The Cultic Life of Trees in the Prehistoric Aegean, Levant, Egypt and Cyprus

This research examines 44 images of Minoan tree cult as depicted in

sphragistic jewellery, portable objects and wall paintings from Late

Bronze Age Crete, mainland Greece and the Cyclades. The study also

compares the Aegean images with evidence for sacred trees in the Middle

and Late Bronze Age Levant, Egypt and Cyprus. The purpose of this

investigation is the production of new interpretations of Minoan images

of tree cult. Each of the chapters of the book looks at both

archaeological and iconographic evidence for tree cult. The Aegean

material is, in addition, examined more deeply through the lenses of

modified Lacanian psychoanalytic modelling, new animism, ethnographic

analogy, and a Neo-Marxist hermeneutics of suspicion. It is determined

that Minoan images of tree cult depict elite figures performing their

intimate association with the numinous landscape through the

communicative method of envisioned and enacted epiphanic ritual. The

tree in such images is a physiomorphic representation of a goddess type

known in the wider eastern Mediterranean associated with effective

rulership and with the additional qualities of fertility, nurturance,

protection, regeneration, order and stability. The representation of

this deity by elite human females in ritual performance functioned to

enhance their selfrepresentation as divinities and thus legitimise and

concretise the position of elites within the hegemonic structure of

Neopalatial Crete. These ideological visual messages were circulated to

a wider audience through the reproduction and dispersal characteristic

of the sphragistic process, resulting in Minoan elites literally

stamping their authority on to the Cretan landscape and hence society.