INTRODUCTION
1. Benjamin 1999 [1936].
2. Frankfort 1939.
3. Monsters, variously defined, have long been a favorite topic in cultural and literary studies, where they have been considered as symbolic expressions of social difference or moral corruption (Lenfant 1999; Strickland 2003), as metaphors of geographical and cultural remoteness (Wittkower 1942; Mitter 1992; Romm 1992), or as public responses to the disturbing effects of new technologies, especially those that challenge established classifications of the empirical world (Graf 1999; Smits 2006; and for more wide-ranging studies, see Cohen 1996; Bildhauer and Mills 2003; Asma 2009). By contrast, the focus here will be on the transmission of images, confined to a study of composite animals, which I will go on to define in terms that are visual and technical, rather than moral or psychological.
4. For example, Sperber 1985, 1996; Boyer 1994, 2001.
5. Stafford 2007: 2.
6. Mesoudi et al. 2006.
7. For a sample of current applications of cognitive psychology in archaeology, see the collected papers in Renfrew and Scarre 1998; Renfrew, Frith, and Malfouris 2009.
8. Scott and Baron-Cohen 1996.
9. Mithen 1998a, especially pp. 172–173; and cf. Mithen 1998b; Boyer 2001: 323–324.
10. Hallowell 1955.
11. Leevers and Harris 1998; and see also Low et al. 2009.
12. Take Baxandall, for example, on Renaissance art: “To sum up: some of the mental equipment a man orders his visual experience with is variable, and much of this variable equipment is culturally relative, in the sense of being determined by the society which has influenced his experience. Among these variables are categories with which he classifies his visual stimuli, the knowledge he will use to supplement what his immediate vision gives him, and the attitude he will adopt to the kind of artificial object seen. . . . Whatever his own specialized professional skills, he is himself a member of the society he works for and shares its visual experience and habit” (1988: 40).
13. Quack 2009.
14. See Atran 1990; Atran and Medin 2008.
15. Küchler 2005.
16. Küchler 2005: 207.
17. Küchler 2002; Stafford 2007; see also Melion and Küchler 1991; Belting 2005.
18. Sperber 1996b.
19. Rostovtzeff 1922: 192.
CHAPTER 1
1. Rostovtzeff 1926b, 1941.
2. Bowersock 1974: 19.
3. The terms of that debate are usefully outlined in Sherratt and Sherratt 1998.
4. For intellectual assessments, see Reinhold 1946; Momigliano 1994 [1952]. For biographical insights, see Wes 1990.
5. A recent revival of public interest in the ancient art of the Eurasian steppe can be attributed in part to remarkable discoveries in the Filippovka kurgans of the southern Urals, reviewed in Yablonsky 2010. Major exhibitions have been mounted (see Aruz 2000; Parzinger 2007); and for related discussions of “animal style” art and its interregional connections, see Aruz et al. 2006.
6. In addition to Rostovtzeff 1922 and 1929, see his (1926a) A History of the Ancient World, Volume 1: The Orient and Greece.
7. See especially the concluding chapter (9) of Iranians and Greeks, which considers the origins of the Russian state on the Dnieper; Rostovtzeff 1922: 210–222.
8. Rostovtzeff 1920.
9. Rostovtzeff 1932: 6–7.
10. For example, Childe 1936; Frankfort 1932.
11. See Riegl 1893 (English translation, 1992); and for further discussion, Gombrich 1984; Iversen 1993.
12. Elsner 2006.
13. Riegl 2000 [1900]: 124.
14. Poulsen 1912. For recent perspectives on the concept of “orientalization” in the Iron Age Mediterranean, see Riva and Vella 2006; and for a focused treatment of “oriental” monsters in Corinthian vase-painting, and their role in the definition of Greek cultural identity during the seventh and sixth centuries BC, see Winkler-Horaček 2011.
15. Meyer Schapiro (2000 [1936]) took Riegl’s intellectual disciples to task for treating visual styles as cultural proxies for “racial-psychological” constants.
16. For the Kulturkreislehre, see Andriolo (1979), and for “hyper-diffusionism” see Trigger 1989: 150–155.
17. Momigliano (1994: 43) suggests that “Rostovtzeff, although he studied ancient religion, can hardly be said to have been aware of the profound impact that the religious needs of man have had upon his development.”
18. Rostovtzeff 1922: 192.
19. Ibid.
20. See, more recently, Gunter 2009.
21. Rostovtzeff 1922: 192–193.
22. Ibid., 193–209.
CHAPTER 2
1. Davidoff and Roberson 2002; and for evidence that animal behavior in general holds a special command over human visual attention, see also New et al. 2007.
2. Stafford 2007: 43–73; and see also Clark 1997: 167–169.
3. Sperber 1985, 1996a, with further references.
4. Further discussion of neo-Darwinian approaches to cultural transmission, and their applications in archaeology and anthropology, can be found in Shennan 2002; Richerson and Boyd 2005. G.E.R. Lloyd (2007) considers the findings of evolutionary psychology—which represents just one strand of neo-Darwinian theory—in relation to case studies from ancient Greece and China, comparing their respective classifications of natural kinds, emotions, and modes of causality. Brian Boyd (2009) explores the implication of similar theories for the development of art and fictional narrative, from prehistory to the present.
