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Sealings from the Olive Press Room, Knossos: new information from the unpublished notes of Sir Arthur Evans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2013
Abstract
This paper is based mainly on an unpublished page with drawings, made by Arthur Evans, dealing with sealings recovered from the Olive Press Room, Knossos. In order to date the sealings identified through Evans's drawings, an attempt is made to place them in their correct stratigraphic perspective; this is done by studying the stratigraphy of the Olive Press Room as presented by Evans in two of his notebooks.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1993
Footnotes
1
I am deeply grateful to Sir Arthur Evans's trustees for allowing me to publish notes written by Evans on his excavations at the Palace of Knossos. I am also grateful to the Managing Committee of the British School at Athens for permission to publish the sealings identified through Evans's drawings. My sincere thanks are also due to Dr M. Lagoyiani for her help in Herakleion Museum; Mrs Ann Brown, Dr Don Evely, and Professor Gerald Cadogan for reading the manuscript; and Mrs Vasso Photou for all her help in Oxford.
The following special abbreviations are used:
AE/NB = A. Evans, Notebook of the Knossos Excavations
AM = Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
BSA 7 (followed by colon and page no.) = A. Evans, ‘Knossos excavations 1901’, BSA 7 (1900–1901), 82–3
BSA 8 (followed by colon and page no.) = A. Evans, ‘Knossos excavations 1902’, BSA 8 (1901–1902) 23–7
BSA 9 (followed by colon and page no.) = A. Evans, ‘Knossos excavations 1903’, BSA 9 (1902–1903), 19–22
DM/DB = D. Mackenzie, Day Book of the Knossos Excavations
HM = Herakleion Museum
Pini 1990 = I. Pini, ‘The Hieroglyphic Deposit and the Temple Repositories at Knossos’, pp. 46–53 of Aegaeum, v: Aegean Seals, Sealings, and Administration (ed. Palaima, 1990)
Weingarten 1986 = J. Weingarten, ‘The sealing structures of Minoan Crete: MM II Phaistos to the destruction of the palace of Knossos, part I: the evidence until the LM I B destructions’, OJA 5 (1986), 279–98
Weingarten 1988 = J. Weingarten, ‘The sealing structures of Minoan Crete: MM II Phaistos to the destruction of the palace of Knossos, part II: the evidence from Knossos until the destruction of the palace’ OJA7 (1988), 1–25
References
2 The page was found amongst twenty-one other pages (of the same type and paper quality) of drawings and notes on the Temple Repositories. They were most probably all made in 1903, when the Temple Repositories were excavated (below, pp. 49–91 ).
3 AE/NB 39 (1913), 73–9 (Figs. 3–9); 40 (1900, 1901, 1910, 1911, 1917); not paginated (Figs. 10–11).
4 Evans published two of the sealings; one is drawn on his page (BSA 9: 20, fig. 9), but not the second (BSA 9: 21, fig. 10). All of them are studied in this article.
5 ‘Olive Press Room’ was the original name given to the room lying w of the Loom Weight Basements and the Spiral Fresco room (its s wall is the N wall of the Upper East–west Corridor). The name came from two stone ‘olive presses’ sitting on the gypsum floor (BSA 7: 82–3); later they were seen by Doll, C. as ‘drain-heads’ (PM i: 378–9)Google Scholar, and the room was named accordingly ‘Room of the Drain-heads’.
6 BSA 7: 82–3; DM/DB 1901, ii. 1 (27 Apr.); 4 (30 Apr.); 6 (1 May).
7 DM/DB 1901, ii. 4 (30 Apr.).
8 DM/DB 1901, ii. 1 (27 Apr.) ‘very good gypsum slab paving … The pavement is at a depth of 1.20 from the top of the gypsum block marked 2. [Sketch 27) 1]’.
9 This depth was taken at the E side of the room; the w side was at 1.40 below the datum according to Mackenzie, DM/DB 1901, ii. 6 (1 May). Evans (BSA 7: 87) gives the same depth (1.40) as taken from the surface to the floor, which he mistakenly calls a cement floor.
