Artifacts in MANTO: capturing places

Written by Greta Hawes

In the midst of our recent efforts to add data from ancient artifacts into MANTO, I was delighted to take up an invitation to spend some time at the Canellopoulos Museum in Athens. CAMU has an extraordinary collection of Greek art, which you can explore on-line here (or of course in its beautiful premises tucked in under the Acropolis). Because CAMU holds a good number of ancient objects that depict myths, my visit was a great opportunity to think through some of the issues we are facing in working with this material. I began documenting these in my last four posts and conclude the series with this one.

If identifying characters from myth is difficult in ancient depictions because they are so numerous, capturing the locations of myth on ancient images poses the opposite problem: they are in fact relatively rare.

Take a quite typical black-figure scene of two warriors fighting:

Attic black-figure lekythos attributed to the Diosphos Painter (ca. 480-470 BCE) showing the duel between Achilles and Memnon with Eos and Thetis. See in MANTO.

Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum, Athens, no. Δ 61. Photograph: Nikos Stournaras. Image used with permission.

This is Achilles about to kill Memnon; their mothers Thetis and Eos appear at the sides, distraught by what they are seeing. This event ostensibly happens during the Trojan War, but nothing in the image suggests a Trojan setting, and besides how would we account for Eos and Thetis on the battlefield? Instead, we need to understand this scene as a conventional depiction; it is part of the Trojan cycle but not clearly localised in its landscape.

Where we do tend to get good data for mythic spaces is when specific landmarks become part of the iconographic language of the scene. We have already seen this in the example of Heracles luring the Nemean Lion from its cave. Another appears in depictions of Achilles attacking Troilos as he leaves a fountain house, as on the François Vase and elsewhere.

(I can’t resist adding here an example from the Canellopoulos collection that does not show the fountain house but does have Achilles (on foot) pursuing Troilos (on horseback) in the vicinity of … the Chimaira?)

Line drawing of Corinthian black-figure aryballos depicting Achilles’ pursuit of Troilos, and a Chimaira-like hybrid figure (ca. mid-6th c. BCE). See in MANTO.

Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum, Athens, no. Δ 1319. Image: George Vdokakis. Image used with permission.

MANTO’s basic approach to myth is to highlight how stories were connected to the physical landscape in antiquity. Because ancient vase painting, which accounts for most of the surviving depictions of myth from antiquity, tends not to highlight these topographical aspects of myth its potential for revealing this kind of data seems low. But there is another kind of local connection that ancient images can capture, and for this we need to go further afield. Whereas most figurative vases were produced in Attica, often for export, and so reveal little about highly localised dynamics of mythic identification, by contrast objects like coins can tell us a lot about how cities wanted to present their mythic pasts not least because these are the kinds of objects that are closely associated with a single place and time.

We have not focused much on coins in this part of the project, not least because Nomisma has already done so much work in creating LOD datasets of them. Nonetheless, where we have encountered interesting examples in the collections we have worked with, we have added them. And so we have a silver stater from Knossos:

Silver stater from Knossos depicting the labyrinth (between 320/310 and 280/270 BCE). See in MANTO.

Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum, Athens, no. N 601. Photograph: Sokratis Mavrommatis. Image used with permission.

What we see here is a schematic representation of the Labyrinth in which the Minotaur was imprisoned. The Hellenistic Knossians used it as a symbol of their city, and because our scheme for classifying artifacts includes capturing where each was made (amongst other things), this connection of an image of a mythic landmark to the place in the historical period is also captured as part of our mass of data.

My warmest thanks to Nikolas Papadimitriou, director of the Canellopoulos Museum, for hosting me in Athens and for providing the images of objects in the collection that appear in this blog series.

This blog captures some material I presented at a workshop at the Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Uppsala: I thank also Anna Foka and the team there for a fika-licious visit.

Ewan Coopey has been instrumental in developing the practices and processes for collecting data from artifacts in MANTO.