*Article* **The Obstetric Connection: Midwives and Weasels within and beyond Minoan Crete**

**Simone Zimmermann Kuoni**

Department of Classics, Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin, D02 PN40 Dublin, Ireland; zimmermb@tcd.ie

**Abstract:** The Minoan peak sanctuaries call for systematic comparative research as an island-bound phenomenon whose significance to the (pre)history of medicine far transcends the Cretan context: they yield clay anatomical offerings attesting to the earliest known healing cult in the Aegean. The peak sanctuary of Petsophas produced figurines of weasels, which are usually interpreted as pests, ignoring their association with votives that express concerns about childbirth, traditionally the first single cause of death for women. The paper draws from primary sources to examine the weasel's puzzling bond with birth and midwives, concluding that it stems from the animal's pharmacological role in ancient obstetrics. This novel interpretation then steers the analysis of archaeological evidence for rituals involving mustelids beyond and within Bronze Age Crete, revealing the existence of a midwifery *koine* across the Near East and the Mediterranean; a net of interconnections relevant to female therapeutics which brings to light a package of animals and plants bespeaking of a Minoan healing tradition likely linked to the cult of the midwife goddess Eileithyia. Challenging mainstream accounts of the beginnings of Western medicine as a male accomplishment, this overlooked midwifery tradition characterises Minoan Crete as a unique crucible of healing knowledge, ideas, and practices.

**Keywords:** midwives; Eileithyia; Minoan peak sanctuaries; Bronze Age medicine; gender studies

#### **1. Introduction**

According to evolutionary anthropologists, the conflicting conjunction of a narrow pelvis—derived from bipedal adaptation—and increased brain size resulted in difficult parturition, which is at the origins of assisted birth; namely, obligate midwifery, a therapeutic response to lessen the impact of maternal and perinatal mortality that may have been in place long before the advent of anatomically modern humans (Trevathan 1987; Rosenberg and Trevathan 2001; DeSilva 2010). The first practitioner recorded in writing is the 'wise woman' (Liturgy to Nintud, Mesopotamia, c. 2600 BCE), the expert in the core medical fields of gynaecology, obstetrics and paediatrics. Yet no attention has been paid to the therapeutic systems emerging early on to address the issues associated with gestating and birthing large helpless infants. Anthropological and comparative approaches to midwifery indicate that these medico-religious systems revolve around the cult of deities/spirits of (re)birth made in the image of the midwife. This is pertinent to Petsophas (c. 2000–1600 BCE), the Minoan peak sanctuary yielding the largest number of terracotta anatomical votives. Distinctive of Petsophas are also models of weasels, commonly interpreted as pests (Myres 1902–1903, p. 381; Evans 1921, p. 153; Mackenzie 1917, p. 275; Hutchinson 1962, p. 219; Willetts 1962, p. 72; Dietrich 1974, pp. 292, 299; Marinatos 1993, p. 117; Jones 1999, p. 33), and a largely overlooked concentration of gynaecological offerings; an association evoking the weasel's intriguing symbolic bond with childbirth and the ancestral figure of the midwife. The paper argues that their pervasive connection rests on the weasel's pharmacological use in obstetrics, which explains the animal's role as an attribute of the Cretan Eileithyia and other divine midwives. Applying this interpretation to the diachronic analysis of rituals involving mustelids beyond Bronze Age Crete leads to the identification of an animal package with a long history in midwifery cult and practice.

**Citation:** Zimmermann Kuoni, Simone. 20221. The Obstetric Connection: Midwives and Weasels within and beyond Minoan Crete. *Religions* 12: 1056. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel12121056

Academic Editors: Giorgos Papantoniou, Athanasios K. Vionis and Christine E. Morris

Received: 15 October 2021 Accepted: 19 November 2021 Published: 29 November 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

This package is associated in the Minoan votive record with depictions of plants later recorded as main gynaecological drugs in the Hippocratic texts, bespeaking of women's neglected contribution to the foundations of Western medicine. A Minoan midwifery system is thus revealed by pinpointing a distinctive insular tradition on Crete, nested in wider traditions and connectivities that are discernible across the Mediterranean and the Near East. As the paper illustrates the potential of integrative approaches to the study of peak sanctuary materials, it showcases Minoan Crete as an epistemic laboratory of the greatest significance to the (pre)history of medicine.

#### **2. Practices Relating to Midwifery at the Minoan Peak Sanctuary of Petsophas**

#### *2.1. An Extraordinary Corpus of Gynaecological Votives*

Dedicating models of body parts to supernatural healers is a very old ritual practice in the Mediterranean. In modern Greece, metal and wax anatomical *tamata* are offered to saint therapists (e.g., Panagia, Agios Panteleimonas) in request or thanks for cures and protection. For similar purposes, in Classical times worshippers offered clay and marble anatomical votives to medical deities (e.g., Asklepios, Hygeia). The prototypes of these dedications typically associated with healing cults are the clay body parts from the peak sanctuaries of Bronze Age Crete (Peatfield 2000, p. 11; Morris and Peatfield 2014, p. 61; McGeorge 1987, p. 414; 2008, p. 122), occurring alongside full-bodied figurines of worshippers, animal models and other votives.

Petsophas, serving the area of Palaikastro in northeastern Crete, is the Minoan peak sanctuary yielding by far the largest number of anatomical votives. These include legs, arms, hands, torsos, hips and lower bodies, often pierced for suspension, insightfully related to healing practices by John Myres (1902–1903, p. 381), who first excavated Petsophas at the turn of the 20th century. In the 1970s, Costis Davaras completed the excavations of the site, unearthing the largest part of the sanctuary's assemblage, still mostly unpublished.<sup>1</sup> Among these finds and the fewer published is a striking concentration of offerings suggesting childbirth-related concerns, the kind of dedications made in antiquity to deities protecting reproductive health. The corpus of gynaecological votives from Petsophas, unprecedented in the Aegean, encompasses the following material:


**Figure 1.** (**a**) Fragmentary clay figurine of a birthing female with a dilated vulva and a hand on the belly, originally seated on a stool like the one adjacent. Petsophas. Crete, 2000–1600 BCE. Archaeological Museum of Agios Nikolaos, Crete. (**b**) Drawing of clay parturient figurines—one with an emerging infant—seated on stools. Kissonerga-Mosphilia. Cyprus, c. 3000 BCE. Courtesy of Diane Bolger.

**Figure 2.** (**a**) Clay lower body models with incised female genitals, one displaying spread legs, and (**b**) clay figurines of swaddled newborns. Petsophas. Crete, c. 2000–1600 BCE. Archaeological Museum of Agios Nikolaos, Crete.

According to osteological studies, life expectancy in Bronze Age Crete was not even half that of modern Cretans, females having an average life span shorter than males, as due to the endangering hazards of pregnancy and childbirth, many women died during the stage of peak fertility between the ages of 20–25 years (McGeorge 1987, p. 408; 1988, p. 48; 2008, p. 118; Hallager and McGeorge 1992, p. 38). Such hazards gave rise to the cult of Eileithyia (McGeorge 2012, p. 293), the prehistoric Cretan goddess patterned on the midwife (Willetts 1958, p. 221), who was to be adopted into Greek religion as the primary deity of childbirth (Farnell 1896; Baur 1902; Pingiatoglou 1981). Eileithyia's cult is attested in the 2nd millennium BCE; her name (*e-re-u-ti-ja*) appears on Linear B tablets from Knossos, one mentioning the neighbouring site of Amnisos, where she had a cave sanctuary renowned in Homeric times (*Od*. 19. 188) (Ventris and Chadwick 1973, pp. 127, 310; Flouda 2011). She is the earliest known midwife goddess in Crete and, according to Warren (1970, p. 375), the only medical deity in the Linear B archives.

In Hellenistic-Roman times, on the island of Paros, Eileithyia was offered models of female breasts and hips with incised genitals (Forsén and Sironen 1991, pp. 176–77; Forsén 1996, pp. 97–100, 135), the kind of dedications made for safe birth, lactation (Wise 2007, pp. 103–16), or other gynaecological issues. Nilsson (1925, p. 30; 1950, pp. 518, 523) and Willetts (1958, pp. 221, 223, n. 16) respectively acknowledge Eileithyia as "the divine midwife" and her "obvious origin in the human midwife"; but they then argue that she was a deity of childbirth except on Paros, where she was a healing goddess because only there did she receive anatomical votives. This view is supported by other scholars (Pingiatoglou 1981, p. 88–89; Forsén and Sironen 1991; Forsén 1996, p. 135; Leitao 2007, p. 257), including Dietrich (1974, p. 87, n. 88), who—except on Paros—sees Eileithyia as a "goddess of nature". Ancient sources show, however, that this paradoxical division of her skills and roles and her association with nature rather than culture are modern perceptions obscuring data relevant to the history of medicine. On an Archaic relief amphora from the island of Tinos depicting Athena's birth, Eileithyia holds her *harpe¯*, the obstetric knife to cut the umbilical cord (Olmos 1986, pp. 686–87, 697; Étienne et al. 2013, pp. 63–65, 109–10); as we shall see, the divine midwife displays other attributes of her medical expertise. Writing on her human prototype, Plato (*Theaet*. 149c-d) says that by means of drugs and incantations, she induced labour, eased the birth pangs, promoted conception, and abortion, if needed. Soranus (*Gyn*. 1. 4) states that, when skilled, the *maia*/*obstetrix* was a general practitioner.3 In the Orphic Hymn to Protothyraia, Eileithyia is invoked as she who frees from pain those in terrible distress. Human or divine, the midwife is always a healer. The anatomical votives dedicated to Eileithyia on Paros in historical times find close parallels among the gynaecological offerings from the Minoan peak sanctuary of Petsophas, themselves pointing to her cult. Supporting this suggestion is an animal with surprising names that takes us on a journey across the Mediterranean and beyond.

#### *2.2. Kalogennousa: The Intriguing Weasel Models from Petsophas*

Along with human figurines including body parts, when excavating Petsophas, Myres unearthed clay models of cattle, goats, sheep, swine, birds, beetles, tortoises, dogs, and a creature with a pointed nose, prick-ears, long neck and tail, and a kink in the back (see Figure 3). He recorded this animal as the most common "non-domestic" species represented at the sanctuary and identified it as a mustelid, probably the *kalogennousa* (Myres 1902–1903, pp. 377, n. 2, 381), a Cretan name for the weasel meaning 'she who births well/easily'. Myres (1902–1903, p. 381) listed the *kalogennousa* models among the few finds from Petsophas difficult to interpret. Arguing that the mustelid had an evil repute among pastoral people, he deemed it "vermin", "definitely noxious", and suggested that worshippers dedicated the figurines of weasels "by way of imprecation or out of gratitude for deliverance from their ravages".

Except for a few voices recalling the animal's ancient domestic use to repel mice and/or its symbolic connotation with fertility (Rutkowski 1991, p. 36, n. 64; Watrous 1996, p. 87), archaeologists have mainly followed Myres' lead and variously portrayed the weasels4 from Petsophas as "unclean animals", "mere vermin", "bestial enemies of mankind", "lowly creatures", and "pests" (Evans 1921, p. 153; Mackenzie 1917, p. 275; Hutchinson 1962, p. 219; Willetts 1962, p. 72; Dietrich 1974, pp. 292, 299; Marinatos 1993, p. 117; Jones 1999, p. 33). No new insights have been offered on the weasel figurines from the sanctuary, nor have questions been raised as to their occurrence together with anatomical votives attesting to healing practices. Yet the role played by mustelids in Minoan ritual should not be neglected. As discussed below, Palaikastro, the settlement served by Petsophas, yielded weasel iconography and wells with remains of dedicated mustelids. And the Temple Repositories of the Palace of Knossos, the cult assemblage containing the iconic faience 'snake goddesses', included a weasel skull along with depictions of plants suggesting that the animal was neither noxious nor lowly.

**Figure 3.** (**a**,**b**) Clay models of weasels. Petsophas. Crete, c. 2000–1600 BCE. Archaeological Museum of Agios Nikolaos, Crete.

#### *2.3. Telling Names: The Lexicon of the Weasel*

While inquiring about the weasel in Crete, some people told me that "it is bad because it attacks chickens in their coop"—yet the chicken is virtually absent from the island's Bronze Age record (Reese 1990, pp. 200–2; Moody 2012, p. 240), so this could hardly have been a problem for the Minoans. Other people reported instead that the weasel is *gouri*, a bringer of good luck. Cretans have funny local names for the animal. Along with *kalogennousa*, 'she who births easily/well', they call it, or rather, her, *kalosynteknari*, 'she who is good with the infant'; *kalogynekari*, 'good little woman'; or *nyfitsa*, 'little bride', the common Greek term for the mustelid. This peculiar nomenclature would have no further significance if it were restricted only to the Aegean. But that is not the case. In an array of languages and dialectal variants over a broad geographic area stretching from the Atlantic to the Black Sea and from the Baltic to the southern shores of the Mediterranean, the weasel is regarded as female and commonly designated by names meaning 'little lady', 'little beautiful lady', 'little bride/newlywed' (Hutchinson 1966; Bambeck 1972–1974; Coseriu et al. 1979, pp. 36–37; Mesnil and Popova 1992; Witczak 2004; Kaczynska and Witczak 2007), and also 'little midwife': *comadreja* (Spanish), *kumairelo* (Tolosan), *cummatrella* (Campanian), *cumarella* (Abruzzian), *cumătri¸tă*, *cumetritl* (Romanian) (Coseriu et al. 1979, pp. 36–7; Bambeck 1972–1974), all deriving from Late Latin *commater*, 'with (the) mother'; namely, the *obstetrix*, she who stands before the mother in childbirth. Belonging to this same semantic field are the Cretan terms for the weasel *kalogennousa* and *kalosynteknari.* Why is the animal's identification with women's transition to motherhood (brides), birth and midwives imprinted in the linguistic record across Europe and beyond? Looking into this question sheds light on the joint occurrence of gynaecological and weasel votives at the Minoan peak sanctuary of Petsophas.

