Artifacts in MANTO: practical (im)possibilities

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 post, and am continuing the series with this one.

I read recently that there are some 700 pots made in Attica during the archaic and classical periods that show (specifically!) Heracles killing the Nemean Lion. This number puts things in perspective. Firstly, there’s a lot of artifacts out there that we could enter into MANTO. And secondly: does our dataset really need to capture all 700 such depictions? Would MANTO be seven times more useful if aimed at completeness rather than just entering (say) 100 or them? (For context, we have a grand total of nine images of Heracles killing the Nemean Lion in MANTO currently.)

Every project has a problem of resources: we need to decide where we will spend our time, effort and expertise. I’ve already written about how we have opted for a very lightweight way of classifying artifacts so as to be able to spend our time on other things. Simply “creating” an artifact in MANTO is a lot of labour: we want to be sure we’re focusing on the most useful ones.

One issue that very quickly came up was the question of where the boundaries of this part of the project should be placed. This discussion was analogous to the decision we made at the very beginning of the project that our focus should be capturing narrative traditions, and that, although this meant we might include data about where some characters from myth were worshipped, we certainly couldn’t aim at completeness in that respect. So, our Manual says:

We do not systematically capture cult sites dedicated to Olympian gods, Heracles, Asclepios, Demeter, Persephone, and personifications that have no connection to the spatium mythicum (p. 7)

In short, it’s not technically impossible for us to capture the fact that there was a cult site dedicated to Zeus in some city, but in practical terms, we choose not to focus on collecting such data.

With artifacts, we’ve decided to focus on images that show either a narrative event, or a grouping of mythic characters that is somehow significant, or mythic characters who are not often encountered in the tradition. This means in practice that:

We do not systematically capture depictions of Olympian gods, Heracles, Asclepios, Demeter, Persephone, personifications, monsters, and mythic objects except where they convey clear narrative content or they are involved in a grouping of entities that is mythically significant. We do not systematically capture images of common mythic entities whose function is decorative rather than indicative of clear narrative content or local significance (Manual, p. 7)

As ever, this means that there will be some seeming inconsistencies in MANTO. For example, we do list some depictions of Zeus (just as we list some of his cult sites), but we do not undertake to have captured every last image of him that we have come across, especially if the image just shows him standing around, do nothing.

Finally, it’s good to remember that the line that goes from “decorative” to “clear narrative content” is pretty short, and - one might say - somewhat arbitrary. So, to take these three objects from the Canellopoulos collection:

Black-figure trefoil oinochoe with scene of an armed Amazon.

Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum, Athens, no. Δ 431. Photograph: Nikos Stournaras. Image used with permission.

Fragment of terracotta relief vase with scene of an Amazonomachy

Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum, Athens, no. Δ 2118. Photograph: George Vdokakis. Image used with permission.

Attic black-figure skyphos with scene of an Amazon fighting Heracles

Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum, Athens, no. Δ 90. Photograph: Nikos Stournaras. Image used with permission.

All three of these objects have quite similar components, and all have highly conventional iconography that leans towards the “decorative” side of the equation. This conventionality certainly does not suggest the kinds of distinctive, local perspectives that we’re keen to reveal with MANTO.

Nonetheless, lines must be drawn. The first artifact (Canellopoulos Δ 431) did not make it into MANTO since I decided that an armed Amazon on her own didn’t fit our criteria. When she’s fighting someone, though, she can be included: and so I captured Δ2118 along with the tie “THE AMAZONS fights”. If the man she is fighting there cannot be identified, the one in the third artifact above certainly can be: the club identifies him as Heracles. And once we have an image of Heracles with an Amazon, we can perhaps identify her as Hippolyte, the owner of the war-belt whose retrieval is one of his labours. So, I capture against Δ 90 quite a clear narrative: “HERACLES kills HIPPOLYTE using THE CLUB OF HERACLES”

Distinctions like these, between which material we capture and which we do not, and between how we capture scenes that in other ways might seem visually very similar, can seem quite arbitrary as we progress. The simple fact is that our material is messy: lines can’t be drawn with absolute precision in these kinds of contexts.

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.