A Bronze-Age Path to Self-Discovery

The "Warrior Vase", 12th c. BC, is so famous that the building in which it was discovered at Mycenae is called "The House of the Warrior Vase." I was completely crazy about this object when I first studied it: it felt to me like a sketch of Agamemnon's actual warriors going off from Mycenae to fight at Troy, while a woman, at far left, raises her hand in farewell. Agamemnon and the Trojan War are considered legendary, but the archaeological evidence from both Mycenae and Troy indicate beyond a doubt that advanced societies lived there in the Bronze Age, at least 400 years before the Homeric epics were composed, ruled by kings of great wealth and power, who traded and were in contact with other city-states and cultures in the Aegean, Egypt and North Africa, and the Middle and Near East.

I had just turned nineteen when I took my first course in Greek art: it was called "Greece in the Bronze Age", and was taught by John Coleman at Cornell University. Since childhood, I had been captivated by the Iliad and Odyssey, the Greek gods and the myths: this felt like a way to get closer. I still remember the day when John brought shards of impossibly ancient pottery into the classroom, and the first one was passed into my hands. How do we describe those moments of wonder that quickly move into some sort of inexplicable connection, and a passionate longing to plunge in deeply? By the end of that semester, after being immersed in the early cultures of Mycenae and Tiryns, the Cyclades, and the Minoan civilization in Crete, I knew for sure that this was what I wanted to study, and changed my major from biology to classics, with a focus on archaeology and ancient Greek art.

Head from a marble statue from the Cyclades, 2800-2300 BC. This sculpture originally had painted eyes and red striations on the cheek. You can see where Brancusi found inspiration. I've always loved Cycladic art because of its elemental simplicity: this particular head was chosen by the museum as one of its featured objects.

It wasn't easy; I was already a semester behind the students who had declared their decision earlier, so I had to catch up in the Greek language classes, as well as qualifying in French and German, and fit the required courses and my chosen electives into the remaining two-and-a-half years. Nevertheless, it was of the best decisions I ever made. Even though, at the end, I didn't want to pursue the academic route and become a professor, what I learned during those years studying with John, his colleagues Will Cummer, Will Provine, and Andrew Ramage, and brilliant Greek professors like Pierro Pucci, Fred Ahl, and Michael Stokes, completely changed my life. I learned how to be a scholar and my writing improved a great deal; I gained confidence in my ability to think and to express those thoughts with clarity; my interest in history, literature, and human culture deepened; I became more disciplined, and more confident about my own ability as an artist, because John encouraged me to illustrate my papers and honors thesis. I discovered, through the Greeks, my own passion for graphic design, and the use of positive and negative space, that formed the basis for my own eventual career in that field.

Flying fish swimming among fish-eggs and sea sponges, 16th century BC -- a fresco from Phylakopi on the Cycladic island of Melos. I had never seen this fragment before, and was delighted by it.

A tiny Mycenaean hedgehog.

And a huge Mycenaean octopus, amid fragments of seaweed, clearly showing the influence of Minoan art, which this vase-artist must have seen. 16th c. BC.

Through a series of unfortunate political events, my own lack of experience in traveling alone, and limited money, I never made it to Greece when I was young, even though I won a scholarship for a summer of archaeology there. Though I was considering studying the conservation of antiquities, my life took a different turn. Over the years, I would visit the famous Greek and Roman art collections in New York, Boston, London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin, including the Greek vases I loved, but many of the Bronze Age treasures that had first captivated me remained as pictures in books, or memories from classroom slideshows. Unlike the Parthenon sculptures and many of the finest Greek vases and sculptures, which had been taken from Greece long before by wealthy collectors or government-sanctioned archaeology expeditions -- stolen is the correct word -- many of the primary Bronze Age objects had stayed there, some because they were discovered later, or perhaps because fewer people prized them, and partly because some of the archaeologists who discovered them, like Heinrich Schliemann, had insisted that they remain in Greece.

The so-called "mask of Agamemnon" - a lifesize gold death mask of an unidentified Mycenaean king discovered by Heinrich Schliemann; this is one of several such gold death masks that he found.