5. Sperber 1996a: 2, 25, 58; cf. Boyer 2000: 196.
6. Ibid., pp. 2, 64–65, 82.
7. See Hirschfeld and Gelman, eds., 1994, and further references following.
8. For example, Pinker 1994; Dehaene 1997; Kanwisher et al. 1997.
9. For example, Scholl and Leslie 1999.
10. For a review of current issues, see Barrett and Kurzban 2006; also Boyer, ed., 1992. For a critical perspective on modularity and its implications for the relationship between cognition and culture, see Tomasello 1999, especially pp. 201–217.
11. Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004: 41–42.
12. Berlin 1992.
13. Atran 1990; Atran and Medin 2008; but for other possibilities, see Carey 1985; Carey and Spelke 1994.
14. Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004: 43.
15. For example, Boyer 1994, 2000, and 2001, with explicit discussion of “counterintuitive biology” and its role in the transmission of supernatural concepts (pp. 75–79).
16. Boyer 1994: 122. Pyysiäinen (2001), Atran (2002), and Barrett (2004) develop partially comparable approaches to the analysis of religion, and offer useful commentaries on Boyer, but a full review of this literature is beyond the scope of the present study.
17. Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004: 44.
18. See Boyer 1994: 118–119; 2000; Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004: 45.
19. Stafford 2007: 71.
20. Sperber 1996b.
21. Arnheim 1966: 256–257.
22. Lenfant (1999: 198) notes that the corresponding Greek term is “teras, which originally had, just like monstrum, the special meaning of a divine sign, a ‘portent,’ with different sorts of referents”; and also “specifically designated mythological monsters (like Cerberus or the Sphinx) and actual monstrous births.”
23. Sonik (2010) provides detailed consideration of this point in relation to (mainly literary) sources from ancient Mesopotamia.
24. Descola 2010; Karadimas 2010.
25. Descola would see the regular depiction of composites as reflecting a more general set of ontological principles, for which he coins the term “analogistic” (see also Descola 2005). Intriguingly, his examples of analogism derive almost exclusively from large-scale, hierarchical societies including Han China, medieval Europe, and the recent historical kingdoms of West Africa. Neither Descola nor Karadimas, however, propose any causal or historical relationship between analogistic ontologies and processes of state formation.
26. See Descola 2010: 168.
27. Richter 2008 [1952]: 160.
28. Arnheim 1966: 256.
29. Rudenko 1970.
30. Napier 1986: 52.
31. See Ingold 2000; Descola 2010.
32. Invoking a tupilak was, for Inuit, an act of sorcery carried out in private, and most effectively by shamans. It allowed the harmful spirit not only to pursue a named individual but also to take on the forms and capacities of various animals in doing so. It is important to emphasize that the tupilak effigy was not, in origin, a permanent image, but an ephemeral assemblage of bones, to which a piece of clothing from the intended victim might be added. The open and public carving of durable tupilak sculptures is, by contrast, a modern practice, responding to the influence of missionization (which assimilated the tupilak to devil-worship) and also to the commercial demands of tourism and the European art market; see Rasmussen 1921; Petersen 1964; Auger 2005.
33. Guenther 1999; and for the story of “The Mantis Assumes the Form of a Hartebeest,” see Bleek and Lloyd 1911: 2–17.
34. For example, Descola 2010: 12, fig. 1; 26–32, figs. 10–11.
35. See Canetti 2000 [1960]: 337–384. Relevant here is Victor Turner’s (1969: 107) analysis of ritual temporalities, and how a phase within a rite of passage can be transformed—within large-scale social formations—into the durable instantiation of “liminal beings.” The fixing of ritual values within stable media of transmission is also considered—albeit from very different perspectives—in the work of Ruth Benedict (1935), Fredrik Barth (1990), and Harvey Whitehouse (2004); and see also the following, chapter 5.
CHAPTER 3
1. Mithen 1998a: 173; and see, similarly, Borić 2007: 97.
2. Accessible overviews are provided by Bahn and Vertut 1988; White 2003; and for more detailed consideration of methodological issues in the interpretation of Paleolithic art, see Conkey et al. 1997.
3. The occurrence of “therianthropes”—or part human, part animal figures—in Paleolithic rock art has been widely linked to debates concerning the origins of shamanism (for example, Makkay 1953; Lommel 1967; and for an early critique, see Leroi-Gourhan 1977). The development of these debates, and their recent revitalization through the work of David Lewis-Williams and others, is usefully reviewed in Ronald Hutton’s (2001) Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination (see especially pp. 130–133; and also de Beaune 1998).
4. Schmid 1989.
5. See Hahn 1986.
6. Conard 2003.
7. For instance, R. Dale Guthrie’s (2005: 446) reading of the Hohlenstein Stadel “lion-man” as a standing bear.
8. Taborin et al. 2001.
9. See Breuil 1952.
10. Breuil’s approach is placed in its intellectual and historical context by Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967.
11. Bahn and Vertut 1988: 42.
12. Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967: 204–206.