#### *2.4. Mustelids, Brides and Midwives: Ethnographic and Historical Sources*

Ancestral practices and beliefs often lie embedded in words. The weasel's striking lexicon brings to mind the popular Athenian ritual of the *Nyfitsa* ('little bride') still performed in the 19th century, by which the animal was ceremonially invited to partake in wedding celebrations (Rodd 1892, p. 163). The *Nyfitsa* ceremony evokes, in turn, the Hungarian custom of offering weasel furs as wedding gifts (Dömötör 1982, p. 126); the belief held in Montenegro that such furs eased delivery (Mesnil and Popova 1992, p. 96); the use of the skin of another mustelid, the otter, as a childbirth charm in the Scottish Highlands (Beith 1995, p. 180); amulets with hair of yet another mustelid, the badger, given to newly delivered mothers and their babies in the Abruzzi (Italy) (Canziani 1928); and a Renaissance custom linking the weasel to the girdle, an association we shall come across in the Minoan record. In her study on weasels and pregnancy in Renaissance Italy, Musacchio (2001) discusses weasel iconography on birth trays, inventories recording jewelled mustelid heads

as expensive bridal gifts (see Figure 4a), and portraits of wealthy ladies holding weasel pelts, at times outfitted with golden mustelid heads, which are attached to their girdles by a chain (see Figure 4b).

**Figure 4.** (**a**) Jewelled gold head of a marten. Venice, c. 1550. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; (**b**) A similar head set with mustelid fur is worn attached to the girdle by Countess Livia da Porto Thiene on the portrait with her daughter Deidamia, painted by Veronese in 1552 when the noblewoman was pregnant. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

Some art historians have interpreted these 'weasel girdles' as flea-catchers worn to draw vermin away from the body, but there are no references to such a function in contemporary texts; relying on primary sources, Musacchio (2001) argues instead that in the Renaissance mustelids served as amulets in pregnancy and childbirth. Could their apotropaic use to propitiate this risky passage explain the weasel's identification with the midwife in the linguistic record? Or is there more to it? Trota of Salerno's *De mulierum passionibus* (12th c.), a major reference on women's medicine disseminated throughout Europe by the Late Middle Ages, offers a first insight into this question. Trota, whose treatments stem from female oral lore (Green 2008, p. 58), prescribes a vaginal pessary containing weasel oil and musk to promote conception (Boggi 1979, p. 22). Beyond, or rather, beneath its apotropaic function, the weasel was then a pharmacological animal in midwifery.

When turning to Classical texts, we learn that the weasel was an attribute of Eileithyia, Hekate and Leto (Ael. *NA* 10. 47, Ant. Lib. 29. 4. 1), all goddesses of birth, the latter identified with the Egyptian Wadjet (Hdt. 2. 59). The ancient Greek name for the weasel was *gale¯*, a term also designating other mustelids and the Egyptian mongoose, the ichneumon. At Herakleopolis, the Egyptians worshipped the weasel-like ichneumon, sacred to the goddesses of birth (Clem. Al. *Protr*. 2. 39. 5, Ael. *NA* 10. 47); mummified mongooses were placed in statuettes of Wadjet (James 1982), and when children recovered from serious illnesses, ichneumons received thank-offerings of bread and milk (Diod. 1. 83). In the Greek polis of Thebes, the weasel was worshipped in honour of Galinthias (Clem. Al. *Protr*. 2. 39. 6, Ael. *NA* 12. 5), the female metamorphosed into a weasel who unblocked Alkmene's delivery of Herakles, saving mother and child from likely death. Out of gratitude, Herakles set an image of Galinthias by his house and offered her sacrifices, a cult perpetuated by the Thebans, who, before the festival of the Herakleia, sacrificed to Galinthias first (Ant. Lib. 29).

#### *2.5. Galinthias, the Oxytocic Weasel*

The myth of Galinthias (<*gale¯*, 'weasel'), recorded by various sources, is a story about obstructed labour, a main cause of maternal and foetal death. Wishing to hinder Alkmene's delivery of Herakles, Hera/Juno dispatches Eileithyia and the Moirai (Ant. Lib. 29), the Pharmakides (Paus. 9. 11. 3), or Lucina (Ov. *Met.* 9. 281–323), who, by crossing their limbs, 'lock' the parturient's womb.<sup>5</sup> But Alkmene's clever attendant, Galinthias/Galanthis, fools them. With a joyous cry in their hearing, she announces that the baby has been born, which so startles Hera/Juno's envoys that they 'unlock' their limbs, thus allowing Alkmene to bring forth Herakles. Then, in punishment for her deed, Galinthias/Galanthis is metamorphosed into a weasel. According to Ovid, the mustelid is doomed to give birth through the mouth for having assisted Alkmene by uttering a lie. In another version (Ant. Lib. 29), out of pity for the metamorphosed Galinthias, Hekate appoints the weasel as her sacred attendant.

Modern scholarship, perpetuating many a gender stereotype, tends to follow ancient authors ascribing Galinthias to the presumed female domain of magic, superstition, trickery, sorcery and deviant sexuality. The weasel is associated with witchcraft, endowed with magical potency, linked to superstitious practices owing to the blocking gestures performed by Hera/Juno's envoys, or related to miraculous birth because of the belief that the animal delivered through the mouth (Papathomopoulos 1968, pp. 134–38; Celoria 1992, p. 189; Canto Nieto 2003, pp. 205–8; Bettini 2013, p. 168). It has also been proposed that the similarity between Galinthias' name and the weasel's (*gale¯*) is accidental or assignable to false etymology (Maas 1888, p. 614; Hiller von Gärtringen 1910, p. 607; Forbes Irving 1992, p. 206). But the data examined so far suggest otherwise.

At the core of Galinthias' story lies a primary concern to women: surviving childbirth. Relevant in the myth then is not so much what obstructs Alkmene's labour, but rather who is credited for its unlikely positive outcome: a female turned into a weasel, identified with the animal. In Pausanias' account (9. 11. 3), Galinthias is called Historis, meaning 'she who knows', 'she who is skillful' (cf. Papathomopoulos 1968, p. 136), the oldest and most common name for the midwife (Stol 2000, p. 171). It may thus be inferred that Galinthias = the weasel is the practitioner able to deliver Alkmene when she is in the dire straits of stalled labour (cf. Bettini 2013, p. 247). Through metaphors embedded in Galinthias' myth, we are told that the weasel facilitates birth. In fact, the mustelid acts precisely as expressed in the linguistic record: like a 'little midwife' (Spanish *comadreja*, Tolosan *kumairelo*, Campanian *cummatrella*, Abruzzian *cumarella*, Romanian *cumătri¸tă*, *cumetritl*), a 'good birther' (Cretan *kalogennousa*), a female 'who is good with the infant' (Cretan *kalosynteknari*).

Ancient sources record the weasel as an attribute of midwife goddesses, who mirror the functions and emblems of their human counterparts. Is it possible then that the animal provided an oxytocic (<ϴξ*υς*´ , 'quick' + τóκo*ς*, 'birth'), one of those drugs stimulating uterine contractions essential in obstetrics because they hasten labour, foster placental

expulsion and reduce the incidence of postpartum haemorrhage? This was indeed the case. Pliny the Elder (*Nat.* 30. 43. 14), who draws from the vast repository of ancient Mediterranean folk medicine, reports that delivery is facilitated when the parturient has taken the liquid that flows from the uterus of a weasel by its genitals. As tame weasels were often kept within the household in antiquity (Lazenby 1949, p. 302; Kitchell 2014, p. 95), the drug would have been readily available. Scholars assume that the remedy recorded by Pliny was ineffective (French 2004, p. 54) or related to homeopathic magic (Bettini 2013, p. 98), but underestimating the efficacy of traditional animal-derived drugs without inquiring into their chemical composition may be unwise. The oral administration of the pounded tail of the opossum (*Didelphis marsupialis*) to ease birth, an ancient Mayan treatment still used in Mexican midwifery (Enríquez Vázquez et al. 2006, p. 495), has been relegated to folk beliefs (Bettini 2013, pp. 128–29); but it actually rests on sound empirical knowledge as, according to laboratory analyses, opossum tail extracts contain prostaglandins, hormone-like compounds that function as oxytocics, and are effective in very small doses when taken orally (Ortiz de Montellano 1990, p. 187).

What is significant here is that a weasel-based drug deemed an effective oxytocic was employed in ancient Mediterranean obstetrics, in all likelihood explaining why the animal was sacred to Eileithyia and cognate goddesses, its apotropaic use in pregnancy-delivery, and its remarkable lexicon. Under this new light, the joint occurrence of childbirth and weasel offerings at the Minoan peak sanctuary of Petsophas seems no coincidence. This votive association undermines the view that weasels were pests, reinforces Eileithyia's connection with the sanctuary, and raises the question as to whether the animal's tenacious bond with females, birth and midwifery has left archaeological traces across the Mediterranean basin. Let us cast a diachronic eye on mustelid figurines and bones in votive/cult and funerary assemblages beyond Crete before we zoom back to the insular Minoan record.

#### **3. Mustelids Associated with Ritual Practices beyond Minoan Crete**

Finds from the Italic peninsula provide revealing data. A temple deposit (2nd c. BCE) unearthed at the Roman site of Praeneste contained anatomical votives, including clay models of uteri; a bronze statuette likely portraying Juno; probable iron keys, typically dedicated to ease birth (i.e., 'unlock' the womb); bones of a marten or a cat; and unique clay figurines of a female with a weasel-shaped body (Tedeschi 2007). Tedeschi, who soundly interprets these figurines as depictions of Galinthias, notes the occurrence of the weasel motif on Praenestine bridal bronze caskets (*cistae*), and briefly mentions the weasels from Petsophas as an earlier example of mustelid iconography. The reported finds, notably the association of weasel figurines and gynaecological votives paralleled at Petsophas, point to the cult of a healing goddess linked to animals of the weasel family who presided over female lifecycle transitions and related concerns, possibly Juno Lucina, Eileithyia's Roman counterpart.

Of relevance here is a pattern observable in the Roman and Etruscan votive record and beyond. Mustelids are recurrently sacrificed to midwife goddesses along with tortoises, dogs, including puppies, and/or deer. All four animals, including puppies, are documented in the faunal assemblage of the Archaic temple of Mater Matuta and Fortuna at Sant'Omobono in Rome (Rask 2014, p. 293; De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti 2000, p. 393; Trentacoste 2013, p. 98, n. 44). Likewise, at the sanctuary of Pyrgi (Donati 2004, pp. 142, 146–148, 156; De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti 2006, p. 63; Trentacoste 2013, p. 98, n. 42), where a votive pit yielded remains of tortoises and anatomical votives (Belelli Marchesini and Michetti 2017, p. 480); the main deity at Pyrgi was the Etruscan Uni, identified by the Greeks with Eileithyia and Leukothea (De Grummond 2016, p. 153), the latter assimilated to Mater Matuta by the Romans (Carroll 2019, p. 3). Remains of canids, tortoises and deer, also found in the *area sacra* of Tarquinia, appear to be associated with Uni's cult (De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti 2000, p. 392; Bonghi Jovino 2005, pp. 73, 80–81; Rask 2014, p. 293); bringing to the fore Archaic relief slabs of crouching females with splayed legs and upraised arms from Tarquinian tombs, interpreted as goddesses of birth and

rebirth (Jannot 1980; Perkins 2012, pp. 159–60). Mustelid (otter) and dog bones occur at the sanctuary of Poggio Colla (Trentacoste 2013, pp. 83, 85), which yielded a stele mentioning Uni (Warden 2016, p. 213) and the stamp of a birthing female with upraised arms (Perkins 2012). Martens, badgers, canids, tortoises and deer are attested at the Etruscan sanctuary of Ortaglia (Volterra), consecrated to an unidentified goddess overseeing female concerns (Bruni 2005). Turning to the Aegean, the Acropolis sanctuary of Stymphalos (Arcadia, 4th c. BCE) produced inscriptions naming Eileithyia, snake-shaped bracelets probably offered to her for safe delivery (Young 2014, p. 143), beech marten, otter, tortoise and deer remains, many sacrificed dogs (Ruscillo 2014, pp. 250–51, 257, 266), and a puppy burial (Stone 2014, p. 329, n. 58).

The tortoise was primarily sacred to Eileithyia and cognate goddesses (Baur 1902, p. 73). Artemis Orthia (Sparta)—bearing the epithet *Chelitis* (<*chelis*, 'tortoise') (Clem. Al. *Protr*. 2. 33), Artemis Elaphebolos (Kalapodi), Artemis Laphria (Kalydon), Aphaia (Aegina) and Athena Lindia (Rhodes) received shells and/or figurines of tortoises, an animal also linked to Aphrodite Ourania (Paus. 6. 25. 1) and the Phoenician Astarte (Bevan 1988). As for dogs, according to literary evidence, the Argives sacrificed bitches to Eileithyia/Eilioneia for safe birth (Baur 1902, pp. 17, 22, 89; De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti 2006, p. 62; Bettini 2013, p. 99, n. 35). A Hellenistic well in the Athenian Agora (2nd c. BCE) contained the remains of c. 500 infants and over 150 dogs, including puppies, possibly dedicated to Hekate, Artemis or Eileithyia (Liston and Rotroff 2013). At Eretria (Euboia), where Eileithyia was worshipped (Ackermann and Reber 2018), a well associated with the Sebasteion (3rd c. BCE) yielded the bones of at least 19 infants and 26 dogs (Chenal-Velarde 2006, pp. 27–28). At Messene, the Agora well hosted the remains of several hounds and c. 264 infants (3rd-2nd c. BCE), the large number of baby bones suggesting that the well was used by "mothers and local midwives as a place of disposal of infants who died at birth" (Bourbou and Themelis 2010, pp. 115–16). Eileithyia was worshipped at Messene (Paus. 4. 31.9).

