‘From Emblem to Epic: Mycenaean Art and Mycenaean Society’

This public lecture examines how an artistic style emerged that exemplified the Mycenaean civilization in Greece during the late bronze age. The lecture explains how individuals use luxuries and other high status items to promote their social and political position so as to consolidate power over their communities and in relation to competing leaders elsewhere within the Greece. I will explain how they created both a local art and blended with the art of the palaces of Crete in order to institute a visual program within the palaces that they constructed at their capitals on the mainland of Greece. This public lecture closes with a consideration of the impact of this visual program after the fall of the palaces and the transition to the iron age that ultimately led to the epics of Homer and the rise of the Greek city-states.

The podcast of this public lecture is available in UQ eSpace