The Cultic Life of Trees in the Prehistoric Aegean, Levant, Egypt and Cyprus
By (author) C.J. Tully
Hardback (Published)
(September 2018)
ISBN: 9789042937161
Price: $138.00
Out of stock
This research examines 44 images of Minoan tree cult as depicted in sphragistic jewellery, portable objects and wall paintings from Late Bronze Age Crete, mainland Greece and the Cyclades. The study also compares the Aegean images with evidence for sacred trees in the Middle and Late Bronze Age Levant, Egypt and Cyprus. The purpose of this investigation is the production of new interpretations of Minoan images of tree cult. Each of the chapters of the book looks at both archaeological and iconographic evidence for tree cult.
This research examines 44 images of Minoan tree cult as depicted in sphragistic jewellery, portable objects and wall paintings from Late Bronze Age Crete, mainland Greece and the Cyclades. The study also compares the Aegean images with evidence for sacred trees in the Middle and Late Bronze Age Levant, Egypt and Cyprus. The purpose of this investigation is the production of new interpretations of Minoan images of tree cult. Each of the chapters of the book looks at both archaeological and iconographic evidence for tree cult. The Aegean material is, in addition, examined more deeply through the lenses of modified Lacanian psychoanalytic modelling, “new” animism, ethnographic analogy, and a Neo-Marxist hermeneutics of suspicion. It is determined that Minoan images of tree cult depict elite figures performing their intimate association with the numinous landscape through the communicative method of envisioned and enacted epiphanic ritual. The tree in such images is a physiomorphic representation of a goddess type known in the wider eastern Mediterranean associated with effective rulership and with the additional qualities of fertility, nurturance, protection, regeneration, order and stability. The representation of this deity by elite human females in ritual performance functioned to enhance their selfrepresentation as divinities and thus legitimise and concretise the position of elites within the hegemonic structure of Neopalatial Crete. These ideological visual messages were circulated to a wider audience through the reproduction and dispersal characteristic of the sphragistic process, resulting in Minoan elites literally stamping their authority on to the Cretan landscape and hence society.
- By (author) C.J. Tully
"The book should be read as one about Minoan religious practices, and what these images of tree cult on a range of objects can tell us about Minoan society. . . . It updates the field in a much-needed manner, and develops a new cross-disciplinary methodology for the re-examination of these images. This methodology enables Tully to dispel the argument put forward in the canonical study of Evans, that these sacred trees belonged to a primitive religion. Through her fresh approach, Tully inserts new complexity into the issue of Minoan tree cult, and into ancient interactions with the landscape." --Fox, Andrew, University of Nottingham, BMCR 2020.05.42
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