Artemis, Hekate/Enodia, Aphrodite Kolias and the Genetyllides, all goddesses protecting the birth process, received dogs-puppies in sacrifice and so did the old Roman birth deities Genita Mana and Mater Matuta (Baur 1902, pp. 17, 22, 89; Dillon 2002, pp. 246–47; De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti 2006, pp. 62–64; Trantalidou 2006; Bettini 1978, pp. 128, 130; 2013, p. 99, n. 35). Sirona, Nehalennia, Aveta, Epona and Sequana, Gallic healing goddesses who presided over human, animal and/or plant reproduction, appear represented with dogs-puppies; Sequana received anatomical votives, and Sirona is depicted with the medical serpent coiled about her arm (Gourevitch 1968, pp. 256, 275–80; De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti 2006, pp. 63–64). Two millennia earlier, in Mesopotamia, the divine physician Gula, herself a midwife (Stol 2000, p. 79), displays the dog as a sacred attribute, which is offered to her in the form of figurines and actual dogs-puppies (Ornan 2004; Böck 2014). Gula's opponent, Lamashtu, the demoness causing maternal and infant mortality and whose favourite trick was to pose as midwife (Stol 2000, p. 230), is frequently portrayed suckling puppies and piglets, possibly reflecting the ethnographically attested practice of suckling neonatal mammals to relieve breast engorgement after the death of an offspring (Wiggermann 2010). Mesopotamian, Hurrian, Hittite and Greek sources record the ritual use of puppies to heal and purify people and places (Hartswick 1990, p. 242; De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti 2006, pp. 63–64; Edrey 2008, p. 271). Puppies occur in foundation deposits (Black and Green 1992, p. 70; Ornan 2004, p. 18; De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti 2006, p. 65), and in funerary contexts (Trantalidou 2006), notably with infants, as aforementioned; altogether testifying to the animal's propitiatory role in liminal transitions, often conceived as symbolic rebirths. According to Hurro-Hittite texts, to avert evil, purify and promote new beginnings, wise women employed piglets, animals customarily offered to birth goddesses (e.g., Hannahanna/Nintu, Gulses), which occur along with puppies in votive pits and on tablets describing rituals (Collins 2006, pp.161–62, 174–75, 177).

In the Near East, the ritual association of mustelids, dogs and/or tortoises with females can be traced far back in time. At the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (southern Anatolia, 8th-6th millennium BCE), weasel skulls were embedded in plaster representations of breasts, the animals' teeth protruding from the open nipples (Mellaart 1967, pp. 101, 106, 183). The site, yielding the clay statuette of an enthroned birthing female and plaster relief figures with upraised arms, widely splayed legs and swollen bellies (Mellaart 1967, pp. 76, 139), produced the burial of a woman interred with a complete weasel, a small dog, and many owl pellets (Farid and Cessford 1999; Hamilton 1999). This remarkable grave, calling for further study, brings to mind two preceding ones in the Mesolithic Levant: an Early Natufian burial at 'Ain Mallaha (Israel, c. 12.000–10. 800 BCE) hosting the skeleton of a woman with a hand on a puppy placed above her head (Maher et al. 2011, p. 8), and an unprecedented tomb at the Natufian site of Hilazon Tachtit (Israel, c. 10.000 BCE) containing the remains of a mature woman buried with 86 tortoise shells; the skulls of two mustelids (beech marten) without skinning marks, suggesting they were interred with their skins attached; selected parts of other animals (wild boar, golden eagle, leopard, cow); a pointed bone tool and a basalt bowl fragment (Grosman et al. 2008; Grosman and Munro 2016). Since cross-cultural evidence shows that shamans are often buried with objects reflecting their medico-religious role, such as the remains of particular animals and the contents of healing kits, the woman from Hilazon Tachtit has been interpreted as a healer, a medicine-woman closely bonded to the animals that accompanied her to the afterlife (Grosman et al. 2008). In cultures the world over, midwives were shamanic practitioners with broad healing competence (Tedlock 2005; Zimmermann Kuoni 2019, pp. 56–67). The mature Natufian female could thus be a wise woman and perhaps also the female buried with a weasel and a small dog at Çatalhöyük.

Looking beyond the island boundaries of Bronze Age Crete, we have identified a transcultural set of animal associations embedded across the Mediterranean that are relevant to the cult of goddesses concerned with reproductive health. These ritual associations include mustelids, tortoises, dogs-puppies and/or deer, occasionally occurring with anatomical votives or snake iconography. In the prehistoric Levant and Anatolia, mustelids, dogspuppies and/or tortoises are connected with females, one of them consistently interpreted as a shamanic healer. Keeping in mind the weasel's oxytocic dimension in ancient obstetrics, let us zoom back to mustelids and associated finds in the Minoan votive record.

#### **4. Unravelling Evidence for a Minoan Midwifery Tradition**

#### *4.1. Petsophas-Palaikastro and Juktas*

Coming back to Petsophas, we may now safely argue that the association of gynaecological votives with weasel figurines at the sanctuary is far from coincidental: the assemblage also includes models of tortoises and dogs (Myres 1902–1903, p. 377; Rutkowski 1991, pp. 108–9, 112; Jones 1999, p. 45), which, like weasels, are sacred to Eileithyia in the historical record. Juktas, the peak sanctuary of Knossos and Archanes in north-central Crete, produced a pregnant figurine, over 60 models interpreted as embryos or women crouching in childbirth (Karetsou 1981, p. 146; Watrous 1996, p. 70); figurines with splayed legs, paralleled at Petsophas;6 models of puppies (Karetsou and Koehl 2014),<sup>7</sup> snakes (Karetsou 1974, 2018) and tortoises.8 These Minoan materials are contemporary with the dedication of dogs to the midwife goddess Gula, the foremost medical deity in Mesopotamia, and with midwifery devices from Middle Kingdom Egypt displaying tortoise and/or snake iconography; such as a baby's feeding cup, apotropaic wands to propitiate birth and the rebirth of the dead, bricks upon which women crouched during delivery, and segmented rods thought to be conceptually and functionally linked to the bricks (Wegner 2009, pp. 466, 473–74, Fig. 13; Teeter 2011, p. 169; Fisher 1968, pp. 30–32).

This brings to the fore the therapeutic dimension of the animals represented in peak sanctuary assemblages, which should not be disregarded in the context of a healing cult; all the more so considering that zootherapy was common practice in antiquity, as shown by the wealth of Egyptian animal-based drugs (Nunn 1996, pp. 137–62), or the over a hundred animal species employed in Hippocratic medicine (Von Staden 2008, p. 175). The question pending here is why tortoises and dogs-puppies are emblematic of deities patterned on the midwife. It has been suggested that the tortoise is associated with fertility because it lays many eggs (Rappenglück 2006, p. 227), but this symbolism could have stemmed from actual medical practice. In the Hippocratic Corpus, tortoise-based treatments are predominantly gynaecological—to stimulate postpartum lochia discharge and promote conception (Von Staden 2008, pp. 187, 202). The Babylonian medical compendium from Assur prescribes eating turtle meat to ease delivery (Stol 2000, p. 71) and the Ebers Papyrus a tortoise-based remedy "to release a child from the belly of a woman" (Nunn 1996, p. 195). The animal was, like the weasel, deemed an oxytocic agent. As for dogs, it is often argued that the beneficial effect of their saliva in curing wounds through licking explains the animal's bond with Gula and other healing deities (Fuhr 1977, p. 143, n. 5, 144; Böck 2014, p. 38; Ornan 2004, p. 18; Ogden 2013, p. 369, n. 113). But this might not account for the dedication of dogs-puppies to divine midwives stretching all the way from Mesopotamia to the Gaul. When turning to medical sources, we learn that in Hippocratic medicine bitch milk was used to expel the foetus (Andò 2001, p. 125, n. 283). According to Pliny (*Nat.* 30. 43. 14), bitch milk and placenta facilitate childbirth. It may be noted that bitches, not male dogs, were offered to Eileithyia/Eiloneia, Hekate, Genita Mana (Plut. *Quaest. Rom.* 52), Artemis and Enodia (Baur 1902, p. 17, n. 22; Lacam 2008, p. 43).

According to endocrinological research, breast milk contains high concentrations of oxytocin (Takeda et al. 1986). The placenta, a major endocrine organ in mammals, contains both oxytocin and high levels of prostaglandin (Fields et al. 1983; Onuaguluchi and Ghasi 1996; Burd and Huang 2011), the two chief endogenous compounds activating uterine contractions and lactation (Neville and Walsh 1996, pp. 25–26; Kota et al. 2013). The intake of placenta extract increases the opium-like substances released during childbirth, thus enhancing the tolerance to labour pains; it fosters milk secretion, may help to arrest postpartum bleeding and promote lochia discharge (Burd and Huang 2011), and effectively alleviates menopausal symptoms (Lee et al. 2009). In European, Moroccan, Nigerian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Javanese and Mexican midwifery traditions, the placenta, usually dried and pounded, was used to hasten birth, expel the dead foetus, prevent afterpains, promote lactation and treat infertility (De Nobleville and Salerne 1757, pp. 478–80; Mérat and de Lens 1837, p. 174; Croft Long 1963, p. 238; Onuaguluchi and Ghasi 1996; Burd and Huang 2011; González Casarrubios and Timón Tiemblo 2018, p. 291).

As for puppies, what about their connection with female healing practices? We may develop here Wiggermann's (2010) suggestion that the iconography of Gula's opponent (Lamashtu) suckling puppies and piglets might mirror their use as breast pumps after the loss of a nursling. The breastfeeding of puppies—and other neonatal mammals by women, encouraged by midwives and doctors until the 19th century in Europe, is performed in many cultures to develop good nipples, stimulate lactation, relieve breast engorgement after the death of an offspring, disperse mammary nodules and prevent conception (Rabdill 1976, pp. 26–27; Simoons and Baldwin 1982, pp. 429–32, 435; Gourevitch 1990, p. 94). This therapy was prescribed as well to expel the afterbirth; for example, when the writer Mary Wollstonecraft was dying of puerperal fever in 1797, the attending doctor applied puppies to her breasts in an attempt to remove the infected placenta from her womb (Tomalin 2004, pp. 280–81). As oxytocin is released in response to sucking (Neville and Walsh 1996, p. 25), breastfeeding puppies could also have been effective to induce/ease labour. Such treatments may account for the persistent connection of neonatal dogs with midwife goddesses.

Coming back to Petsophas, the dog figurines offered by worshippers at the sanctuary could refer to the animal's role in the hunt or as guardian of flocks (Myres 1902–1903, p. 381; Platon 1951, p. 111; Zeimbekis 1998, p. 253); but its therapeutic agency in cleansing/renewal/rebirth rites should also be considered in light of finds from the settlement where the worshippers lived. At Palaikastro, also yielding weasel iconography (Evely 2012, pp. 227, 252–3 Fig. 8.18; Zimmermann Kuoni 2019, p. 283, Fig. 25), two Late Minoan

wells produced bones of at least 28 dogs, including puppies, and remains of mustelids (beech martens), in some instances articulated skeletons (Wall-Crowther 2007, pp. 184, 194), indicating that the animals were carefully deposited (MacGillivray and Sackett 2007, p. 226). As argued by Cunningham and Sackett (2009, p. 91), the offering of puppies and piglets—also documented in the wells—should be regarded as part of the cultic life of the inhabitants of Palaikastro since cross-cultural parallels attest to their use in purification rites. Such rites, the Classical evidence for dog sacrifice in wells, paralleled at Palaikastro, and the animal's bond with the medical goddess Gula are recalled by Karetsou and Koehl (2014) in their discussion of the puppy models from Juktas, which underscores the dog's sacral connotations in the Aegean Bronze Age.

Arnott (2014, p. 51), who sees a pregnant figurine from Petsophas and the squatting models from Juktas as "evidence for childbirth and the work of midwives", has repeatedly postulated the existence of these practitioners in Aegean prehistory (Arnott 1996, p. 267; 1997, pp. 277–78, n. 109). He speaks of "wise women", remarking that "midwives with a much wider healing competence are well known from other early societies", such as the Hittite 'Old Woman' (Arnott 2004, pp. 162–63, n. 28); we may recall the cleansing/renewal rites involving piglets and puppies linked to the expertise of Hurro-Hittite wise women. The joint dedication of childbirth, weasel, tortoise and dog offerings at Petsophas, of dogs-puppies and mustelids in the Palaikastro wells, and of childbirth, puppy and tortoise votives at the Knossian peak sanctuary of Juktas suggests the existence of a Minoan midwifery system seemingly connected with the cult of Eileithyia, who, like Gula, is patterned on the wise woman. An iconic cult assemblage from Knossos provides further evidence for female therapeutics, including an oxytocic flower that takes us to the nearby island of Thera on a last comparative journey.

#### *4.2. From the Temple Repositories of Knossos to the Xeste 3 Frescoes at Akrotiri (Thera)*

At the heart of the Central Palace Sanctuary at Knossos, Arthur Evans (1921, pp. 463– 85) brought to light the Temple Repositories (c. 17th c. BCE), two carefully sealed stone cists containing, among others, the famous faience 'snake goddesses'; a complete weasel skull, whose function remains obscure to scholarship (see Figure 5); and deer antlers (Panagiotaki 1993, pp. 54–55, Fig. c; 1999, pp. 118–19). The bare breasts of the figurines, often regarded as symbolizing maternal and nurturing aspects of the 'snake goddesses' (Evans 1902–1903, p. 85; 1921, p. 500; Nilsson 1950, p. 85; Christou 1968, p. 145; Panagiotaki 1993, p. 54; 1999, pp. 104, 273; Jones 2001, p. 264), have traditionally been invoked to support the existence of a mother goddess central to Minoan religion (Evans 1902–1903, p. 85; 1921, p. 500; Nilsson 1950, p. 85; Christou 1968, p. 145). But the notorious absence of kourotrophic (female holding/nursing infant) images in Aegean Bronze Age iconography strongly argues against any notions of such a deity in the Minoan pantheon (Olsen 1998, p. 391; Goodison and Morris 1998, pp. 114–16; Budin 2010). Indeed, the Knossian 'snake goddesses', found with *both* weasel and deer remains, point not to the cult of a mother goddess but to the worship of a deity embodying female healing knowledge. This contention is supported by the snake-handling figurines themselves, in association with other objects in the Repositories, when addressed within the context of ancient midwifery cults and practices. Let us briefly discuss the most relevant material.