13. See, for instance, Guthrie 2005: 100–101.
14. Lewis-Williams 2002; and see also Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998. In making their case, these authors also draw attention to a range of other factors, including the special sensory environment of caves and its conduciveness to altered states of consciousness; the rendering of animal forms from natural features in cave walls (perhaps implying an artificially heightened state of visual awareness); and the presence in Upper Paleolithic rock art of “entoptic” images: geometric patterns produced by the nervous system under circumstances of sensory deprivation and/or altered consciousness. For critical commentaries on their interpretation of these features, see Bahn 1997; Layton 2000.
15. Attributing the “explosion” of representational art in the Upper Paleolithic period to a shift in human cognitive capacities may be unnecessary in view of other, more parsimonious explanations. Powell et al. (2009) argue, for instance, that the first widespread attestation of modern symbolic behavior in the archaeological record is best explained by demographic factors (that is, changing densities of human populations and related transmission rates for culturally inherited skills); cf. White 1992. Mithen’s interpretation also rests on the problematic assumption that neurological disorders in autistic children can be used to develop inferences about premodern modes of cognition (see the introduction to this volume for further references).
16. For example, Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998: 17–19, figs. 10–12.
17. Jolly (2002) estimates that figures composed of mixed human and animal attributes constitute no more than 3 to 4 percent of painted subjects in the known corpus of southern African rock art. Anne Solomon (1997) notes that the date at which figures with composite anatomy began to be depicted in San rock art is itself unknown, and that indigenous accounts link such figures more closely to the ancestral dead than to shamanic trance-states.
18. For example, those of the Natufian or Epipaleolithic period (ca. 11,000–9000 BC) in the southern Levant (see Perrot and Ladiray 1988: 58–59, fig. 32, pl. xxv; and Grosman et al. 2008), and their European counterparts such as the Mesolithic burial of a woman adorned with deer antlers and other animal ornamentation, discovered in Bad Dürrenberg in 1934 and dating to between ca. 7000 and 6200 BC, now displayed at the Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte in Halle (Saale; see Geupel 1977).
19. McCown 1937; Vandermeersch 1970. Direct evidence for the use of wings from predatory birds as ritual costume derives from Zawi Chemi Shanidar in northern Iraq (ca. 11,000–10,000 BC; Solecki 1977; and for recent discussion, see Mithen 2003: 420–422).
20. Composite burials, using the horns of cattle rather than gazelle to adorn human corpses, became a common feature of Neolithic funerary rituals in the Nile Valley from around 6000 to 4000 BC (Wengrow 2006: 56–59). Of the many Neolithic examples that might be cited from Southwest Asia, the inclusion of a plastered human skull alongside the headless body of a gazelle is particularly striking (Goring-Morris and Kolska Horwitz 2007). The assemblage was sealed beneath a floor around 10,000 years ago at the site of Kfar Ha-Horesh, in the Jezreel Valley of northern Israel. For the famous “Puyang shaman” burial of Neolithic China (Yangshao culture, Henan Province), see Kesner 1991: 36, 45, with further references.
21. Wengrow (2006) provides a synthetic treatment of the later prehistory of Egypt; for Southwest Asia, see Charvát 2002.
22. For a global survey of the origins and spread of farming, see Bellwood 2005.
23. Cauvin 1994 (English translation, 2000).
24. Hodder 2006: 142; Borić 2007; Meskell 2008.
25. See Meskell and Nakamura 2009; Hodder and Meskell 2010: 61.
26. Schmidt 2006: 210–218.
27. Wengrow 2001a, 2003; Helmer et al. 2004.
28. Gifford Gonzalez 2007.
29. Russell and McGowan 2003.
30. For discussion of an isolated and ambiguous exception, see Borić 2007: 96–97. Ian Hodder and Lynn Meskell suggest that schematic clay figurines with pinched-out faces might have been intended to encapsulate both avian and human qualities, and propose tentative analogies at the much earlier site of Göbekli Tepe. But they also note that “hybrid human forms are not common overall at Çatalhöyük or elsewhere in the Neolithic of the Middle East” (Hodder and Meskell 2010: 61; cf. Meskell and Nakamura 2009). Carolyn Nakamura, working on the same corpus of imagery, is more categorical, stating that “there are no clear examples of human-animal hybrids,” and drawing a suggestive contrast with the interplay of human and animal body parts in domestic rituals and burials (Nakamura 2010: 309).
31. Mallowan and Rose 1935; Goff 1963; Wengrow 2001b. For a remarkable, but also strikingly isolated, exception to this pattern, see the richly decorated Halaf-period vessel discussed in detail by Breniquet 1992.
32. Madjidzadeh 2008.
33. Oates 1966, 1978; Yoffee and Clark, eds., 1993; Wengrow 1998.
34. Wengrow 2006: 41–62.
35. Hendrickx and Vermeersch 2000.
36. Wengrow 2006: 41–62.
37. Flores 2003; Hoffman et al. 1982: 55–59.
38. R. F. Friedman 2008.
39. Van Neer et al. 2004. The cemetery, known as HK6, remained in use for human burials throughout the fourth millennium, but those of wild animals belong only to the Naqada I–II periods (ca. 4000–3300 BC).
