Artifacts in MANTO: what do myths even look like?

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 two posts and am continuing the series with this one.

I ended the last post by noting that there are necessarily blurred boundaries between mythic material that we must include in MANTO, and mythic material we can just leave out in the interests of expediency. Here’s another tricky boundary: how do you even recognise a mythic scene where you see one?

Take these three objects from the Canellopoulos collection, which are prima facie quite similar in their depictions of people riding side-saddle:

Terracotta figurine probably depicting Europa’s abduction by Zeus in the form of a bull. (Late 5th c. / early 4th c. BCE)

Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum, Athens, no. Δ 1389. Photograph: Sokratis Mavrommatis. Image used with permission.

Late Minoan III terracotta equestrian figurine (ca. 1400-1050 BCE)

Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum, Athens, no. Δ 2458. Image used with permission.

Black-figure lekythos with scenes of two women riding bulls (late 5th c. BCE)

Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum, Athens, no. Δ 79. Photograph: Nikos Stournaras. Image used with permission.

The first image has been added to MANTO as a depiction of the abduction of Europa by Zeus. This was a well-known story with canonical form: the Phoinician Europa is attracted to the sight of a particular bull on the seashore; she climbs on to it’s back and it swims away with her over the sea to Crete. It was, in fact, Zeus in one of his metamorphosed forms. This story should be easy to spot in art, surely? There are hints of it the first image: the pair seem to be moving at speed; Europa is perched awkwardly, she grasps the bull’s horn and her legs and clothing flow out behind her as if they are indeed moving thought water.

But for all their superficial similarities, I did not add the second two artifacts to MANTO as further examples of the same episode. The late Minoan terracotta is interesting in that, if we were to identify it as Europa, then we would be identifying the myth on a Bronze Age artifact: there, is, in short, much at stake in its interpretation. However, the Canellopoulos inventory describes it simply as an equestrian figure: the animal is a horse, and the gender of the figure riding side-saddle is not specified.

The third artifact, the lekythos, takes us forward again to archaic Greece, and does certainly show a woman riding a bull. But is this Europa? The Canellopoulos inventory does not suggest this interpretation, saying only that it shows “two women riding bulls, one on each side” (here I translate from the Greek). Presumably, because the figure is repeated on both sides, and no movement through water is suggested, there is not much to support a reading of the scene as the abduction of Europa rather than, for example, some kind of ritual procession.

So, from these example we can see how quite subtle iconographic and contextual changes are crucial even where scenes are superficially similar, and the careful work that is required for interpretation. What we rely on in MANTO is the expertise of others. Because the identification of scenes can be both difficult and disputed, we try to connect our work in identifying images with published ones, or material provided to us by the collections themselves. In my fourth blog in this series, to appear next week, I’ll delve deeper into this issue of interpretative uncertainty and authority.

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.