**Figure 5.** Finds from the Temple Repositories of the Palace of Knossos (c. 17th c. BCE), including the weasel skull indicated by the arrow, as arranged by Arthur Evans shortly after discovery. Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum Archive Collections, Oxford.

#### 4.2.1. Figurines of Female Snake-Handlers

Scholarly approaches to naked breasts in ancient art, heavily influenced by the Western dichotomization of women's breasts as either sexual or maternal attributes (Morris 2009, p. 243), overshadow what the Knossian figurines *are doing*. Calling for elaboration is the suggestion that they are "snake-charmers" of a religious character (Evans 1921, pp. 506–7) or participants in a snake-handling cult (Foster 1979, p. 72). In line with mainstream interpretations of the serpent when associated with prehistoric female iconography, scholarship underscores its chthonic and fertility aspects in Minoan cult (Evans 1902–1903, pp. 85, 87; Picard 1948, p. 113; Willetts 1962, p. 120; Christou 1968, p. 145; Panagiotaki 1999, pp. 104, 149; Gesell 2004, p. 132) but tends to overlook its potential medical symbolism. The snake was already a rich repository of remedies in Sumerian times (Krumholz Mc-Donald 1994), and its healing symbolism is so tenacious that, despite the reptile's negative Judeo-Christian connotations, it still signals our pharmacies. There is, therefore, no reason to assume that the serpent lacked medicinal value in the Aegean Bronze Age.

Associated with birth, rebirth and the prophetic gift, the snake was an attribute of ancient medical deities (e.g., Hygeia, Asklepios, Angitia, Bona Dea) (Ogden 2013). It has been suggested that the healing serpent of Asklepios originated in the cult of house snakes and related deities, first attested in the Aegean in Minoan Crete (Schouten 1967, pp. 35–36; Ogden 2013, p. 343); a type of cult perpetuated until the 20th century in rural Greece and the broader Balkans, where the house snake (*oikouros ophis, domachitsa*) was kept in high regard as the guardian spirit of the home (Lawson 1910, pp. 259–61; Evans 1935, p. 153). According to Greek folklore, Asklepios was a *fidopiastis*, a snake-catcher (Oikonomopoulos and Oikonomopoulou 2012, p. 696). Serpents were emblematic of snake-handling therapists across the Mediterranean, such as the *Ophiogenes* in Cyprus, the *Psylli* in Lybia, or the Italic *Marsi* linked to Angitia's cult; practitioners reputedly skilled in snake-based drugs (e.g., antidotes, *theriaca*), charming serpents and curing snake bites (Leaf 1923, p. 85; Ogden 2013, pp. 210–13; Dench 1995, pp. 24, 99, 156–74; Montinaro 1996). Similar therapists, called *serpari*, *cirauli* or *sanpaolari*, were practising until fairly

recent times in Italy (Montinaro 1996; Park 2001). There are no poisonous serpents in Crete (Weingarten 2015, p. 192) that could possibly account for a healing cult associated with the cure of snake bites in Minoan times. But the 'snake goddesses' from the Temple Repositories of Knossos strikingly resemble the Beset-type birth deities commonly featured on midwifery paraphernalia from Middle Kingdom Egypt, such as birth wands and bricks (see Figure 6).

**Figure 6.** (**a**) Drawn detail of the reconstructed faience figurine from the Temple Repositories of Knossos (Evans 1921, p. 504, Fig. 362a); (**b**) Beset-type figures portrayed on the Abydos birth brick and apotropaic birth wands from Middle Kingdom Egypt, and Beset statuette from the Ramesseum (Wegner 2009, p. 466, Fig. 10). Courtesy of Josef Wegner.

An extraordinary deposit from the Ramesseum (Luxor, 18th c. BCE), including a wooden figurine of Beset holding bronze serpents (see Figure 6b, no 12) (Quibell 1898, p. 40, Pl. 3), has been interpreted as a magician's kit (Bosse-Griffiths 1977, p. 103; Dasen 1993, p. 69; Wegner 2009, p. 482; Teeter 2011, pp. 166–67; Weingarten 2015, p. 185), the professional kit of a medical practitioner (Gardiner 1955, p. 1), a female healer (Weingarten 2015, p. 184), or the town physician or midwife, who might have assumed the role of Bes[et] to perform rituals (Dasen 1993, p. 69). The kit could indeed have belonged to a wise woman as it included apotropaic wands (Quibell 1898, p. 40, Pl. 3, Figs. 1–3) employed in (re)birth rites, ritual-medical texts recording a birth incantation, procedures to protect the newborn, the first known account of an obstetric fistula (Nunn 1996, p. 194) and a reference to mastitis (Aufrère 2010, p. 12), along with other objects relevant to midwifery.9 The Beset figurine in the Ramesseum kit has articulated arms, emphasising the capacity of the midwife goddess as a serpent-handler. It may be noted that Hittite wise women used snakes in rituals (Beckman 2016, pp. 51, 53); and that the snake motif recurs on Graeco-Egyptian and Byzantine uterine amulets used to treat female conditions (Bonner 1951; Ritner 1984; Vikan 1984; Spier 1993).

The ritual handling of snakes is a distinctively female feature of Minoan cult. In later antiquity, the handling and tending of (harmless) sacred serpents was primarily a female activity (Lawler 1946, p. 121, n. 26; Ogden 2013, pp. 201–6, 319–21, 370–71). Snake worship is attested in connection with Eileithyia's cult at Olympia; the priestess of the goddess cared for the snake Sosipolis dwelling in her sanctuary (Paus. 6. 20. 5). The many serpent bracelets found at Olympia, regarded as symbols of birth and fertility, probably relate to her cult (Bevan 1986, p. 270). They recall those likely given for safe delivery to Eileithyia at Stymphalos, occurring with mustelid, tortoise, dog and deer remains, including antlers (Ruscillo 2014, p. 251). Along with the weasel skull and deer antlers, the Knossian Repositories yielded parts of missing faience figurines, including a hand and two arms—one with a coiled snake—wearing serpentine bracelets (Panagiotaki 1999, Pl. 16e).

According to ancient medical texts, the snake was commonly employed in the treatment of female concerns. Its cast-off skin, prescribed in Hippocratic medicine to promote lochia discharge (*Morb. Mul*. 1. 78), was deemed a powerful emmenagogue and oxytocic remedy (Plin. *Nat.* 30. 43. 14, 30. 44). Pliny (*Nat.* 30. 44) reports the oral administration of snakeskins to ease parturition—strikingly paralleled in Chinese (Read 1982, pp. 33–34), Mexican (Enríquez Vázquez et al. 2006) and Filipino midwifery (Oracion 1965, p. 273)—and also the use of snakeskin girdles as birth amulets. This practice evokes the snake girdle worn by the largest figurine from the Temple Repositories (see Evans 1921, Frontispiece) and by the Egyptian birth protector Bes,<sup>10</sup> the male counterpart of the snake-handling Beset, superseding her in the 1st millennium BCE. According to Greek folklore, in his capacity as a *fidopiastis* ('snake-catcher'), Asklepios assisted women in hard labour by attaching snakeskin girdles to their loins or by placing on their belly a live serpent. The animal would henceforth remain in the home as the house snake (*spitofido*), a domestic protector not kept by childless couples (Oikonomopoulos and Oikonomopoulou 2012, p. 696), leaving one to wonder whether that was because the barren did not require a regular provision of sloughs. The pharmacological and related apotropaic use of snakeskins to ease birth is deeply embedded in the Mediterranean. Both have survived throughout the basin until the 20th century (Kristi´c 1955; Gélis 1976, p. 326; 1986, pp. 44–45; Gicheva-Meimari 2002, p. 929; Musset 2004, p. 430); in modern Greece, the *fidopiastes* supplied snakeskin girdles in case of dystocia (Oikonomopoulos and Oikonomopoulou 2012, pp. 696–97). Though not in connection with the Knossian 'snake goddesses', Evans (1935, pp. 168, 183, n. 2) reported that in Crete, snakeskins "are still preserved as possessing certain curative or apotropaic virtues", and in the spring, young men of courting age hung them up on trees as charms "for the girls to look at". Such charms were not just looked at. The snakeskin, called *poukamiso* ('shirt') or *fidotomaro*, was used in Crete to treat persistent fever (Rigatos 2005, p. 361) and reproductive issues; elderly villagers still remember the customary feeding of snakeskins to female animals (e.g., ewes, does) as an effective emmenagogue promoting mating and conception. Considering their widespread gyneacological uses, serpent sloughs might contain some uterotonic agent—prostaglandins, oxytocin?—yet to be (re)discovered by modern clinical research.

#### 4.2.2. Deer Antlers

The Knossian Repositories yielded three roe deer antlers (Panagiotaki 1999, p. 118, 172). It has been proposed that they reflect "an aspect of the natural world" or are "talismans to ensure success in the hunt" (Panagiotaki 1999, p. 118). However, hunting is a practice holding a rather residual place in Minoan ideology (Krzyszkowska 2014) and the deer, not native to Crete, has left little trace in the island's Bronze Age faunal record, suggesting that the animal was imported for reasons other than economic, possibly including its symbolism (Jarman 1996, p. 219; Harris 2014, p. 50; Harris and Hamilakis 2014, pp. 99–102). Deer antlers were offered to the Etruscan Uni, the Roman Mater Matuta and Fortuna (Bonghi Jovino 2005; Bruni 2005, p. 21), together with mustelids, tortoises and dogs. Such dedications are paralleled at the Stymphalos sanctuary where Eileithyia was worshipped, shifting again the attention to medical practice. Deer-based remedies

are exclusively gynaecological in the Hippocratic Corpus (Andò 2001, pp. 267, 294). Deer suet and marrow recur in pessaries for uterine inflammations to promote menstruation, conception and lochia discharge (Von Staden 2008, pp. 185–86, 200–1; Temkin 1991, p. 222). Roasted/burned and administered orally or in fumigations, deer antlers were used to regulate menstruation (Hipp. *Morb*. *mul.* 2. 192, 195, 199, Dsc. *Mat. med*. 2. 63, Plin. *Nat.* 28. 77. 19). In traditional Chinese medicine, they are prescribed in the treatment of gynaecological disorders and male impotence (Rehman et al. 2013), a clinical study suggesting that antler velvet products may "produce anti-inflammatory compounds that assist in the regulation of prostaglandins" (Rehman et al. 2013, p. 90; Nezhat et al. 2012). It has been proposed that the deer's close bond with Artemis—often identified with Eileithyia—explains its relevance in the Hippocratic treatment of uterine disorders (Von Staden 2008, p. 186). But it may conversely be argued that the animal was emblematic of midwife goddesses because it belonged to the pharmacopoeia of wise women.

#### 4.2.3. Seashells

Seashells, found in abundance in the Temple Repositories (see Figure 5) (Evans 1921, pp. 498, 517–19; Panagiotaki 1999, pp. 78–81), occur with periparturient figurines in Neolithic Crete at Phaistos (Mosso 1908; Pernier 1935, pp. 105–6; Todaro 2012) and in the birth deposit from Kissonerga-Mosphila in Chalcolithic Cyprus (Sharpe 1991). In the East, they are offered primarily to female deities (Panagiotaki 1999, p. 130); at Mari, conch shells and objects made from seashells were given to Ninhursag (Sanavia and Weingarten 2016, pp. 337–38), also known as Nintu, the first recorded (divine) healer.11 The Sumerian ideogram for 'pregnancy' and 'shell' is identical: it represents a body with water in it (Stol 2000, pp. 51–52). Shells were involved in Mesopotamian birth rituals (Stol 2000, p. 52), and girdles with attached cowries, associated with notions of birth and rebirth, were worn for protection during pregnancy-childbirth in Egypt (Golani 2014; Quirke 2015, p. 60). In Classical antiquity, the cowrie (Latin *matriculus*) was among the shells symbolizing the vagina/womb (Stol 2000, p. 52; Golani 2014). Pounded shells recur in Mesopotamian, Classical and later gynaecological recipes (Steinert 2012; Lev 2003, p. 110). To treat pregnancy bleeding, Hippocratic and later medical authors (Cyranides, Alexander) prescribe pessaries with pounded cuttlefish bone (Voultsiadou 2010, p. 245), still administered orally in the 1960s by Cretan midwives as an "excellent remedy" for postpartum haemorrhage (Karatarakis 1962, p. 24). Like seashells, the cuttlebone contains mainly calcium carbonate (Ivankovic et al. 2009, p. 1040), which improves gestational and birth outcomes when taken as a supplement during pregnancy (De-Regil 2013).