40. R. F. Friedman 1996; Linseele and van Neer 2003.
41. Wengrow 2006: 99–123.
42. Dreyer et al. 2003: 72–75, 80–84, pl. 15: a–b.
43. Flinders Petrie’s (1921) White Cross-Lined or C-Ware.
44. See Wengrow 2006: 102–108; and for an alternative view, see Hendrickx 1998.
45. Only a slim portion of the designs on the Abydos vases would have been visible at any one time, and turning the vessel was therefore necessary to gain a full prospectus of any single animal. The general orientation of the figures, and the lines linking them, further encourage the viewer to follow a horizontal axis around the vessel surface, maintaining an interplay between images recalled (as they disappear from sight) and images brought to mind (as they enter the field of vision).
46. Petrie’s (1921) Decorated or D-Ware; see also Wengrow and Baines 2004.
47. A contrast can be drawn here with the more complex subdivision of bodies, and more detailed rendering of technological details, on an extensive painting (ca. 3500 BC) that covered the plastered walls of a large mud-brick tomb at Hierakonpolis (Case and Payne 1962). Modes of depiction thus varied between contexts and media. Carvings and pecked images on rock surfaces of the Eastern and Western Deserts may present another perspective on predynastic depiction, but ongoing difficulties with their dating preclude any definitive statement on the matter (Wengrow 2006: 111–114).
48. Ciałowicz 1991.
49. Van Lepp 1999.
50. Baumgartel 1960: 85–86.
51. Needler 1984: 336–343, cat. 267–273.
CHAPTER 4
1. Boyer 2000: 196.
2. For the concept of cultural ecology, see Bateson 1972; and for its application to images, see Gombrich 1998.
3. For a detailed account, see Wengrow 2006: 127–217.
4. Asselberghs 1961.
5. Boehmer 1974a, 1974b.
6. Moorey 1987; Philip 2002.
7. See also Baines 1995.
8. Weeks 1971: 80, and see also pp. 76–88.
9. For example, Fischer 1958; Churcher 1984.
10. For the adaptation of Mesopotamian composites in Egyptian art of the protodynastic periods, see the following, notes 36–38. For examples and discussion of locally invented composites, see McDonald 2000; Huyge 2004.
11. Robins 1994: 13.
12. Ibid.; and see also Baines 2007: 218–219.
13. Schäfer [1919] 1986.
14. Fischer 1978.
15. Eckmann and Shafik 2005; Hill 2007.
16. Frankfort 1948: 12; Hornung 1982: 109–125; 2000. Anatomical specificities, beyond what was needed to convey the essential components of an image, seem to have been consciously avoided for figures associated with the gods (whether human, animal, or mixed), perhaps because they implied a proximity to the visible world that was considered inappropriate in such contexts. For depictions of bodies that approached or contained divine agency, including those of royalty in certain contexts, many details of musculature may be either deliberately lacking or hidden by uniform clothing; cf. Hornung 1982: 107–109; Baines 2007: 219, n.13.
17. Szpakowska 2009; Lucarelli 2010. For reasons unclear, the protective images of Bes and Taweret—beings part-divine, part-demonic, and both associated with the domestic sphere—were regularly depicted with heightened anatomical definition, lending a distinct veracity to their fantastic, composite forms.
18. Kroeper and Krzyżaniak 1992.
19. C. A. Ward 2003.
20. Frankfort 1941.
21. Emery 1961: 216–222; Gale et al. 2000: 358–365.
22. Emery 1961: 241–242; Killen 1980.
23. Whitehouse 2002: 427, 432–434; see also Bussmann 2010.
24. Petrie et al. 1913: 23–24, pls. 8–9; cf. Wengrow 2006: 169.
25. Hodder 2011.
26. Comparative discussion of the origins and early development of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Iranian scripts can be found in Houston, ed., 2004; for the Indus script, see also Parpola 1994.
27. For more extended surveys, see Aruz, ed., 2003; Wengrow 2010b. For discussion of particular Bronze Age societies in the Near East, see Akkermans and Schwartz 2003 (Syria); Kohl 2007 (Central Asia); Pollock 1999 (Mesopotamia); Possehl 2002 (Indus Valley); D. T. Potts 1990 (Arabian Peninsula), 1999 (western Iran).
28. The geographical distribution of metals and other raw materials, and its relationship to the early growth of urban life and long-distance trade in the western Old World, is discussed at greater length by Moorey 1994 and D. T. Potts 1997; see also Sherratt and Sherratt 1991.
29. Algaze 1993; Wengrow 2006: 13–40.
30. T. F. Potts 1994.
31. Crawford 1998.
32. Pettinato 1991.
33. Possehl 2002.
34. Kohl 2007.
35. Dickinson 1994; Parkinson and Galaty, eds., 2010.
36. For the initial appearance of both composite types on cylinder seals in Mesopotamia and western Iran, see Frankfort 1939: 25–27; Brandes 1979; Amiet 1972, 1980: 75; Dittmann 1986; Moorey 1987.