10 DM/DB 1901, ii (27 Apr.), sketch 27. 1 (opp. p. 1).
11 BSA 7: 87–90.
12 BSA 8: 14–33.
13 Evans (BSA 7: 87) associates the tripod pots (in the Loom Weight Basement rooms) with a floor at 0.70 m from the surface, and records, ‘These lay just below the surface of the ground’.
14 DM/DB 1902, ii. 50 (21 May), ‘The Kamares floor of cement was 4–4.10 below the Mycenaean floor-level on about 4.40 from the surface’. Although this depth applies to the Loom Weight Basement rooms again, yet we get the idea that the difference between the ‘Mycenaean’ floor and the surface was only about 0.30 m.
15 BSA 8: 23–4; DM/DB 1902, ii. 33 (12 May); 36 (13 May); 50 (21 May); 51 (22 May).
16 BSA 8; 14–22.
17 DM/DB 1902, ii. 33 (12 May).
18 BSA 9: 19; there is nothing recorded in Mackenzie's two-volume diary of that year.
19 BSA 9: 19–22.
20 PM i. 249 n. 3.
21 AE/NB 39 (1913), 73–9.
22 The discovery of this early wall brought about some confusion (PM i. 249 n. 5), because it came to be considered as the E wall of the Olive Press room; the real E wall was further E. On its s part a triangular block of gypsum was used as the datum of the whole area.
23 Pendlebury, J. D. S., A Guide to the Stratigraphical Museum (London, 1933), 19.Google Scholar
24 DM/DB 1901, i. 1–2 (27 Apr.–1 May).
25 Pendlebury (n. 23).
26 BSA 9: 19.
27 Pendlebury (n. 23).
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 BSA 9: 19.
32 Mackenzie uses ‘K’ numbers in his 1902 pottery notebook.
33 Pendlebury (n. 23).
34 DM/DB 1902, ii. 1 ff.
35 Pendlebury (n. 23).
36 Evans, A. J., ‘Preliminary scheme for the classification and approximate chronology of the periods of Minoan culture in Crete, from the close of the Neolithic to the Early Iron Age’, Report of the 74th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Cambridge, 17–24 Aug. 1904) (London, 1905), 719–21Google Scholar; id., Essai de classification des époques de la civilisation minoenne (London, 1906), 5–11.
37 DM/DB 1902, 70 ff.; ‘Kamares’ probably meant white on dark, as suggested by Boardman, J., ‘The date of the Knossos tablets’, in On the Knossos Tablets (Oxford, 1963), 6.Google Scholar
38 This was the first floor encountered; there was thus no floor at the depth of 0.70 m as in the adjacent Loom Weight Basements.
39 Seven baskets of pottery were analysed. The curving designs dated by Evans as MM III could be MM II B. I am grateful to Prof. G. Cadogan for this information, which is the result of the Knossos Pottery Workshop (see Cadogan et al., ‘Early Minoan and Middle Minoan pottery groups at Knossos’, pp. 21–8 above).
40 Three baskets of pottery are analysed.
41 Seven baskets of pottery are examined. The footed cup dated by Evans as MM II in Fig. 5 can be taken by Cadogan et al. (n. 39) as MM I.
42 The pottery from B 115 was most probably that to which Mackenzie refers in his pottery study: Mackenzie, D., Pottery Notebook 1903; ‘The pottery of Knossos’, JHS 23 (1903), 176–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
43 Evans (n. 3).
44 DM/DB 1902, ii. 50 (21 May). Mackenzie states that the Kamares floor in the Loom Weight Basement is at 4.40 m below the surface, and in the Olive Press Room it is at 3.25 m below the gypsum floor (which is 1.20 m below the datum and about 1.40 m below the surface); this means that the depth of the Kamares floor from the surface is 4.65 m, which is reasonable allowing for the slope. Since the depths were taken sometimes from the gypsum floor and at other times from the datum, it can be confusing to try to find out the real depth.
45 Evans (n. 3). This note is two pages before Fig. 10 here, associated with notes on the High Relief Fresco.
46 BSA 7: 90–3; Warren, P., Minoan Stone Vases (Cambridge, 1969), 60–1.Google Scholar
47 BSA 9: 19–22 and pl. 2. Evans calls them ‘thorn vases’ because they imitate the ‘thorns of a briar rose’.
48 Evans, (BSA 8: 23–4)Google Scholar expressed the idea that upper floors and their contents had fallen onto lower floors, and then filling-in followed to support the second palace walls.