#### 4.2.4. Depictions of Robes and Girdles

Together with the weasel skull, deer antlers and shells, the Knossian Repositories contained faience models of dresses and girdles, some decorated with crocuses (see Figure 5) (Evans 1921, pp. 505–6; Panagiotaki 1993, 1999, pp. 101–3). We may recall the Renaissance girdles attached to weasels, serving as amulets in pregnancy and childbirth (Musacchio 2001). An ancient marker of reproductive maturity (Lee 2015, p. 135), the girdle is a garment closely bonded with women's rites of passage, whose apotropaic dimension has survived into present times. In Greece, Agia Zoni ('Saint Girdle') is said to bestow strength on children (Handaka 2006, p. 104) and aid in conception and delivery. The belts of Christian saint deliverers of women in travail were placed on the parturients' belly to ease birth (Gélis 1986, p. 44); Cretan midwives borrowed the priest's belt to incense it over women in hard labour (Karatarakis 1962, p. 36). Medieval prayer rolls served as birth girdles (Musacchio 2001, p. 185; Jones and Olsan 2015, pp. 424–27). In ancient Egypt, the amulet depicting the girdle of the healing goddess Isis (*tyet*) was deemed to staunch obstetrical haemorrhage (Nunn 1996, p. 110); plausibly depicting a looped, loosely tied cloth (Quirke 2015, p. 58), the *tyet* "may evoke general use of cloth at menstruation, or specific bandaging in extremes, above all at birth" (Quirke 2015, p. 60; citing Westendorf 1965). In Classical antiquity, the girdle signalled the transition to puberty and marriage-motherhood. Callimachus

(Fr. 620 A) refers to a prepubescent girl as *azostos* ('without a *zone* = belt'). Tying on the *zone* was an act signifying a girl's sexual maturity (Lee 2015, p. 135), and loosening it symbolic of consummation (Hersch 2010, pp. 109–12) and easy delivery (Baur 1902, p. 67). The Minoan peak sanctuary of Vrysinas in western Crete yielded figurines of female worshippers with tied and loose girdles, which may reflect initiation rituals, as suggested by I. Tzachili (pers. commun. 2017). In historical times, out of gratitude for surviving parturition, women who 'loosened the girdle for the first time' (primiparae) dedicated their girdles (Sch. A. R. 33. 13–14), robes and jewels to goddesses protecting birth (Rouse 1902, p. 252; Baur 1902, p. 67). Eileithyia, who bore the epithet *Lysizonos*, 'Girdle-Loosener' (Theoc. *Id.* 17. 60–63), was offered clothes pins at Sparta, suggesting the dedication of related garments, like those given to Artemis at Brauron (Kilian 1978, pp. 220–21). As argued by Warren (1988, p. 22), such practices may be continuities from the Bronze Age; Eileithyia's Cretan cave sanctuary at Tsoutsouros yielded Late Minoan-type gold rosettes that used to be sown/pinned to clothes (see Kanta 2011b, pp. 160–61). The models of robes adorned with saffron flowers from the Knossian Repositories may, like the girdles, have a bearing on women's maturation rites. Similar garments are worn by females thought to participate in initiation rites to menarche and motherhood on the Bronze Age frescoes from Xeste 3 at Akrotiri on Thera, addressed below. In later Greece, girls undergoing their puberty initiation at Brauron wore a saffron-dyed robe (*krokotos*), the crocus having a special significance in such rites because it relieves menstrual pains (Lee 2015, p. 200).

#### 4.2.5. Medicinal Plants

Along with the crocus-decorated garments, the Temple Repositories yielded models of crocuses, lilies, pomegranates, and a vessel with a spray of rose leaves (Evans 1921, pp. 499–500; Panagiotaki 1993, 1999, pp. 75–77, 91, no195). The rose is referenced over ninety times in the Hippocratic Corpus, exclusively in gynaecological treatments (Andò 2001, p. 242). Dioscorides (*Mat. med.* 1. 53) prescribes *rosaceum* oil to soothe irritations of the vulva, and Soranus in contraceptive pessaries, remedies for uterine haemorrhage, womb inflammations, drying up breastmilk, skin ulcers in infants, and gonorrhoea (Temkin 1991, pp. 227–28). According to modern research, rose tea alleviates primary dysmenorrhoea (Tseng et al. 2005), recurrent menstrual pain. Roses feature on the Fresco of the Garlands from the North Building at Knossos together with lilies, crocuses, papyri and greenish leaves that might stand for dittany, myrtle or olive (Warren 1985, pp. 193–204; 1988, p. 24). Warren (1988, pp. 24–27), who includes the collection and dedication of flowers (e.g., in bunches, wreaths) among the characteristic rituals of Minoan religion, argues that the symbolic value of the plants involved in such ceremonies derived from their perceived usefulness and efficacy. Noting that lily, dittany, withy/osier, pomegranate and myrtle were associated with childbirth and menstruation in antiquity, he suggests that the wreaths on the Fresco of the Garlands relate to the cult of one or several Minoan goddesses as, in historical times, Eileithyia, Diktynna, Ariadne and Europa-Hellotis were garlanded with plants symbolic of fertility, such as dittany, pine, mastic and/or myrtle (Warren 1985, pp. 202, n. 59, 205; 1988, p. 26).

The pomegranate, occurring in the Temple Repositories in the form of bud models (Evans 1921, p. 496), is an attribute of Eileithyia (Buffa 1933; Pfiffig 1975, p. 307; Jannot 1980, p. 616) and other goddesses overseeing human, plant and/or animal (re)birth (e.g., Hera, Demeter, Persephone, Aphrodite, Artemis) (Sourvinou-Inwood 1978; Preka-Alexandri 2010; Senkova 2016; Greco 2016). In antiquity, it was used to expel the foetus and the placenta, treat uterine conditions, and as a contraceptive (Riddle 1991, p. 11; 1992, pp. 25–26, 93–94; Nixon 1995, p. 86); according to modern research, pomegranate extract stimulates uterine contractions (Promprom et al. 2010; Kupittayanant et al. 2014, pp. 531, 534), its female sex hormones accounting also for its effectiveness as a contraceptive (Riddle 1991, p. 12; Nixon 1995, p. 86). While the pomegranate is regarded as a symbol of fertility because of its many seeds and blood-red juice (Greco 2016, p. 188; Ward 2003, p. 532), this symbolism could also have to do with its long-recognised oxytocic properties. Like other life-giving midwifery

drugs—and instruments—the pomegranate played a role in lifecycle transitions conceived as symbolic rebirths. Depictions of the fruit occurring in ancient funerary contexts, in Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean (Immerwahr 1989; Ward 2003), might have symbolically fostered rebirth into the afterlife. In modern Greece, the pomegranate is shared by newlyweds, laid on the bier of the deceased, and is an ingredient in the *kollyba*, the customary funerary meal (Lawson 1910, pp. 13, 535, 559). The fruit is still hung or smashed on the threshold of the home to propitiate the New Year's (re)birth.

The lily models from the Repositories (Evans 1921, pp. 499–500; Panagiotaki 1999, pp. 75–76) find parallels at Petsophas. Together with the crocus, it is one of the most common plants in Aegean Bronze Age iconography, a sacred flower appearing as tribute to the deity, associated with cult objects (Marinatos 1984, p. 89; Warren 1985, pp. 203–4; Phitos 2010), and the floral motif par excellence on Late Minoan larnakes, likely symbolizing regeneration/rebirth (Watrous 1991, p. 295). The lily has pervasive historical connotations with childbirth. According to Greek mythology, the Milky Way (*Galaxias* < *gala*, 'milk') was formed by a squirt of Hera's breastmilk, lilies sprouting from the drops fallen on earth (Chirassi 1968, p. 105; Phitos 2010, p. 105). Busts crowned with lilies, periparturient figurines and keys were offered to Hera-Eileithyia for safe delivery at the Heraion at Foce del Sele (Poseidonia/Paestum) (Zancani Montuoro and Zanotti-Bianco 1951, pp. 14–15; Stoop 1960, pp. 24–41). In the Christian tradition, the Madonna Lily embodies the mystery of the Incarnation and is the flower of the Annunciation (Phitos 2010, pp. 114–15); thence the Cretan expression *myrise ton krino*, 'she smelled the lily', meaning, ironically, that a woman got pregnant. The lily is mainly a gynaecological drug in the Hippocratic Corpus (Andò 2001, p. 291). Its oil, the *sousinon*, deemed most effective to treat female ailments (Dsc. *Mat. med*. 1. 62), is recorded as an emmenagogue and an oxytocic by Pliny (*Nat*. 21. 74) and Soranus (Temkin 1991, p. 228).

As for the crocus, proven to be a powerful oxytocic by modern research (Javadi et al. 2013), it is the most represented plant in the Knossian Repositories. Prescribed as an oxytocic in Babylonian medicine (Ferrence and Bendersky 2004, p. 207), it was used throughout antiquity to induce parturition and abortion, arrest uterine haemorrhage, as an emmenagogue and a painkiller in menstruation and childbirth. Archaeologists have recognised these gynaecological applications in the context of the Xeste 3 frescoes from Akrotiri (Thera) interpreted as initiation rituals to menarche and motherhood, which depict prepubescent to mature females—some wearing crocus-decorated garments—who are engaged in the harvest and dedication of saffron to a goddess (Cameron 1978, p. 582; Marinatos 1984, pp. 64–65; Amigues 1988, p. 237; Ferrence and Bendersky 2004, pp. 207–17; Forsyth 2000, pp. 152–53, 162, 164; Rehak 2002, pp. 48–50; 2004, p. 92; Kopaka 2009, p. 192).

It has surprisingly gone unnoticed that four other plants featured on the Xeste 3 frescoes, either as offerings to the goddess or decorating the depicted altar, wall backgrounds, garments or jewellery, were themselves main midwifery drugs: the lily and the rose;12 the iris,<sup>13</sup> an exclusively gynaecological plant in the Hippocratic Corpus (Andò 2001, p. 301), recorded as an emmenagogue and an oxytocic by Dioscorides (*Mat. med.* 1. 1, 1. 66) and Soranus (Temkin 1991, pp. 227–78); and, last but not least, vitex,14 used in Babylonian midwifery (Steinert 2012; Böck 2013, p. 44 n. 64) and predominantly gynaecological in the Hippocratic texts, which was prescribed as an emmenagogue, oxytocic, galactagogue and fertility enhancer (Von Staden 1993, pp. 26–27; Nixon 1995, p. 87). Called *lygos* (modern *lygaria*), vitex was involved in Spartan maturation rites presided by Artemis Orthia, to whom the plant was sacred (Calame 1997, pp. 135, 163–64), and whose sanctuary also hosted the cult of Eileithyia (Kilian 1978). The *lygos* was sacred to the Samian Hera (Paus. 7. 4. 4, 8. 23. 5), who was offered pomegranates, poppies (Kyrieleis 1993, pp. 138–39) and anatomical models, including female genitalia (Senkova 2016, pp. 33–34). Lastly, vitex was associated with the most widespread Greek festival, the all-female Thesmophoria, in honour of Demeter. During this celebration propitiating human and agricultural reproduction, women congregated in the wildness, slept on *lygos*-strewn couches, uttered ritual obscenities, sacrificed piglets and imitations of snakes, ate pomegranate seeds and cakes

shaped as female genitalia (Burkert 1985, pp. 242–46; Von Staden 1993, pp. 37–40; Dillon 2002, pp. 110–20).15

#### **5. The** *Materia Medica* **of Minoan Midwives and Crete's Identity as a Foremost Drug-Bearer**

On the above-discussed frescoes from Xeste 3, contemporary with the Knossian Repositories, there is not one but five plants composing a pharmaceutical kit to ease women's hazardous transition to menarche, pregnancy, parturition, postpartum and lactation: crocus, lily, rose, iris and vitex. The Xeste 3 goddess has been interpreted as a mistress of nature (Marinatos 1984, p. 70), a mistress of animals or *Potnia theron* (Marinatos 1976, p. 33; Cameron 1978, p. 582; Rehak 1999, p. 12; Chapin 2010, p. 227), and as a medical deity owing to the manifold applications of saffron in ancient therapeutics (Ferrence and Bendersky 2004). On account of the specifically female herbal kit linked to her cult, the Xeste 3 goddess is most probably a divine wise woman, the type of deity overseeing female rites of passage. Several scholars highlight the economic importance of saffron as both a dye and a medicinal agent in the Aegean Bronze Age (Goodison and Morris 1998; Day 2011). The Xeste 3 goddess may have presided over the (re)productive cycle of this precious commodity on Thera. According to Marinatos (1976, p. 36) and Doumas (1992, pp. 130–31, 162, Fig. 125), she is crowned by a rearing snake. The figurine from the Temple Repositories wearing the serpent-plaited girdle (see Evans 1921, Frontispiece) displays a snake on her headdress.

The Knossian 'snake goddesses', traditionally ascribed to the cult of a conjectured mother goddess, are represented with the crocus, lily and rose, included in the Xeste 3 healing kit; the pomegranate, weasel, deer and snake, all midwifery pharmacological agents linked to the historical Eileithyia; garments used in female initiations; and shells, fulfilling pharmacological and apotropaic functions in birth-midwifery across the ancient world. The Knossian figurines, schematically paralleled on midwifery instruments from Middle Kingdom Egypt, recall the snake-handling Beset statuette from the Ramesseum kit including midwifery paraphernalia. They also bring to mind the ritual use of snakes by Hittite wise women—employing as well piglets and puppies—and the priestess of Eileithyia tending her sacred serpent at Olympia. It is likely then that the 'snake goddesses' mirror Minoan healers attached to Eileithyia's worship. They may be practitioners like the Mesopotamian midwives officiating in the cult of Nintu (Stol 2000, p. 76; Westenholz 2013, p. 248), the Sumerian Creator goddess who fashions humans from clay through her midwifery skills; or like the nu.gig/*qadishtu*, the 'sacred women' performing as midwifepriestesses in the cult of Ninisina/Gula, "the midwife of the mothers of the land, the great physician of humankind" (Stol 2000, pp. 79, 112, 116), who is associated with dogs-puppies and the 'dog's tongue', a plant prescribed for women in hard labour (Stol 2000, pp. 54, 131, 133; Böck 2014, pp. 141, 153–54). Leading us to the Knossian Repositories were the weasel figurines from the peak sanctuary of Petsophas, occurring with childbirth, tortoise, dog and lily offerings, themselves likely indicators of Eileithyia's worship. This same cult is suggested at the related site of Palaikastro by the joint dedication of dogs-puppies and martens in wells. And Eileithyia may also have been worshipped at Juktas, the Knossian peak sanctuary yielding childbirth votives, models of puppies, tortoises and snakes.

