The first excavators of the two temples suggested that the ropes would have served to lift each block into place, and were subsequently extracted from the grooves once the block had been set against its neighbour. Yet scholars disagree about how these ropes would have been used, and during what stage of. ¹ Their peculiar feature is the presence of grooves plausibly explained as a way to move the blocks with ropes. The first stone ashlar blocks of Greek architecture, those of the mid-seventh-century temples at Isthmia and Corinth, pose a problem for understanding the beginnings of Greek stone construction. By focusing on swords and swordsmanship, this article seeks to use the material culture of war to illuminate the dynamic relationship between war and society in the Aegean Bronze Age. Practical functions of these weapons can be determined with the help of metric and use-wear analysis and experimental archaeology these efforts provide insights into the manner in which combat was conducted, a picture that is enhanced by iconographic, literary, and mortuary evidence. The actual weapons, particularly swords and spears, that warriors used to participate in wars survive in large quantities. To understand better the systemic and reflexive impact of warfare on social structures, consideration of the technical aspects of combat practice is important. Iconography and mortuary practice provide insights into how warrior identity and violence were materially celebrated. Warfare and combat are often considered to have played central roles in the characterization of elite identities and the social evolution of Aegean Bronze Age polities of Crete and the Greek mainland. We can only assume that the art centres whence they came were numerous” (Demargne 1964, p.

Nor have we any reliable means of tracing these objects to specific workshops in the East. Our knowledge of them is still too meagre for us to distinguish with any certainty between ‘Oriental’ or ‘Orientalizing’ or to plot out a chronological and geographical distribution of objects according to their more or less Orientalizing nature. He wrote: “It is hard to classify the Oriental objects found in Greece. Pierre Demargne took a particularly pessimistic view. It is often difficult to distinguish between the products of these cultures, even when the material is found in the Near East where there was considerable interchange of goods particularly in the early 1st millennium BC, and it is even more difficult when it is found in Greece. It is clear that many different cultures are represented: as well as Assyrian and Babylonian, there are also Phoenician, Syrian, Neo-Hittite, Urartian, Phrygian, Iranian, Caucasian and Egyptian. The second problem is to decide, if an object is Oriental, which part of the Near East it comes from. The first difficulty is to distinguish between objects imported from the Near East and those produced locally but deriving their inspiration from the Near East (Oriental versus Orientalizing). In this period, too, Oriental forms and motifs were copied or adapted to produce objects in a so-called Orientalizing style. 750–500 BC), particularly in the so-called Early Orientalizing Period, these contacts were intensified and the importation of Near Eastern luxury goods is attested by the presence of ivory plaques for furniture, bowls, cauldrons, weapons and jewellery. It is assumed these Oriental goods and influences were transmitted to Greece and the islands via the Phoenician ports on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and to a lesser extent overland through Anatolia.

1100–750 BC) and this resulted in objects of Near Eastern origin being imported into Greece well before the mid-8th century, for example ivories and metal bowls. It is well-known that close contacts between Greece and the Near East were already being forged in the Geometric Period ( c.

Greek hoplite shield design meanings