Minoans Reimagined: From Ancient Images to Multiple Modern 'Lives'

Christine Morris of Trinity College Dublin examines how the material culture of Minoan Crete has been received, recreated and commodified since the archaeological rediscovery of the Aegean Bronze Age at the turn of the twentieth century. After introducing reception studies through Seamus Heaney's poetic use of a metope from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, Morris traces how Sir Arthur Evans's excavations at Knossos from 1900 framed the Minoans for early twentieth-century audiences as peaceful, modern, European and matriarchal, citing contemporary responses including Jane Harrison's reaction to the Mountain Mother sealing.

Morris then works through a sequence of modern case studies. She begins with a replica of the Vaphio gold cup used as a prop in the television series Game of Thrones, and next examines the Knossos Snake Goddess figurines, focusing on their appearance in the 2004 Athens Olympic Games opening ceremony and American television viewers' complaints about nudity. Turning to early modern dance, she reconstructs Ted Shawn's 1919 choreography for the Denishawn company, showing from archival colour photographs that the priest's costume and two-dimensional poses drew on the Knossos Cup-Bearer and Priest-King reliefs.

From contemporary design, Morris discusses Greek fashion designer Mary Katrantzou's Spring/Summer 2017 collection, which combined 1960s psychedelic patterns with restored Bronze Age frescoes such as the Ladies in Blue, and Coca-Cola's 2017 limited-edition regional bottles for Crete, alongside brief comparisons to the 2017 and 2018 bottles for Cyprus showing Aphrodite at Petra tou Romiou, Paphos mosaics and a Chalcolithic cruciform figurine. The lecture closes with Australian poet Dorothy Porter's 1996 collection Crete, showing how Porter used Evans's publications and the Ayia Triada sarcophagus to address lesbian identity, environmental destruction and animal testing.