We seem to have here a ritual package of animals and plants belonging to the *materia medica* of Aegean Bronze Age midwives. Related to their expertise are at least two other drugs: dittany and the opium poppy.16 Endemic of Crete and the island's most celebrated herb in antiquity, dittany, offered in wreaths to Eileithyia, was sacred to the goddess because it was deemed to soothe the pangs of childbirth (Warren 1985, p. 202, n. 59). In the Hippocratic texts, this Cretan herb is prescribed exclusively in gynaecological treatments (Andò 2001, p. 277). The slit poppy capsules crowning the tiara of the Late Minoan 'Poppy goddess' from Gazi attest to the use of the plant's analgesic sap (Marinatos 1937). Poppies and another gynaecological plant, lilies, are offered by two women and a girl to a likely birth goddess on a signet ring from Mycenae featuring metonymical depictions of Taweret (Younger 2009), the Egyptian birth goddess transformed into the Minoan Genius

(Weingarten 1991). The opium poppy, employed primarily for female complaints in the Hippocratic Corpus (Guerra Doce 2006, p. 141), is the source of the strongest modern pain relievers—morphine and other opiates.

In Classical antiquity, Crete was praised as the richest place in medicinal herbs (Theophr. *HP* 9. 16. 3, Plin. *Nat.* 25. 53), first among them the oxytocic dittany (Theophr. *HP* 9. 16. 1). Plants become drugs when their healing properties are tested, recognised and consistently applied in therapeutics. Therefore, Crete's identity as a unique repository of herbal medicine implies the existence of a venerable indigenous healing tradition long renowned beyond the island. Floral offerings and settings are the exclusive domain of females in Minoan iconography (Goodison and Morris 1998, p. 128), probably reflecting a gendered epistemic phenomenon: herbal knowledge, customarily transmitted along the female line (Blum and Blum 1965, pp. 170, 183; Faure 1973, p. 326), was largely the province of women because they regularly used plants to treat reproductive-related conditions (Willetts 1962, pp. 79, 160). The evidence for a Minoan midwifery tradition unravelled in this paper strongly suggests that the lore of indigenous wise women, passed down through the ages, played a major role in building Crete's historical reputation as a foremost drug-bearer.

#### **6. Conclusions**

The view that the clay weasels from Petsophas represent pests shows that regarding Minoan peak sanctuaries as conceptually isolated 'islands' obscures the understanding of the ritual language expressed by their extraordinary offerings. Healing practices underlying votive associations come to light when focusing on connectivities, namely when peak sanctuary materials are addressed comparatively both within and beyond Crete, and by taking a deep and wide time frame. Applying this integrative approach for analysing the joint occurrence of weasel and gynaecological votives at Petsophas has proved fruitful. It has led to the identification of evidence for a ritual healing package in the Aegean Bronze Age that includes the weasel, tortoise, dog-puppy, deer, snake, crocus, lily, rose, iris, vitex, pomegranate, dittany and opium poppy, animals and plants which are the source of important or exclusively gynaecological drugs in the Hippocratic Corpus (5th–4th c. BCE) and/or other medical texts.

The identification of this overlooked Minoan midwifery package lends material support to a claim so far unaddressed but most significant to the interpretation of women's neglected role in the history of medicine: that Hippocratic gynaecological pharmacopoeia originated in earlier female lore passed down orally (Rousselle 1980; Demand 1994, p. 63). The Hippocratic gynaecological texts compose the largest body of homogeneous subject matter within the Corpus (Hanson 1975, p. 568). They include the two oldest Hippocratic treatises, *Nature of Women* and *Diseases of Women* (Grensemann 1975; Andò 2001, pp. 10–11, 29–30), namely, the foundational core of Western (written) medicine. These texts record ancestral *materia medica* of midwives, the first attested healers. Midwifery lore is extremely persistent and may traverse the millennia virtually unchanged unless new technological paradigms set in (e.g., biomedicine). This tenacity is illustrated, for instance, by the evidence for infant swaddling at Petsophas, the pharmacological and apotropaic applications of snakeskins to ease birth/induce menstruation, or the use of mustelid pelts as birth amulets, all practices perpetuated in the Mediterranean until the 20th century. Enduring symbols do not stem from sheer imagination or unwarranted beliefs. The origin of pervasive emblems of birth-midwifery, like the weasel, dog, snake, lily or pomegranate, often ascribed vague 'fertility' connotations, is to be sought in the material responses they provided to women's pressing health concerns; responses available within the household, resting on sound empirical knowledge in the case of the placenta, crocus, vitex, poppy, pomegranate and rose, confirmed as effective gynaecological drugs by modern research.

The Minoan therapeutic package brought to light in this paper reveals the existence of a midwifery *koine* stretching in antiquity from Mesopotamia to the Western Mediterranean, as shown by the association of dogs-puppies with divine midwives all the way from

Babylonia to Gaul; the cross-cultural use of puppies for cleansing/healing purposes; shared gynaecological applications of animals (e.g., tortoises in Egyptian, Babylonian and Classical treatments) and plants (e.g., crocus, vitex and pomegranate in Mesopotamian and Classical remedies); or the widespread use of shells in birth-related practices. According to the examined data, the oldest recognisable elements of this midwifery *koine* are tortoises, mustelids and dogs-puppies. Bones of these animals are associated with females in the Mesolithic Levant, in one instance (tortoises and mustelids) linked to a woman interpreted as a shamanic healer. They are also linked to females in Neolithic Anatolia (mustelids and dogs-puppies), prefiguring the historical connection of puppies with wise women in the region. Then, at the turn of the 2nd millennium BCE, the three animals emerge together on the northeastern coast of Crete, indicating close indigenous contacts with Eastern therapeutics. This loan, however, is incorporated within a genuinely Minoan healing cosmology. Weasel, dog and tortoise figurines appear at Petsophas alongside an unprecedented type of artefact distinctive of the peak sanctuaries, bespeaking of a full-blown, highly elaborated therapeutic system: anatomical offerings. To judge by their enduring use, these embodiments of wishes or thanks for well-being are a brilliant invention consistently satisfying spiritual needs; in Crete and broader Greece, dedicating anatomical ex-votos is still a favoured mean to negotiate help and protection with supernatural healers. A new ritual language, still 'spoken' today in modern ways, was thus inaugurated by Minoan worshippers at the peak sanctuaries, the first known shrines to yield anatomical offerings. Lying at the crossroad of Asia, Africa and Europe, the island of Crete was strategically gifted to become a major cultural hub, interacting with and interconnected with cultures across the Eastern Mediterranean. But it was the creative vitality of Minoan culture that made the island a unique testing ground of therapeutic knowledge, ideas and behaviours.

**Funding:** This paper presents the core topic of my doctoral research, 'Midwives of Eileithyia: Tracing a female healing tradition in prehistoric Crete', funded by the A. G. Leventis Foundation with a Scholarship in Hellenic Studies.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** I am grateful to the editors and reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Many thanks go to Christine Morris, Alan Peatfield, Kleio Zervaki, Iris Tzachili, Katerina Trantalidou, Sandy MacGillivray, Athanasia Kanta, Robert Koehl, David Reese, Toni Ñaco del Hoyo, Miquel Molist, Josef Wegner, Elizabeth Goring, Diane Bolger, Tatiana Poulou, Denise Alevizou, Panos Angelidis, Kalliopi Zafeiropoulou, Predrag Kilibarda and Marco Zimmermann for their valuable support.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

#### **Notes**


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### *Article* **Neolithic Ritual on the Island Archipelago of Malta**

**Simon Stoddart**

Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1TN, UK; ss16@cam.ac.uk

**Abstract:** This paper addresses the ritual of Neolithic Malta in its island context drawing on recent research by the FRAGSUS project. Ritualised club houses placed in horticultural enclosures formed the focal point of the prehistoric Maltese landscape in the fourth and third millennia BC, providing a stable exploitation of the islands by the small populations of the period. This was a period when connectivity was more challenging than in the Bronze Age which followed, when Malta became part of the wider ritual patterns of the central Mediterranean and beyond. The paper provides discussion of the leading issues and arguments applied to this rich case study of island ritual.

**Keywords:** club house; connectivity; Malta; Mediterranean; ritual

#### **1. Introduction**

It has often been remarked that something rather special, perhaps even unusual, happens in the ritual sphere on islands in prehistory. It is an empirical observation that islands have disproportionately large numbers of prehistoric ritual monuments. This observation has been noted from as far afield as Polynesia with examples such as Hawaii (Kirch 1990) and Easter Island (Boersema 2015). The same observation has been made of islands of the Mediterranean with examples that range from the Balearics (Lewthwaite 1985) to Sardinia (Tinè and Traverso 1992) and to our case study of Malta (Figure 1). This raises questions of why this should be so. Do islands as different in size and isolation as Easter Island and Sardinia have something physically or biogeographically in common that transcends time or is the comparison more in the mind, a social construction of reality, heavily dependent on the socio-political context in which they are situated? We collect together the data and interpretations here for Malta so that readers can address this debate with the most up-to-date information and interpretations, and so that they can come to their own conclusions for an archipelago at the smaller end of the spectrum.

**Citation:** Stoddart, Simon. 2022. Neolithic Ritual on the Island Archipelago of Malta. *Religions* 13: 464. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel13050464

Academic Editors: Giorgos Papantoniou, Athanasios K. Vionis and Christine E. Morris

Received: 3 October 2021 Accepted: 28 March 2022 Published: 20 May 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

**Figure 1.** The Maltese islands. The location of club houses, traditionally known as temples.

#### **2. The Relationship between Past and Present**

Ethnography (a study of the present or near present) has often been studied as a guide to island society. The work of the late Marshall Sahlins is one important example of the way in which the socio-political history of islands, from an anthropological perspective, has been very influential. His early work looked at the relationship between size and socio-complexity, taking an ecological perspective (Sahlins 1963). His later work looked at the complex interaction between different types of society in an island world, clarifying their sense of difference, of identity, particularly when connectivity led to the meeting of different worlds (Sahlins 1981; Sahlins et al. 1995). Other work has also shown the entanglement of radically different worlds (Thomas 1991). In our study of prehistoric Malta, we have to clarify that sense of difference. For this purpose, Malta is fortunate to have its own distinguished ethnographer in the late Jeremy Boissevain (e.g., Boissevain 1980), who identified patterns of ritual distributed across the landscape that have an uncanny topological similarity to the patterns of the prehistoric past. Yet, as we will explore, whereas some of the structural scales may have been similar, the ritual content and periodicity of prehistoric Malta was radically different from the village religions of the twentieth century (Barratt et al. 2018). Boissevain (1996) first expected the rituals that he studied in the 1960s to fade away in a more globalised world. In fact, ritual identity became more accentuated, as Malta became more globalised. Did that same pattern apply to the prehistoric past? As another Maltese ethnographer has explained, ritual mediates between the global and the local (Mitchell 2002) in the modern world. Do the same criteria apply to the prehistoric world?

Indeed, an important pertinent issue is that the conditions of connectivity on islands in prehistory were somewhat altered from those of the present day. We have to transport ourselves into a different world. Islands today have lost a major component of their maritime character, namely the adventure of access, because of the power of air travel, where the maritime features are only regained when the aerial travellers end up on the beach. The difference between past and present is one of the controversial features in explaining the ancient character of islands and the case of prehistoric Malta powerfully illustrates that issue (Evans 1973; Bernabò Brea 1960; Malone and Stoddart 1998; Robb 2001; Malone and Stoddart 2004; Malone et al. 2020a; Dawson 2021). The issue of the level of connectivity is an element that divides a number of these authors in their interpretation of the ritual creativity of island life. It dwells on how much the cultural achievements and characteristics of humans outweigh or interact with the impact of biogeography. In the case of Malta, what is clear is that the technology of both island resilience and travel changed radically between the early Neolithic settlers of the c. 6000 BC and the early state societies of c. 1000 BC. The navigational and other boating skills of the sixth millennium BC made visits to the island of Malta a substantial venture and a degree of fragile existence once agriculture was established, so that most regular resources had to be locally procured. The navigational and other boating skills of the first millennium BC made crossings from the nearest larger land masses much less of a risk and began a process of regular procurement of external resources that allowed much higher and potentially more stable population levels. The transition from one level of connectivity to another over the course of the fourth to second millennium BC was complex, but we can now draw on data that are both cultural and biological. From a modern perspective, where it is easy (at least outside COVID-19 times) to arrive in Malta from most places in Europe, it is more difficult to imagine how the embedded cultural physicality of the Maltese islands contributed to the creative response.

Here we outline this extraordinary explosion of ritual activity on the Maltese islands in the fourth and third millennium BC. We summarise and develop some of the debates on why and how this took place in the light of the most recent evidence at our disposal. We start by examining the character of Malta from three temporal perspectives.

#### **3. Scales of Time and Ritual**

The Maltese islands can be studied in Braudelian terms (Braudel 1949): the longue durée physicality of the islands; the medium scale of the social and technological context; and the action of individuals at the scale of time witnessed by the actors involved. These scales interact and have a degree of fuzziness at their boundaries, but an investigation of these scales illustrates many of the issues in the identification and exegesis of prehistoric Maltese religion.

#### **4. The Longue Durée**

The Maltese islands are small, totalling 317 square kilometres and one of the best studied larger islands, Gozo, is even smaller, reaching only 67 square kilometres. This size has decreased over time because of rising sea level; indeed, the islands were once a headland of Sicily (until c. 14,000 BP; Furlani et al. 2013, Figure 9). However, the size of the islands was relatively stable in the relevant period of the fourth to the third millennium BC (although memories may have remained in the prehistoric mythologies of a fading land mass (Stoddart 2015)). In the same way, the distance of about 80 km from the nearest landmass, Sicily, also remained relatively constant during the same period, although historical navigators' accounts of the crossing vary from absolute calm to substantial storms, so the distance was still potentially a challenge.

