Painted Mycenaean Larnakes

Abstract

Nearly ten years ago the first specimens of a new group of painted Mycenaean sarcophagi, or larnakes, began to become known in Greece. They attracted immediate attention, and some disbelief. The group has not yet been studied as a whole, or evaluated as a relic of Aegean art, for the circumstances of discovery and dispersal have made close examination difficult. The scenes of mourning figures painted on them have considerable interest, however, and it seems timely to put together what is known about them in spite of the incomplete evidence. Once the larnakes become better known it will be a pleasurable task for scholars to relate them as harmoniously as possible to neighbouring monuments of Aegean painting and to the late Mycenaean environment which produced them.Until the discovery of these Greek larnakes, scholars rightly believed that the practice of using clay coffins for burial was essentially a Minoan one, not Mycenaean. The great number of larnakes on display in the Herakleion Museum in Crete demonstrates how widespread larnax-burial was in the Late Minoan period, apparently gathering momentum after the destruction of the Cretan palaces. While the earliest terracotta larnakes known in Crete are as old as the latter part of the Early Minoan period, they were not used extensively among the middle classes until the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. The first preserved wooden coffins of Crete are found in chamber tombs of sea-captains and soldiers who died in the late fifteenth century. Perhaps they adapted the custom from Egypt in an age when relations between coastal Crete and the Nile Valley were particularly active. One of the coffins in the harbour cemetery of Katsaba near Knossos was painted blue; otherwise there are no traces of rich surface elaboration in the Egyptian fashion. As far as one can tell from the rotted condition of wood in the Aegean climate, the Minoans did not use external face masks, or gilding, but made simply carpentered containers for simple inhumations.