37. According to Fischer (1987: 15), the Mesopotamian origin of the serpent-necked felines on the Narmer Palette was first, and independently, noted by L. Heuzey and A. Weigall in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Frankfort (1951: 109) listed “composite animals, especially winged griffins and serpent-necked felines, on palettes and knife-handles” among those cultural elements imported to Egypt from Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC (see further, Boehmer 1974b; Kantor 1992; Pittman 1994; and for the broadly contemporaneous execution of composite figures, including a seated griffin, in miniature three-dimensional sculpture, see Ciałowicz 2007).
38. Quibell 1898; Kaiser 1990; Wengrow 2006: 41. A similar arrangement of serpent-necked felines, carved in relief, is found on a palette from Minshat Ezzat in the Nile delta (el-Baghdadi 1999). The origin of these composite animal designs in seal carving can be indirectly demonstrated only through comparison with cylinder seals found outside Egypt, notably on the lower and middle reaches of the Euphrates, and at Susa in southwest Iran (Boehmer 1974b; Teissier 1987; Pittman 1996).
39. The protective goddess Taweret was visualized in Egypt as a complex animal composite, comprising a standing figure with hippopotamus head, leonine claws and feet, and a crocodile’s back and tail (Gundlach 1986). On apotropaic ivory wands of the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2000–1650 BC), she is depicted with knife in hand or claws extended, marching alongside other protective figures (Altenmüller 1983, 1986). The latter include the serpent-necked felines of the much earlier Narmer Palette (notes 37 and 38, earlier), which are otherwise undocumented between the protodynastic period and the Middle Kingdom. This would suggest a lost medium (or media) of transmission for such images, probably including woven textiles, the appearance of which may be echoed in tomb paintings at Beni Hassan and el-Bersha (ca. 1900 BC), where fantastic creatures appear alongside ordinary desert animals (Newberry 1893, 1895; cf. Fischer 1987: 16). The core elements of Taweret’s image are attested in amulet form by the late Old Kingdom (Petrie 1914: 47, pl. xl; Dubiel 2008) and are depicted on scarab seals by the First Intermediate Period (W. A. Ward 1978: 53, pl. 6: 180). The apotropaic function of this composite figure and its association with women and childbirth in Egypt are discussed by Altenmüller (1965) and, in the context of domestic religion, by Sadek (1987: 125–127) and Stevens (2009).
40. The transmission of Taweret’s figure to the Aegean, and its transformation there into the Middle Minoan “genius,” is the subject of a monograph by J. Weingarten (1991; see also Hallager and Weingarten 1993; Phillips 2008: 156–167; Weingarten 2010). For the likelihood of a Levantine route of transmission, see Kemp and Merrillees 1980: 268–286; Lambrou-Phillipson 1991; Wengrow 2010a); for evidence of Taweret imagery at Byblos (Lebanon) in the Middle Bronze Age, see Aruz 2008b: 136–137; and for fuller discussion of evidence from Aegean seals, see Krzyszkowska 2005. Broader, and highly divergent, assessments of the scope and impact of Egyptian/Levantine introductions to Early and Middle Minoan Crete are provided by Warren 1995; Watrous 2004; Schoep 2006; and Cherry 2010.
41. Mellink (1987) makes a case for Anatolian influences on the development of the Minoan genius, based on comparisons with karum-period and Old Hittite seal carving.
42. No statement on the chronological priority of one imported motif over another should be taken as categorical, since many media of transmission are undoubtedly missing from the surviving body of evidence. In his “Notes on the Cretan Griffin,” Frankfort (1936: 216–217) stressed the likely importance of ornamented textiles—echoes of which are found in the decoration of Minoan miniature frescoes—in the transfer of fantastic animal images, notably the winged griffin and sphinx (see also Morgan 1988: 49–51; Crowley 1989: 40–53; Frankfort 1996: 263–264; Aruz 2008a: 106–108). Recent studies emphasize Egypt as a source of imagery on palatial Crete (Karetsou et al., eds., 2001), but like the technique of fresco painting itself, imaginary creatures may be better considered part of what Susan Sherratt (1994: 237) terms an “elite koiné—artistic, iconographical, ideological, technological,” widely shared among the palatial centres of the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard in the mid- to late second millennium BC (cf. Feldman 2006: 67–68, 2007); and see the following, chapter 6, on “integrative modes.”
43. Early attestations of the griffin on the Greek mainland derive from gold inlays and ornamented weaponry in the Mycenaean Shaft Graves (ca. 1600–1500 BC), where it appears on sword- and dagger-blades in the “flying gallop” pose (Karo 1930; Morgan 1988: 51–52). Morgan (1988: 53) notes a recurrent nexus of visual associations between griffins, lions, and the prowess of male warriors in the elite imagery of Late Bronze Age Greece, with parallels to the east in objects such as a decorated axe-blade of Ahmose I from Thebes (ca. 1570–1545 BC), and later on ivories found at sites along the Cypriot and Levantine coasts (ca. 1300–1100 BC; cf. Kantor 1956). In the Late Bronze Age Aegean, leashed griffins are depicted on seals in the service of anthropomorphic figures. A protective function is further implied by their location around the carved throne at Knossos, as reconstructed by Arthur Evans (cf. Feldman 2006: 80–81). Griffins also appear, alongside lions, around the throne in wall paintings at Mycenaean Pylos (Immerwahr 1990: 136, pl. 79, and see p. 137 [and also Crowley 2008: 270, 279] for possible sphinxes in the decorative programme at Tiryns; and figure 6.1, later).
