper Paleolithic to the Christian era consistently features symbolic representations of both female and male protagonists in confl ict with, accompanied by or transmuted partly or completely into, animals. Adversarial relationships are made explicit through hunting and sacrifi ce scenes, including heraldic compositions featuring a central fi gure grasping beasts arrayed on either side, while more implicit expressions are manifested in zoomorphic attributes (horns, headdresses, skins, etc.) and composite or hybrid fi gures that blend animal and human elements into a single image. While the so-called Mistress of Animals has attracted signifi cant scholarly attention, her male counterpart, the Master of Animals, so far has not been accorded a correspondingly comprehensive synthetic study. In an effort to fi ll this gap in scholarship, The Master of Animals in Old World Iconography assembles archaeological, iconographical, and literary evidence for the Master of Animals from a variety of cultural contexts and disparate chronological horizons throughout the Old World, with a particular focus on Europe and the Mediterranean basin as well as the Indus Valley and Eurasia. The volume does not seek to demonstrate relatedness between different manifestations of this fi gure, even though some are clearly ontologically and geographically linked, but rather to interpret the role of this iconographic construct within each cultural context. In doing so, The Master of Animals in Old World Iconography provides an important resource for scholars confronting similar symbolic paradigms across the Old World landscape that foregrounds comparative interpretation in diverse ritual and socio-political environments.