The geology of the island provided another element of stability in the character of the island, entirely composed, as it is, of sedimentary rocks and different forms of limestone interbedded with more impermeable clays. These layers, transformed by fault lines, created a fractal quality of landscape in the islands where the small islands were themselves compartmentalised into smaller component parts, so that the small was itself divided into smaller, more intimate and personal places (Alberti et al. 2020, p. 267). Grima (2016b) has shown that this fractal quality was even introduced into the subterranean monuments themselves, where structure was provided by the very bedding planes of the substrata. The geology (permeable/impermeable layers and fault lines) also created springs and aquifers, vital for an island system that has no perennial rivers. Water was, and is, a crucial and enduring limiting factor of life in the Maltese islands, one consequently linked to ritual and perhaps to cosmology, as we will discover, and this fact has been extensively explored by Reuben Grima (2016a). Moreover, the globigerina and coralline limestone rock offered malleable material for the construction of the framework for the built environment and the clays and globigerina limestone created immense opportunities for portable material culture within these structures.

The southern European latitude of the islands, nested between continental Europe and continental Africa, has consistently offered long growing seasons, as well as evocative light on land and water alike, characteristics that impressed individuals in the more modern world such as Samuel Coleridge and Edward Lear. These evocative sources of light and dark also undoubtedly impressed the prehistoric people (Stoddart et al. 2020a), particularly when accompanied by violent storms and substantial runoff into the small, intimate, and periodically violent, catchments of the islands.

The absences from the island were and are as important as the presences. There is no current evidence of pre-Neolithic occupation of Malta when, prior to 12,000 BC (Furlani et al. 2013, Figure 9), she was a headland of Sicily, so humans have always had to bring in a number of resources. Some resources, such as animals and plants, had to be brought in on a small scale to initiate agriculture on a larger scale, and then grown and expanded to provide the necessary basis of a stable occupation of islands of this size. Current pollen evidence suggests that this was achieved by c. 5900 BC (Farrell et al. 2020). After the initial import of cultigens, the islands had to become broadly self-sufficient once a population was established, since the large-scale import of food stuffs was not a practical proposition until the first millennium BC. Other raw materials such as some cherts (Chatzimpaloglou 2020a, 2020b), hard stones (Dixon et al. 2009) and obsidian (Malone et al. 2009, pp. 250–53) were similarly imported on a small scale and were probably accompanied by a continuing exchange of humans, both to provide the transport and what we currently assess to have been a limited exchange of genetic material (Ariano et al. 2022). The exotic provenance of materials can be proved, but these materials are difficult to quantify or date. The degree of movement of humans (measured by oxygen and strontium isotopes) is even more difficult to assess, because of the similarities of neighbouring geologies for strontium and the complex pathways for oxygen (Stoddart et al. in press). What is, however, clear is that it was no small venture, compared with today, to cross the waters to Sicily or Africa and what evidence there is of the biology of the inhabitants suggests transmission *was* affected by biogeographical factors (Ariano et al. 2022).

#### **5. The Structurelle**

This stability of the islands was nevertheless fragile, even though both humans and ritual were surprisingly resilient. Humans rapidly stripped the islands of climax vegetation (Farrell et al. 2020) and humans have subsequently prevented the recovery of that land cover, cutting down the trees within a very short period and, in much more modern times, covering a substantial portion of the landscape with concrete. The result has been a long-standing human-induced period of very substantial run-off of water, removing the sediments derived from the parent rock and preventing the development of stable soils. At times, manuring and terracing have been introduced to mitigate these effects, but at this intermediate scale of time, the islands illustrate a lesson to modern humanity on the overexploitation of the landscape. As will be discussed below, prehistoric ritual very probably had a role in introducing a regulated approach to the landscape, which itself mitigated the disastrous effect of stripping the landscape of its vegetation. The monuments were, though, more than the mere ritual; they were strongly embedded in the socio-economic fabric of prehistoric Maltese society.

The human response to these difficulties was one of considerable resilience. Human capital has always been a vital component of the Malta story. In this respect, we can define two important prehistoric stages which engage with a link between connectivity and demography (McLaughlin et al. 2020). For the first c. 3500 years of human occupation of the Maltese islands, demographic levels were very low, probably in the very low thousands for Gozo and not substantially more for the larger island of Malta. The first phase of Neolithic occupation may even have reached a crisis after a few hundred years, a result calculated from the application of a substantial suite of new radiocarbon dates to the available stratigraphies. The second phase of occupation was centred around monuments in the landscapes, introducing a more stable system on which we focus in this paper. From this period, we have evidence, on the one hand, of very high infant mortality, but, on the other hand, of the considerable longevity of some of those who survived adolescence (Stoddart et al. in press). The end of this period of the Neolithic (c. 2450 BC) was marked by a transition towards a much greater degree of connectivity with the rest of the Mediterranean, broadly at the beginning of the Bronze Age. New research by Italian and Anglo-Maltese scholars have detected a new pottery style at the end of the Neolithic period which seems to suggest new contacts (Recchia and Fiorentino 2015; Malone et al. 2020b), most probably the product of more advanced navigational skills. These links also brought risks and settlement rapidly transitioned towards defended sites during the full Bronze Age. By the first millennium BC (Stoddart et al. 2020b), the Phoenicians had made the islands an important node in their maritime network and, from this time onwards (with some fluctuations), the demographic progress was substantially upwards. The major demographic increases did, however, have to await the major modern networks of the Knights of Malta, the British Empire and the European Union. Today, the islands house a population approaching half a million people, sustained by the economic and political power of the European Union. By contrast, for the study of prehistoric ritual, we have to envisage much more intimate population levels of low thousands of individuals and even smaller breeding networks of several hundred (Ariano et al. 2022). These are the scales of interaction recorded in the rituals of the villages of modern Malta, albeit with many differences.

#### **6. The Eventuelle**

The micro scales of individual action are much more difficult to characterise in prehistory and would have provided the greatest contrasts with the modern world. The structural agency of society at the time of the major prehistoric monuments is subject to some debate. Renfrew (Renfrew 1973; Renfrew and Level 1979) sustained a hierarchical idea of society, where the temples were the central foci of a society, implicitly headed by ritual specialists. A rival approach was that of Gimbutas (1991), who stressed the power of women in prehistoric Maltese society, drawing on the perceived feminine form both in the floor plan of ritual sites and in the representation of the human body. More broadly, Gimbutas saw Malta as an example of pacific, female-centred Neolithic religion, particularly prominent in the Balkans, that was replaced by a more male-centred martial society in the Bronze Age, ultimately incoming from the steppes of Asia. More recently, the idea of a more factional prehistoric society has been proposed (Bonanno et al. 1990; Stoddart et al. 1993), where different interest groups jockeyed for position in an intense, but relatively small-scale, society. This model drew substantially on the work of Boissevain (1964, 1965, 1980), who had variously proposed competing networks for the modern rituals and band clubs of modern village Malta. It allowed for ritual specialists to seek advantage within the complex ritual spaces of prehistoric Malta, but was essentially a much flatter perception of relationships within society. The same perception of a flatter, more egalitarian society has continued in more recent writings (e.g., Thompson 2020).

The funerary evidence shows that there was equal participation of all age grades (including the very young) and both sexes in funerary ritual. However, one or two men were placed in structurally significant positions within the funerary stratigraphy, most notably under the very threshold of entry into the best-known funerary complex of the Brochtorff Xag*h*¯ra Circle. Some individuals appear to have intentionally shaped their teeth as a sign of difference (Power et al. in press a) and one female in the burial complex was adorned with a cap of cowrie shells (Stoddart et al. 2009b, p. 145, Figure 8.47). On the other hand, the rich representation of the human form does not give strong prominence to a particular gender or age, but rather to broad cultural attributes, strongly tied to a collective ritualised identity. As a general trend, all the participants in the funerary ritual went through the same patterns of burial: inhumation placed on the right side, sometimes covered by an animal pelt, perhaps sometimes symbolised by a figurine and accompanied by an offering bowl. This integrity of the human form was followed by collective disarticulation, leaving only a small proportion of the original body intact. Furthermore, the isotopic evidence of diet suggests that there was not a substantial variation in the diet of the members of society, which, according to the latest modelling, was 60–80% animal (heavily sheep and very probably dairy in part), 10–20% plant-based and only 10% fish-based, with a relatively low variation (McLaughlin et al. in press). Given the importance of diet in registering differential wealth and identity, this apparently low level of variance suggests a relatively flat society in terms of access to resources, a point supported by the shared physical resilience. This was also a strongly pacific society (echoing the view of Gimbutas) with very little evidence of trauma or indeed of the means (in the form of weapons) to inflict that trauma on other members of the population, accompanied by clear evidence of curative care of individuals within the community (Power et al. in press b). At the risk of exaggeration, the succeeding Bronze Age appears (again echoing Gimbutas) to have been more prone to conflict, if some of the visual material culture and defensive settlement response is taken at face value.

#### **7. The Neolithic Ritual of Malta**

What is the evidence for Maltese prehistoric ritual? The main evidence for formalised prehistoric ritual on Malta dates to the fourth and third millennia BC. These are the structures colloquially designated the *temples of Malta*, still laying claim to be some of the earliest free-standing stone structures in the world, impressive structures that have been recognised as long (since the sixteenth century) as the less impressive classical structures on the islands. By contrast, in the first phase of the Neolithic, we only have settlements and some tentative evidence for religion embedded in domestic life from a site such as Skorba. From c. 3800 BC, best illustrated by the excavations of Skorba (on Malta) and Santa Verna (on Gozo), large monumental buildings were constructed, structures that have been designated temples, although we increasingly designate them *club houses*, inspired by the ethnographic work on band clubs on Malta and on comparable socially embedded ritual from further afield, analysed in many non-Western ethnographies (Barratt et al. 2020).

The *club houses* of prehistoric Malta were composed of highly structured, demarcated and cleansed spaces (Figure 2). It is clear that ritual was broadly prescriptive, but also creative. The scale was also monumental, in the best-preserved cases combining shaped globigerina blocks for decorative finesse with unshaped coralline for the main body of the structures. The largest of the structures, that of South Ggantija, is in excess of 20 ˙ <sup>×</sup> 20 m in area and an original height in excess of 10 m. The opinion is consolidating that these structures were roofed, creating substantial internal dark spaces. The most frequent type of club house was symmetrical, organised about a principal axis rising towards a central apse. The classic example, once again, is the paired structures of Ggantija. Studies have suggested ˙ that the interior was very closely organised so that the left hand was for water and right hand for fire (Malone 2007), developing the theme of dualism noted elsewhere (Tilley 2004). Substantial deposits of animal offerings, principally of heads and feet, were discovered in the best-preserved example of Tarxien, along with numerous offering bowls (Malone 2018). Other material culture was found at visual hotspots within the structures. The interplay of architectural space and liturgical artefacts was exploited through an elaborate theatrical strategy of dark and light, posture and perspective (Tilley 2004), where lines of sight were permanently or temporarily obscured, an interpretation that has been explored through GIS analysis (Anderson and Stoddart 2007), drawing on the best-preserved site of Tarxien, excavated by the father of Maltese archaeology, Themistocles Zammit. The permanent occlusion was, by means of apses, hidden offstage by narrow monumental doorways. These same monumental doorways could be completely closed, as demonstrated by holes in the door jambs. Successive opening of doors and movement of actors hidden within would have created elaborate impressions of sound and light worthy of eastern orthodox liturgy. All these effects would have been greatly enhanced if the structures were roofed. A less frequent type of club house seems to have taken the form of a zone of transition, an architectural rite of passage, where participants would have entered at one end and left by the other open end, replacing the closed apse in the most common format epitomised by Ggantija (Figure ˙ 2, right). This alternative architectural framework suggested a rite of passage from one status to another, perhaps from the sea to the land, or from life into death. The classic example is that of Hslashagar Qim (Figure ˙ 2, left), with at least one other example at Tas Silg. ˙ Grima (2001) has applied this idea of ritual transition to all temples (see below), but the case seems even stronger where the architectural framework suggests an entrance and an exit rather than a cul de sac, unless the Maltese archipelago itself was seen as the end point of a journey from the northern Mediterranean shore.

**Figure 2.** Two types of club house: Hslashagar Qim ( ˙ **left**) Ggantija ( ˙ **right**).

There is tentative evidence that different club houses may have had different attributes (as interpreted by artistic representations found within them), granting an identity to individual communities associated with them. These attributes appear to have been focused on different living creatures and thus may have formed part of the cosmological structures discussed further below. On the Xag*h*¯ra plateau on Gozo, the longer-lived club house of Ggantija appears to have been associated with the serpent, whereas the shorter- ˙ lived club house of Santa Verna may have been associated with the snail. On the mainland of Malta, the small club house of Bugibba seems to have been linked to fish, one of the ˙ Kordin club houses to the grinding of grain and the large club house of Tarxien to the world of domestic animals. This attribution to parts of the animal world may fit the idea that these club houses were also memory monuments, storing the collective memories of small local communities, which may have consisted of no more than a few hundred people. A cluster of these club houses (Figure 3) may characteristically have shared a common burial ground, as appears to be the case on the Xag*h*¯ra plateau where the Brochtorff Xag*h*¯ra Circle was the focal point between Santa Verna and Ggantija. This pattern seems to have been ˙ repeated on the heights above the modern Grand Harbour where Hslashal Saflieni and the associated site of Santa Lucija were the focal points for the Kordin cluster of club houses on one side and Tarxien on the other. This suggestion provides a future research strategy for investigation of those club houses which lack a burial focus, notably the Hslashagar Qim ˙ and Mnajdra clusters on the southern cliffs of the island of Malta.

**Figure 3.** Club house models of landscape, showing the relationship to different parts of the land and seascape: sea, garrigue, burial places, horticulture and springs.