44. Parpola 1994; Possehl 2002. Among the most common motifs on Indus seals is the unicorn, also a subject of depiction in terracotta figurines (Kenoyer 1998: 87–88). For its status as a “fabulous animal” and possible derivation from West Asian prototypes, see Parpola 2011.
45. Al-Sindī 1999.
46. Sarianidi 1981; Francfort 1994; Aruz 1999.
47. See Frankfort 1939; Pittman 1995.
48. Amiet 1966, 1972; Roach 2009.
49. Pittman 1994.
50. Pittman 1997.
51. Serpent-necked felines are documented on seal impressions from the site of Habuba Kabira, on the Middle Euphrates, with close connections to the much larger urban centers of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium (Amiet 1980: 505, pl. 123: 1631). The seal repertory from Tel Brak, an early urban center on the Syrian steppe, includes the image of a standing figure with feline head and tail, as yet without parallel (Oates and Oates 1997: 294, fig. 14).
52. Akkermans and Schwartz 2003: 210–224 (Ninevite 5 culture); Rova and Weiss, eds., 2003.
53. Matthiae et al., eds., 1995; Akkermans and Schwartz 2003: 232–287; Margueron 2004.
54. Porada 1985; Matthiae 2003.
55. See Frankfort 1939: 308; Barber 1991; Sherratt and Sherratt 1991; and notes 39 and 42, earlier.
56. Jasim and Oates 1986; Nissen 2001; Oates 1993; Wengrow 1998: 790–792.
57. Wengrow 2001b.
58. McAdam 2003: 183; cf. Moorey 2003: 19–20.
59. Wickede 1990; Pittman 2001.
60. Wickede 1990; Pittman 2001; and see also Caldwell 1976.
61. Amiet 1980; Pittman 2001: 412–415; Cool Root 2005: cat. 114, 115.
62. Potts 1997: 138–163; Rova 2008: 24.
63. Nissen et al. 1993.
64. Nissen et al. 1993: 14, 30.
65. Englund 1998: 171–172.
66. Brandes 1986; Frankfort 1996. Schematic modes of representation remained in use for certain purposes, but are now instantly distinguishable from the detailed renderings of animal and human figures, which often appear in complex poses and extended narrative scenes; see Amiet 1980; Brandes 1979; Schmandt-Besserat 1993.
67. Dittmann 1986; Nissen 1977; Nissen et al. 1993: 15–18.
68. Stafford 2007: 45.
CHAPTER 5
1. First millennium BC versions of the text have been found at Nineveh, Assur, and Uruk; Köcher 1953; Wiggermann 1992; Herles 2006: 185–186.
2. Wiggermann 1996: 219; see also Radner 2005: 548–549.
3. Wiggermann, in Porada 1995: 84.
4. Weingarten 1983; Müller and Pini, eds., 1998; Krzyszkowska 2005: 150–153, 178–185, with divergent views from Weingarten on the replication of seal designs; and for the latter, see also Weingarten 1986. Schlager (1996) proposes a paleontological inspiration for at least some the fantastic composites among the Zakros sealings.
5. Hopkins 1934, 1961; Kantor 1962; Napier 1986: 91–124.
6. Vernant 1991: 137.
7. Napier 1990: 77–111.
8. Boardman 2002: 51–52; cf. Graf 1999.
9. Kostoula and Maran 2012.
10. Zuckerman 2008, with further references.
11. Kostoula and Maran 2012; cf. Karageorghis 1993: 33–35; pl. 20: 4–5, 7; Webb 1999: 219–222; and for Near Eastern parallels, Wilcke 1972–1975: 530–535.
12. Karageorghis (1993: 35) notes that Late Cypriote III terracotta masks found at Enkomi and Kition are too small and impractical for wearing, and most likely replicate the appearance of functional masks in perishable materials such as leather or wood.
13. Carter 1987; for a comparison with gorgon-like helmets from late eighth or seventh century BC Tiryns, see Napier 1986: 86, pl. 34.
14. Moorey 1975; Auerbach 1994.
15. For general surveys, see Frankfort 1939 (cylinder seals); Moorey 2003: 22–46 (terracotta molds).
16. See Moorey 2003: 28.
17. Sax and Meeks 1994.
18. See Eisenstein 1983.
19. See Yoffee 2005.
20. Gombrich 1984: 256.
21. In Mesopotamia, stamp seals were widely used in late Neolithic villages long prior to the beginning of urban life. Until the fifth millennium BC, however, they carried mainly nonfigurative designs; Wickede 1990.
