Since the earliest era of archaeological discovery on Crete, vivid renderings of animals have been celebrated as defining elements of Minoan culture. Animals were crafted in a rich range of substances and media in the broad Minoan world, from tiny seal-stones to life-size frescoes. In this study, Emily Anderson fundamentally rethinks the status of these zoomorphic objects. Setting aside their traditional classification as 'representations' or signs, she recognizes them as distinctively real embodiments of animals in the world. These fabricated animals-engaged with in quiet tombs, bustling harbors, and monumental palatial halls-contributed in unique ways to Bronze Age Aegean sociocultural life and affected the status of animals within people's lived experience. Some gave new substance and contour to familiar biological species, while many exotic and fantastical beasts gained physical reality only in these fabricated embodiments. As real presences, the creatures that the Minoans crafted artfully toyed with expectation and realized new dimensions within and between animalian identities.

"Minoan renderings of animals are some of the most vibrant art of the ancient Mediterranean. Working with current developments in material-culture studies, animal studies, and ancient art, Anderson examines these objects not as mere representations but as uniquely real embodiments of animals that made powerful contributions to sociocultural life"--

Contributions by 34 scholars are brought together here to create a volume in honor of the long and fruitful career of Guenter Kopcke who is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Articles pertain to various topics on the ancient art, architecture, and archaeology of the greater Eastern Mediterranean region: from Pre-Dynastic Egypt to the Bronze Age Aegean and Anatolia, Cyprus and the Near East, and Etruscan Italy.

The exhibition "Beyond Babylon : Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.," held in 2008 - 2009 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, demonstrated the cultural enrichment that emerged from the intensive interaction of civilizations from western Asia to Egypt and the Aegean in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. During this critical period in human history, powerful kingdoms and large territorial states were formed. Rising social elites created a demand for copper and tin, as well as for precious gold and silver and exotic materials such as lapis lazuli and ivory to create elite objects fashioned in styles that reflected contacts with foreign lands. This quest for metals--along with the desire for foreign textiles--was the driving force that led to the establishment of merchant colonies and a vast trading network throughout central Anatolia during the early second millennium B.C. Texts from palaces at sites from Hattusa (modern Bogazköy) in Hittite Anatolia to Amarna in Egypt attest to the volume and variety of interactions that took place some centuries later, creating the impetus for the circulation of precious goods, stimulating the exchange of ideas, and inspiring artistic creativity. Perhaps the most dramatic evidence for these far-flung connections emerges out of tragedy--the wreckage of the oldest known seagoing ship, discovered in a treacherous stretch off the southern coast of Turkey near the promontory known as Uluburun. Among its extraordinary cargo of copper, glass, and exotic raw materials and luxury goods is a gilded bronze statuette of a goddess--perhaps the patron deity on board, who failed in her mission to protect the ship. To explore the themes of the exhibition--art, trade, and diplomacy, viewed from an international perspective--a two-day symposium and related scholarly events allowed colleagues to explore many facets of the multicultural societies that developed in the second millennium B.C. Their insights, which dramatically illustrate the incipient phases of our intensely interactive world, are presented largely in symposium order, beginning with broad regional overviews and examination of particular archeological contexts and then drawing attention to specific artists and literary evidence for interconnections. In this introduction, however, their contributions are viewed from a somewhat more synthetic perspective, one that focuses attention on the ways in which ideas in this volume intersect to enrich the ongoing discourse on the themes elucidated in the exhibition.

In ancient Greece, epiphanies were embedded in cultural production, and employed by the socio-political elite in both perpetuating pre-existing power-structures and constructing new ones. This volume is the first comprehensive survey of the history of divine epiphany as presented in the literary and epigraphic narratives of the Greek-speaking world. It demonstrates that divine epiphanies not only reveal what the Greeks thought about their gods; they tell us just as much about the preoccupations, the preconceptions, and the assumptions of ancient Greek religion and culture. In doing so, it explores the deities who were prone to epiphany and the contexts in which they manifested themselves, as well as the functions (narratives and situational) they served, addressing the cultural specificity of divine morphology and mortal-immortal interaction. Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture re-establishes epiphany as a crucial mode in Greek religious thought and practice, underlines its centrality in Greek cultural production, and foregrounds its impact on both the political and the societal organization of the ancient Greeks.