The evidence for death ritual is also very strongly represented. The main data are derived from two complementary sites. The first, the site of Hslashal Saflieni, discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a complex, deep architectural space which provided a club house for the dead complementary to the one for the living above ground. Sadly, very few of the human remains were preserved. For an understanding of the funerary ritual, we have to turn to the more recent excavations of the Brochtorff Xag*h*¯ra Circle, where some 220,000 fragments of human bone were recovered, amounting to an estimated minimum of 1001 individuals (Stoddart et al. 2009a, p. 321) if all ages and sexes are included. The ritual procedure, as partly described above, amounted to a highly regulated process of inhumation followed by disarticulation, most probably presided over by ritual specialists, whose liturgical artefacts were found close by. The symbolism appears to have been centred on the recurrent theme of the cycle of life embedded in the longevity of the eternal descent group. Two sets of liturgical artefacts found in a central demarcated zone of the complex appear to echo the cycle of life in material form. One was the stone (globigerina) carving of a pair of corpulent individuals seated on a wooden bed. The first held a small diminutive human form. The second (with the head missing) held an offering bowl. These can be interpreted as child progressing through life stages into the status of an individual buried with their bowl, temporarily personal to them. The second was a set of carved schematic stick figures in different stages of craft completion. Both share elements of the Tarxien dress style, which appears to have been the overarching collective memory of all prehistoric Maltese society. Our interpretation is that these liturgical objects encapsulate, visually and metaphorically, the transitions of life within a framework of eternal memory: childhood and death and craft process.

#### **8. Landscape and Cosmology**

There is strong evidence that the cosmology of prehistoric Maltese religion can be reconstructed from the placement of the club houses in the landscape. This can be analysed at different scales, starting with their preferential location and investigating their horizontal and vertical relationships with landscape by incorporating increasing scale.

The club houses were preferentially located close to springs (Grima 2004; Ruffell et al. 2018), a preference which allowed the club houses to be the centres not only of consumption but of horticultural production (Figure 3). Study of the soils has shown the improved conservation and enhancement of the soil quality in the immediate environs of these impressive structures (French et al. 2020). In the case of Ggantija, the club house was deliberately located above a ˙ spring which still remains active today, facilitated by a fault line that runs below the structure (Ruffell et al. 2018) and similar bedding planes or fault lines underground at Hslashal Saflieni

may have merged the percolation of water with the very structure of the monument (Grima 2016b). The soils around the above-ground club houses have become depleted today, moving towards the arid terra rossas covered with garrigues that are frequent on the overworked limestones of the Mediterranean as a whole. The club houses, in the past, were maintained as ritually defined precincts of intensive horticulture, a tamed Eden, within a wild uncultivated space grazed by sheep and goats that extended across the wider, wilder landscape. The practice of rituals within these precincts was complementary to the socio-economic success of the communities, drawing on the stability that the gardens created. The location of the club houses close to reliable water sources, as convincingly shown by Grima (2016a) on an island-wide basis using a combination of geological prediction and toponyms, must have facilitated the relative success of these monuments. The importance of water is also given emphasis by the presence of very large ceramic containers for liquid, most probably water, in many of the large temple and burial complexes such as Tarxien, Santa Verna and the Brochtorff Xag*h*¯ra Circle. Grima has suggested that the size, longevity and success of temple clusters was strongly correlated with their agricultural catchment (Grima 2007, 2008), an interpretation given further precision by the recent FRAGSUS project (Grima et al. 2020).

The club houses were arranged in clusters within the horizontal landscape. Generally, these were arranged across a façade (e.g., Ggantija) or around a court (Mnajdra) or, more ˙ informally, stacked horizontally (Hslashagar Qim and Tarxien). These clusters can be ˙ envisaged (as first proposed by Renfrew) at the centre of territories attached to living communities, in some cases attached to a focal burial ground. The formation of the land and the visual qualities of its geology may have inspired the prehistoric inhabitants (Tilley 2004). Equally, access to the sea (as shown by Caruana (1896), Zammit (1929, p. 5), Pace (1996, p. 5) and more recently by Grima (2004) in his GIS work) seems to have been an important criterion, as well as proximity to fresh water, as already described.

This relationship to the sea has also been interpreted cosmologically. Grima (2001, 2003) has suggested that the internal organisation of the temple may itself be related to the interplay of land and sea, as has Tilley (2004). The internal "marine" courts, often surrounded by raised curbs decorated with spirals recalling reflections of water, might have been deliberately flooded with pooled rainwater to enhance this effect, making a contrast with the "terrestrial" apse islands decorated with vegetation carved in relief at Tarxien. Grima has taken this further by suggesting that graffiti of boats at Tarxien and a canoeshaped grindstone at Kordin II reinforce this pattern. This internal spatial configuration of the club houses could thus have mirrored the Mediterranean island seascape of which Malta was part. This idea may be reinforced by the fact that points of reference, the places in the non-human world of sea and land, are mainly represented in relief, whereas the humans are represented in the round (Grima 2003), setting up a specific cultural categorisation that is special to the Maltese islands.

Scholars have hypothesised that a vertical landscape was also critical, potentially composed of three layers, drawing on comparative ethnographies: the sky, the land and the subterranean (Stoddart 2002; Tilley 2004; Malone 2008; Malone and Stoddart 2009, pp. 374–46; Grima 2016a, 2016b). The structural and cosmological stability of these club houses was guided by their orientation with the celestial world. The entrance appears to have been orientated on the winter solstice, complementary with the life rituals which were undertaken within (Barratt et al. 2018). The principal apses were broadly orientated towards Sicily, the principal point of origin of these very same communities (Stoddart et al. 1993). By contrast, the opening of the one funerary structure, the Brochtorff Xag*h*¯ra Circle, where an orientation can be calculated, appears to have been set on the summer solstice, complementary to death rituals practised within. These deep funerary structures gave access to a lower landscape inhabited by the dead and other beings.

These three levels were populated by different beings that the prehistoric Maltese took care to represent in their art (Malone 2008). The world of the visible earth was the most familiar and the most represented. The form of representation was generally corpulent, but a corpulence attached to gender ambiguity. The figuration of the human form generally adopted a sacred style of gathered hair (Stoddart and Malone 2018), limited individuality and flounced skirts when clothed. This was a timeless style, redolent of ritual time and of stability in a fragile world. Animals were also represented from this world, most notably at Tarxien, which (as already mentioned) may have taken the domestic animal (pig and sheep) as its attribute. More rarely, the occupants of the upper world, the sky, namely birds, were represented, communicants perhaps with the celestial markers observed from the club house entrances. With equal rarity, the occupants of the lower worlds, monsters and fish were also part of the repertoire, most probably associated with the unknown yet originally familiar world of the dead.

#### **9. The Power of Inter-Related Scales**

One interesting recurrent feature of the creativity of the prehistoric world of Malta was the morphing between scales in a wide range of material forms of the same shape and style (Malone et al. 1995; Tilley 2004; Stoddart and Malone 2008; Vella Gregory 2016), leading to a comprehensive conceptualisation of the cosmos under one roof in the case of the architecture of the club house or burial enclosure. The exquisite aesthetic and skill of the small and the overpowering extra-human dimensions of the colossal (Mack 2007, pp. 5, 11, 55), as well as scales in between, were important features of the Maltese-built and peopled ritual environment. At the same time, human bodies were disarticulated and their parts reassembled in a larger collective form. The miniaturised had a capacity to be more elemental and more redolent of ritual (Mack 2007, p. 72) and yet recombined as part of a unified architectural complex.

In the ritualised ceramic repertoire, we have minuscule vessels of less than a centimetre across that were scaled up to very substantial containers of more than a metre in diameter (Figure 4). These two scales show the considerable investment in liturgical apparatus that contrasts with the simpler fare of the few settlements which have been excavated (Malone et al. 2020a). A good example of the small scale is a container for ochre found in the inner sacristy of the Brochtorff Xag*h*¯ra Circle. A good example of the larger scale is the stone vessel found in an inner apse of Tarxien, substantial enough to wash a human body. In the representation of the human form, there is a comparable range in scale from much less than a centimetre to an original size of at least two metres in scale. The posture and character of the human form, however, tended to vary more across this range (Malone and Stoddart 2016). The corpus of human figurines may now reach some 250 examples of which nearly 40% come from the Brochtorff Xag*h*¯ra Circle. Some of the smallest representations are human heads on animal phalanges from the Brochtorff Xag*h*¯ra Circle. Individual heads were also carved at life size and sometimes larger, notably from the club houses of Ggantija and (probably) Tarxien. Full representations of the human form range from ˙ small, corpulent, seated figurines at the Brochtorff Xag*h*¯ra Circle, through larger seated stone versions found at Hslashagar Qim, to the massive standing figure in the right apse ˙ of Tarxien (Figure 5). This brief analysis of the permutations of scale shows that one underlying trend was the liturgical role of the object. Funerary sites seem to have had the more intimate, meaningful liturgical items, whereas the club houses appear to have contained the more rhetorical, visual displays of larger scale which looked over and gazed on their audiences (Malone et al. 1995). A further scaled creation was the model of the club house. One example took an exterior perspective of a one-apse structure. Other examples appear to be simple representations of the floor plan. These scaled models appear to have been more explanatory, perhaps guides to the ritual process. What is interesting is that there was a guiding cultural and stylistic logic which bound together these different scales into one working system of ritual performance. It is a detail of understanding of the workings of ritual that is extremely rare in prehistory. This article has presented some of the key characteristics and some of the debates regarding their character and meaning.

**Figure 5.** Scales of figurative sculpture.

#### **10. The Ending**

One facet of prehistoric island religion which has been more recently uncovered is its demise. Where sites have been more effectively excavated, there appear to have been deliberate acts of closure, or even of iconoclasm. In the Brochtorff Xag*h*¯ra Circle, the liturgical artefacts seem to have been deliberately back-filled into a demarcated enclosure, colloquially described as the sacristy. A standing human figure of something less than life size was also deliberately broken up and its parts distributed across the burial area. At the club house of Tas Silg, another standing figure appears to have been deliberately toppled ˙ and slighted. At Tarxien, the central part of the site may have been deliberately covered

with an agricultural deposit. The upper levels of other club houses were unfortunately excavated in a period when the subtleties of stratigraphy were not recorded.

The circumstance of this closure can now be explained in cultural and ecological terms. It is very probable that the club house horticulture was no longer serving the needs of the community. The promises of the divine authorities were not being fulfilled. There is evidence of increasing aridity in the landscape (French et al. 2020) and some evidence of stress within the human remains discovered in the later phases of the Brochtorff Xag*h*¯ra Circle (Stoddart et al. in press). A combination of factors, including fundamentally the social, appears to have contributed to the end to what had been a very stable system of club house ritual, which lasted, on present estimates (McLaughlin et al. 2020), for at least a thousand years from 3400 to 2400 BC and was preceded by a formative period of a further 400 years from 3800 BC. A subsequent transitional period of two hundred years (2400–2200 BC) was followed by a probable hiatus of two hundred years, before replacement by another system of ritual in c. 2000 BC, during the arrival of the Bronze Age. A very different stylisation of the human form then accompanied cremation. The islands of Malta were now part of a connected Mediterranean world which lacked the distinct identity of the preceding Neolithic. This was a world which adopted defended locations in the landscape and prioritised the burial of single individuals. The new ritual of the Maltese islands was now shared with the rest of the Mediterranean through the medium of enhanced connectivity. In contrast to the maintenance of ritual identity uncovered in the modern, globalised by Boissevain, the ritualisation of Malta in protohistoric times came to be shared or at least *glocalised* (Eriksen 2001, p. 302) within the wider Mediterranean, where local variants could be easily placed and recognised as part of a much wider framework.

#### **11. Island Ritual?**

We posed the question at the beginning whether there were special circumstances that made ritual on islands qualitatively different from those in other geographical circumstances. It is true that islandness can be a state of mind which can affect some substantially large land masses, such as not only Sardinia (24,090 km2) and Cyprus (9251 km2) discussed elsewhere in this journal (Papantoniou and Depalmas 2022), but the "island nations" of Sri Lanka (65,610 km2; Bacon 2016), the British Isles (in its imperial form 315,159 km2; Lavery 2005), Japan (377,975 km2; Isozaki 1996) and even Australia (7,617,930 square km2; Broeze 1998). The issue is often one of comparative, that is relational, scale since the inhabitants of such islands consider themselves in contradistinction to the inhabitants of their neighbouring continents. The inhabitants of smaller islands in the appropriate sociopolitical circumstances and conditions of connectivity (Stoddart 1999) can sense even more profoundly that challenge of scale. We contend that the richness of the Maltese evidence does show that inhabitants of the small islands did have a highly developed creativity that in some considerable degree relates to their relative physical circumstances. These circumstances include their sense of security and connectivity, which may interpret the physical distance between them and their neighbours in different ways in different periods. We are dealing with gradations of connectivity, cultural as well as biological, that must have left their impression on the construction of identity of the communities concerned. We leave the readers to decide for themselves the temporality of the sense of distinctive difference that we have presented for the fourth and third millennium BC, which contrasts itself with previous and subsequent periods.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding except as reported indirectly under acknowledgements.

**Data Availability Statement:** Many of the supporting data of the FRAGSUS project can be found in the Cambridge Apollo repository (e.g., https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/312497, (accessed on 2 March 2022); https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/315523, (accessed on 2 March 2022)).

**Acknowledgments:** The ERC-funded FRAGSUS project (2013-7; Grant agreement No. 323727; PI Caroline Malone; Cambridge Co Investigator Simon Stoddart) and an earlier Templeton grant (PI Caroline Malone and Simon Stoddart) have contributed greatly to this article, as has particularly the published work of Reuben Grima and Chris Tilley. The FRAGSUS project has now been published (French et al. 2020; Malone et al. 2020a, 2020b; Stoddart et al. in press). The publication of the Templeton grant will be completed with the publication of a Cambridge University Press volume in the near future and this article heralds steps towards this achievement (Malone, Stoddart et al. in preparation), where many of these ideas will be presented more systematically, with a full measured catalogue of much of the redolent material culture of the extraordinary club houses of Malta.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


Bacon, Christine. 2016. *The Island Nation*. London: Oberon Books.


Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. *Entangled Objects. Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific*. Harvard: Harvard University Press.


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