On the Origin of the Wooden Coffin in Late Bronze Age Greece

Abstract

During the last three decades, wooden coffins have come to light in increasing numbers in graves of the earlier phases of the Late Minoan period, especially in the area of Knossos. When their form and dimensions can be discerned, they often belong to a type that is or imitates a chest for household use. Sinclair Hood, Ingo Pini, and Bogdan Rutkowski, who have dealt with these coffins, agree on their general similarity to the clay larnakes of the type called chest-larnakes that are so common in the LM III graves of central and western Crete, and for which wooden prototypes are generally assumed. Hood and Pini also stress that the wooden coffins belong to a different tradition from that of the earlier, Middle Minoan, clay larnakes, but that the origin of the type is unknown. Rutkowski thinks that the wooden coffin was ‘a subsequent development of the M.M. rectangular larnax made of clay’. Common to all three is that they see the use of the wooden coffin as a purely Minoan phenomenon, in line with the tradition of larnakes from Early Minoan onwards till the end of the Bronze Age. They note in passing that there are a few examples of sarcophagi of wood, stone, and terracotta on the Mycenaean mainland, but attribute their occurrence to Minoan influence.