22. A similar hypothesis has been advanced more recently by Steven Mithen (2001: 49): “We can all sit and day-dream and think of fantastical monsters; but to describe that monster to someone else, or recall it yourself the following day is not so easy—unless the basic idea is offloaded from the mind into the physical world, as by drawing a picture or making some notes. Such ideas are difficult for minds to remember, to manipulate, and to communicate, because they do not correspond to a part of our evolved psychology. Contrast this with thinking about, say, some gossip concerning an acquaintance. That is always easy to remember and to pass on. This is because it engages with a part of our evolved psychology—the ideas in gossip are exactly the types of ideas our minds have evolved to deal with. In contrast, ideas about monsters and supernatural beings have no natural home within the mind.” Like the earlier views of Gombrich, these assertions have no apparent basis in cognitive-experimental data. Such data as exists in fact tends to support the opposite view, that representations that explicitly violate some limited aspect of domain-specific knowledge are inherently more memorable and “catchy” than ordinary, intuitive ones (Boyer and Ramble 2001).
23. The point could be equally well made in relation to ethnographically documented counterexamples, such as the monster masks of the Pacific Northwest, famously analyzed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1982).
24. Chang 1963, 1983: 56–80; Falkenhausen 2006.
25. Chang 1999: 49–52; Zhongpei 2005.
26. Among the latter, found at Banpo in Shaanxi Province, is a recurrent image interpreted as “a human face with a fish design at each ear” (Chang 1983: 114; Zhongpei 2005: 62, fig. 3.33); attempts have been made to link this design to the practice of shamanism (Marilyn Fu, cited by Chang 1983: 114).
27. Bagley 2008: 85–92.
28. Keightley 1998.
29. Falkenhausen 2006.
30. For which, see Bagley 2008.
31. Rostovtzeff 1929: 70–73.
32. Bagley 2006.
33. For example, Kesner 1991: 36, 45, with further references.
34. Bagley 2006: 17.
35. Bagley 1990.
36. And compare Gell 1998: 73–90.
37. Ledderose 2000: 34. Rawson (1987: 28) suggests that the elements of the taotie and also of the long dragon may have been specifically devised “to fill compartments of different shapes and proportions on angular and highly articulated vessels.” “Imaginary beasts,” she notes, “were much easier to use in this way than real creatures, as they could be extended or compressed, and could be given new heads or different bodies as the shapes of the vessels demanded.”
38. For example, in the decoration of Erligang ceramic vessels (ca. 1500–1300 BC) with carved clay stamps; Wang Haicheng (forthcoming) notes that these decorated pots “imitated both the shape and the decoration of bronzes . . . [by means of] a technique never used in the bronze foundries. Erligang bronze casters never used stamps or pattern blocks. Each piece of a mould or model was individually carved by expert designers.” And for general observations on the avoidance of mechanical replication in the decoration of Shang and Zhou bronzes, see Ledderose 2000: 25–41.
39. Bagley 1987: 37–45.
40. Experts disagree categorically on the manual procedures followed (compare Bagley 1987: 37–45, 2008: 113–120, to Ledderose 2000: 39–40; Nickel 2006; and see also Bagley 2009). All concur, however, that no mechanical technique was regularly used to replicate surface ornament on cast bronzes until the fifth century BC, or perhaps some few centuries earlier.
41. Ledderose 2000: 25.
42. Bagley 1993, 1996; Li Xiating and Liang Zhiming 1996.
43. Sher 1988; see also Di Cosmo 1999: 924–945; and earlier, chapter 1, on Rostovtzeff’s views concerning the transmission of “animal style” ornament in Eurasia.
44. Bagley 2006: 24–26.
CHAPTER 6
1. For a discussion of “cycles of contingency” in developmental systems theory, see Oyama et al., eds., 2003.
2. Bevan 2007: 171.
3. For an overview of state formation in Archaic Greece, see Runciman 1982.
4. Osborne 1998: 43.
5. See also Napier 1986; Winkler-Horaček 2008, 2011. Adrienne Mayor (2000) makes the intriguing case that depictions of certain fantastic beasts (for example, the griffin) in Iron Age Greece were informed by encounters with fossil remains of long-extinct species, eroding from the surface of the landscape (and see also Schlager 1996). By her own admission, however, the argument has little to say about why imaginary creatures should have become popular subjects of depiction at particular times, or about what she herself describes as: “the obviously imaginary hybrids of Greek tradition like Pegasus (a horse with wings), the Sphinx (a winged lion with a woman’s head), the Minotaur (a man with a bull’s head), and the half-man, half-horse Centaurs” (Mayor 2000: 16; cf. Boardman 2002).
6. Johnston 1993: 11.
7. Whitley 1994.
8. Whitley 1988.
9. Irene Winter (1995) explores similar tensions in relation to the composition of Greek epic, and in particular the Homeric portrayal of Phoenician traders: “makers and merchants as opposed to warriors, associated with no gods or family ties, deceitful, disrespectful of accepted codes of hospitality and friendship, unbound by social constraints.” This she reads as a literary projection “of the social and economic present, the becoming [Greek] ‘self’ . . . [imbued] with all of the ambivalence and discomfort, denial even, that contemporary Greeks must have felt about the changes that their society was presently undergoing” (1995: 261).