Just one of many cases of Mycenaean gold of astonishing workmanship and detail.

A few weeks ago, I finally got to see these objects and visit some of the places where they were found. As I stood in front of the cases of Mycenaean and Cycladic art in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, I felt the years collapse: once again I was that young woman, seeing these things for the first time, feeling my heart leap with delight and fascination. How grateful, and how fortunate I felt, to be there at last!

Late in that long day of museum-looking, I went back through the galleries and made the two drawings shown here. It wasn't because I thought that my drawings would have any more value or beauty than my photographs of the objects, nor because I wasn't sure if I'd ever come back to Athens -- I certainly hope to, but one never knows about the future. All drawings aren't done for the same reasons. In this case I wanted to take the time to do this, because choosing these particular objects out of so many, and standing in front of them with the intent focus that a drawing requires, felt like a ritual act imbued with personal significance. It was a testament to relationship: not only with the objects and their anonymous makers, but with myself over time. I wanted to honor that, and so I drew.

Comments

[Natalie]

Fascinating post,Beth. The gold death mask is fabulously dramatic, mesmerising and so 'modern' to our modern eyes. But I feel tenderness for those shy,diffident, not at all war-like warriors on the vase.I wonder if they were intentionally so, perhaps even satirically so? They certainly look reluctant to engage in conflict of any kind. Modern Greeks have a great, sardonic sense of humour, maybe Bronze Age Greeks were similarly inclined?

[Roderick Robinson]

I can only read in wonder - not just at the material you were showered with, or the skills you acquired, but at your state of preparedness for what you were facing. The necessary eagerness and abilities you brought to the act of learning.

I compare this with the empty bowl I represented when I left the meaningless restrictions of school, driven by a vague thought that to write about things - even for such an ephemeral medium as a newspaper - would be better than doing nothing with my life. I may have been as eager as you were but my state of mind was erratic and childish. The goals, if they existed, were undefined.

Now, after all this time, that apprenticeship makes sense to me even if it would seem pathetic to anyone who sees a one-day-old newspaper as fit only for wrapping fish and chips. That the grind (which I never saw as a grind) of writing in short sentences that were grammatically correct (nothing much more!) and could be easily understood by that shapeless mass known as "the readers" would stand me in good stead when I wanted to engage with more complicated matters. I had my own professors, the sub-editors who corrected my stuff and told me why. And although I never recognised it at the time I was leaving petty restrictions behind and taking aboard valuable restrictions. A simplified method of dealing with the infinity of human events.

Which has left me better able to appreciate what, why and how you did things during your studency, and the person you have necome as a result. That discipline is not Gradgrindism; it should thrill us and - here's a bonus - there's a good chance it will thrill us even more in retrospect.

[Beth]

Thanks for your comment, Natalie. I think my own tenderness toward those warriors was apparent to me even at an early age. They made me smile, but mostly they just seemed very human, and vulnerable in a way soldiers shouldn't be but often are.

Robbie, thank you, but you're giving me too much credit. Yes I was eager to learn and pour myself into it, and once I found this direction I took to it with determination, but I wasn't a kid who had come from a privileged, scholarly background that would have prepared me well for university, compared to many of the other students in those vaunted Ivy League schools. I was from a small town, where I had done well in a small pond, but in the big lake, I found I lacked preparation, study skills, and most of all confidence and experience in large libraries, laboratories, and big competitive or urban environments. It took me two years, really, to find my own "place", and even when I graduated I was still less confident than many others. Frankly, I'm glad for that. It made me empathetic to anyone, from refugees to underprivileged kids or minorities of any kind, who get thrown into the deep end, or willingly put themselves there, and have to sink or swim. I'm glad I wasn't a brash, overconfident, unsympathetic, immodest person (like some I encountered, then, and later, I'm afraid). I've certainly had curiosity, drive, and perseverance that have helped me do make progress in a number of fields, but I hope that trying to be a kind and decent person has always been uppermost.