endlessrarities | Minoan Metalwork

And now for something completely different...

I posted on the subject of Minoan metalwork a few weeks back, and promised you another in the near future. So here it is.

Being quite an afficianado of Bronze Age metalwork, I was really eager to see what the Minoans had to offer in this department. My first encounter was at Malia, where I was gobsmacked by a photograph mounted on the wall. It showed a copper axe, found at the site of Malia, but it was an axe unlike anything I'd seen before.

Here's a photo of the actual artefact, pictured in Heraklion Museum:-

Now, this muzzy picture does it absolutely no justice whatsoever, so I've inked up a drawing based on a photograph, just so you can check it out in greater detail:-

Remember the spirals on the rhyton? This little item's covered with them, too...

Now here's a question. When is an axe not an axe? Answer: when it's a sceptre made in the shape of an axe. This object's made of copper, which means it's virtually useless for hitting anything with (though the battered edge of this one might suggest it was actually used for something....) So the theory regarding this little item is that it represents a symbol of power which takes the form of an axe.

Now closer to home...

When I wandered through various museums in Crete, I found a consistent pattern appearing. There was hardly any Bronze Age metalwork. There were a few daggers found in graves, and a few axes, and nothing more. Confused by the lack of hoards, I asked our tour guide about their absence. "Of course there isn't much bronze!" he replied. "It's all recycled!"

Point taken. But what made me smile was that the pattern of metalwork I encountered was very, very similar to that occurring in contemporary Scotland. Like Crete, our Bronze Age metalwork comprises a few isolated finds of axes (usually attributed to casual loss, though the Early Bronze Age flat axes are now thought to be votive deposits) and daggers, which are usually found in graves. But our paucity of metalwork finds, compared to the large numbers found in England, is usually attributed to impoverishment, as opposed to careful management of a rare resource.

Me? I'm inclined to opt for the careful management scenario. Like the good people of the Minoan civilisation, the canny Bronze Age Scots (or equivalent) weren't interested in chucking vast quatities of their precious metalwork away.

Unfortunately, that's where the similarity ends. The Minoans get sceptres disguised as axes (with added panthers for good measure). We just get axes. Like the one pictured below, from Ayrshire:-