10. For protopalatial Crete, see Krzyszkowska 2005: 32, 90, 147–150; for Late Helladic Greece, see Lambrou-Phillipson 1990: 74; and also Salje (1990) for the Common Mitanni Style.
11. Hallager and Weingarten (1993: 12, n. 23) note that “Taweret’s entry into Crete may have been facilitated by an older Minoan set of ideas connected with the ritual handling of liquids,” and that her introduction coincides, broadly, with that of the rhyton as a specialized pouring vessel for ritual libations; hence: “It seems that the importation of Taweret, with her interest in rites of purification, was a significant part of the conceptual expansion of liquid-pouring rites as represented by new cult assemblages as, for example, at MMIIB Malia and Phaistos” (ibid.).
12. Crowley (2008: 279) observes that griffins “are everywhere in Mycenaean art, shown in flying gallop pose on blades from the Mycenae Shaft Graves, attacking deer on the Athens pyxis, and doing guard duty with lions on frescoes by the Pylos throne”; see also Morgan 1988: 49–51.
13. Reisner, 1923, pl. 55; see also Bonnet, 2000.
14. Kendall 1997: 53–73; Török 2009: 152–153.
15. Wengrow 2006: 170–195, with further references.
16. Kantor 1997 [1947]; Smith 1965.
17. See Cohen and Westbrook 2000.
18. Feldman 2006: 67–68, 74, 78–81.
19. Feldman 2006: 78.
20. De Miroschedji 1973; Lamberg-Karlovsky 1988; and for the wider visual milieu of “intercultural style” chlorite vessels, see Amiet 1986.
21. Kohl 2001.
22. For a representative range of images, see Aruz 2003b. Bull-men composites are atypical; an example is found on an unprovenanced vessel fragment that was subsequently matched to an excavated fragment from Sin Temple at Khafaje, in eastern Iraq (Frankfort 1935: 48, figs. 54, 55; Pittman 2002).
23. Madjidzadeh 2003.
24. Kohl et al. 1979; Madjidzadeh and Pittman 2008.
25. Kohl 1978.
26. Bevan 2007: 175.
27. Zarins 1978; Potts 1990: 66–67, with further references.
28. Hansen and Dales 1962: 79 (with mistranslation of the inscription as “Inanna and the Serpent”; the correct reading is “[To] Inanna: Panun,” the latter being the name of the individual making an offering; Goetze 1970: 42 [Inscription: 7N-120]; my thanks to Gianni Marchesi and Piotr Steinkeller for these references, and to Andrew George for assistance).
29. Wiggermann 1992.
30. Wiggermann 1992: xii.
31. Porada 1995: 64.
32. See also Gurney 1935; Scurlock 2006.
33. See Gunter 2009; and for the influence of Neo-Assyrian composites on the elite art of Urartu (eastern Anatolia/southern Caucasus) in the early first millennium BC, see also Green 1994: 262–264.
34. Van Buren 1931; Klengel-Brandt 1968; Rittig 1977; Nakamura 2004.
35. Green 1983; Ornan 2004.
36. Wiggermann 1994: 225–226; Green 1994: 248–262; and also Black and Green 1992.
37. Wiggermann 1992: 56–66.
38. See also Hurowitz 2006: 15–17.
39. Wiggermann 1996.
40. Wiggermann 1992: 19; and on Lamashtu, in particular, see also Farber 1987, 2007; Tourtet 2010.
41. Comparable strictures apply to the production of magical composites on Egyptian funerary papyri, in connection with spells protecting the corpse against physical and moral degeneration (see Lucarelli 2006, 2010). Incantations in a Ptolemaic “Book of the Dead” include the instruction that they should be recited: “over a snake with two legs, a sun-disc and two horns; over two Sacred Eyes, each with two legs and wings” (Faulkner 1994: 125, ch. 163); and in another case: “over (a figurine of) Mut having three heads; one being the head of Pakhet wearing plumes, a second being a human head wearing the Double Crown, the third being the head of a vulture wearing plumes. She also has a phallus, wings, and the claws of a lion.” The text goes on to prescribe that the images should be: “Drawn in dried myrrh with fresh incense, repeated in ink upon a fresh bandage. A dwarf stands before her, another behind her, each facing her and wearing plumes. Each has a raised arm and two heads, one is the head of a falcon, the other a human head” (ibid., ch. 164).
42. See, more generally, Ataç 2010.
43. Porada 1995: 74.
44. See Burkert 1992: 82–87.
45. Napier 1986: 107–109.
46. For technical analysis of mold-made Gorgon-heads on Greek architectural terracottas, see N. A. Winter 1993.
47. Napier 1986: 99; cf. Mack 2002: 576–578.
48. Herrmann and Millard 2003.
49. Ataç 2004.
50. See also Radner 2009.
51. For the immunological paradigm in modern cultures of governance, and its demonological origins, see Napier 2003.
CONCLUSION
1. Wittkower 1942.
2. See also Lenfant 1995.
3. Friedman 2000: 132.
4. See Mitter 1992.
5. Wittkower 1942: 197.
6. Scott 1998.
7. Tomasello 1999: 204.