Homer and the Archaeology of Crete

The 2018 AAIA Visiting Professor, Professor Antonis Kotsonas, UNE Aspects of Antiquity Public Lecture: 16th August, 2018.

The relationship between the Homeric epics and archaeology has been approached through the lens of Homeric archaeology, which involved matching the epics with the archaeological record and the realia of Homer’s heroes. A range of new approaches has, however, recently revolutionised the field. Drawing from these approaches, I offer a regional and diachronic analysis of Homeric stories about Crete, an assessment of these stories by the island’s inhabitants throughout antiquity, and an account of their impact on medieval to modern literature and art. I find that Cretan interest peaks in the Hellenistic period, but also argue for the much earlier familiarity of some Cretans with stories that underlie the Homeric epics. This argument relies on an analysis of the archaeological assemblage of a tomb at Knossos of the eleventh century BC, which included a range of arms that is exceptional for both Aegean archaeology and the Homeric epics. In the epics, this equipment is carried only by the hero Meriones of Knossos, whose poetic persona can be traced back to the Late Bronze Age on philological and linguistic grounds. Based on this, and on current understandings of performance at death, I argue that the Knossos burial assemblage was staged to reference the persona of Meriones, therefore suggesting the familiarity of some Cretans with early poetry that eventually filtered into the Homeric epics.

A cut-away view of the tomb of ‘Meriones’, Knossos

Professor Antonis Kotsonas, the University of Cincinnati, is a classical archaeologist specialising in the material culture, socio-cultural, and economic history of the Early Iron Age and the Archaic period in Greece and the Mediterranean.