49 In BSA 9: 20–1 Evans dated the vases MM II; in PM i. 249, n. 3 he sees them as belonging ‘to the mature MM IIa Period’. Walberg, G., Kamares: A Study of the Character of Palatial Middle Minoan Pottery (Uppsala, 1976), 120–2Google Scholar, gives them a later date, MM II B. MacGillivray, J. A., ‘Pottery workshops and the old palaces in Crete’, in Hägg, R. and Marinatos, N. (eds), The Function of the Minoan Palaces (Stockholm, 1987), 274 Google Scholar, sees them as MM II A and notes that fragments found in the Olive Press Room (M II 5) join with others found in the Loomweight Basements (M III 2) to produce bridge-spouted jars.
50 Younger, J. G., ‘Bronze age Aegean seals in their middle period (ca. 1725–1550 BC)’, in Laffineur, R. (ed.), Aegaeum, iii: Transition du monde égéen du bronze moyen au bronze récent (1989) 54–64.Google Scholar
51 Pini 1990, 33–54.
52 Weingarten 1986, 279–98; 1988, 1–17; ead., ‘Old and new elements in the seals and sealings of the Temple Repository, Knossos’, in Laffineur (ed.) (n. 50), 39–52.
53 For types of sealings see Weingarten, ‘Old and new elements’ (n. 52); also M. Panagiotaki, The Central Palace Sanctuary in the Palace of Knossos (Ph.D. thesis and forthcoming publication), and ‘The Temple Repositories sealings’, forthcoming paper from the Cretological Congress of 1991.
54 It may be lost, or may exist in some other museum.
55 Evans had obviously thought that the impression was produced from a different seal than that which stamped HM 407.
56 Gill, M. A. V., ‘The Knossos sealings: provenance and identification’, BSA 60 (1965), 84–5.Google Scholar
57 Pini 1990, 41.
58 BSA 9: 20, fig. 9.
59 Pini 1990, 35–6, pl. 4 a–b. Pini has discussed the problem of inaccuracy of the published drawing and the actual sealing.
60 In AE/NB 1902 (loose page) a drawing of a sealing of the same shape and the same representation exists. The only difference is that the agrimi faces in the opposite direction; according to Evans it was found in the Gallery of the Daemon Seals. See also Gill (n. 56), pl. 15, R 71.
61 BSA 9: 21–2, Fig. 10; PM i. 201–2, fig. 151.
62 PM i. 249 n. 3.
63 BSA 9: 21–2, Fig. 10.
64 BSA 9: 21–2; PM i. 201–2; PM ii. 202, ‘It was found associated with MM Ia pottery’.
65 PM i. 201.
66 Pini 1990,35.
67 Weingarten 1986, 279–80; 1988, 1.
68 Weingarten 1986, 279–80.
69 PM i. Fig. 87. 5 (opp. p. 119); Pini 1990, 35, pl. 3 α.
70 BSA 9: 22.
71 If one does not take into account the fact that a good artist may be contemporary with a clumsy one, and their work could be side by side.
72 BSA 9: 22.
73 Ibid.
74 Weingarten 1988, 1–2.
75 Walberg (n. 49).
76 Pini 1990, 37–46.
77 J.-C. Poursat, ‘Sceaux et imprints de sceaux’, in Detournay, B., Poursat, J.-C., and Vandenabeele, F., ‘Fouilles éxécutées à Mallia: le quartier Mu II’, Et. Cret. 26 (Paris, 1980), 157–234.Google Scholar
78 Fiandra, E., ‘A che cosa servivano le cretule di Festos?’, in Πεπραγμένα τοῦ Β'Διεθνοῦς Κρητολογικοῦ Συνεδρίου (Athens, 1968), 383–97.Google Scholar
79 Pini 1990, 46–53.
80 Weingarten 1986, 280.
81 Pini 1990, 41.
82 Ibid.
83 Pini 1990, 46–53; Weingarten 1988, 3 (Apr. 1); also n. 53.
84 Pini 1990, 36.