1 Woolley 1955, 228–32; see also Woolley 1953, 74–5: “we are bound to believe that trained experts, members of the Architects’ and Painters’ Guilds, were invited to travel overseas from Asia (possibly from Alalakh …) to build and decorate the palace of the Cretan rulers”.
2 Niemeier 1991,198–99; see also Niemeier and Niemeier 1998, 69–97, esp. 95–6; 2000, 763–803; 2002, 254–98.
3 Bietak 1992, 26–8.
4 Bietak 1992, 28; Bietak and Marinatos 1995, 61; Marinatos refers to the wall paintings in Tell el Dabca simply as Minoan, Marinatos 1995, 579; for non-Minoan craftsmen, but trained in Knossos, see Shaw 1995, 94.
5 Bietak 1992, 28; 1995, 26; Bietak 1996, 136; Bietak and Marinatos 1995, 61; Bietak et al. 2007, 86.
6 Niemeier and Niemeier 1998, 93. The latter scenario by Niemeier was similarly already proposed in 1995 by Shaw (1995, 110) with regard to the bull leaping scenes of Tell el Dabca. She assumed that the painters had been trained on Crete, almost certainly in Knossos.
7 Hankey 1993, 28.
8 With the new findings in Tell Mardikh/Ebla (Bietak 2007, 273), Tell Sakka (Taraqji 1999, 27–43) and Tell el-Burak (Kamlah and Sader 2010, 108–11), more material is available for comparison, but their final publication with detailed technical and iconographical studies are still forthcoming.
9 Sherratt 1994, 237.
10 Younger 1995, 517–18.
11 The choice of yellow instead of white for leapers, the scale of the figures; as well she considered the depiction of a bull with a frontal face as an iconographic characteristic of the later periods on Crete, but acting on the assumption of a date in the Hyksos period for the Tell el Dabca paintings; see Shaw 1995, 105.
12 Rehak 1996, 41, n. 29; 1997, 401–2.
13 Younger 1995, 517–18.
14 Shaw 1995, 105–6, esp. 106.
15 von Rüden 2011, esp. 95–9; see also Brysbaert 2008, 2011.
16 Cline et al. 2011, 13–4.
17 Zaccagnini 1983, 249–51; Bonatz 2002, 69–85; see also Keilschrifttexte aus Bogazköy (KBo) 1 10+ Rs. 58-61; Keilschrifturkunden aus Bogazköy (KUB) 3 67 Vs. 3‘-6‘; Edel 1994, 170–71; Cline 1995.
18 Bietak 2000.
19 Even though Barbara and Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier consider it as “hopeless to believe that archaeological evidence can identify ethnical groups in the past”, they believe that “Artifacts can, however, be taken and consciously employed as emblemic indica of ethnic boundaries in much the same way as language or religion” (Niemeier and Niemeier 1998, 92) and therefore they use Minoan not as a term for a geographical region, but in relation to an ethnic group. More cautious is the use of the term “Minoan” or “Mycenaean” referring to archaeological cultures based on the idea of a social identity by Ann Brysbaert (Brysbaert 2008, 23–4).
20 See also Susan Sherrat (Sherrat 1994, 237) and A. Bernard Knapp (Knapp 1998).
21 For a more extensive discussion, see Hamilakis and Momigliano 2006.
22 About an attribution to ethnicity with regard to the question of itinerant craftsmen, see also Susan Sherrat (Sherrat 1994, 237) and A. Bernard Knapp (Knapp 1998, 201–2). Knapp expressed his doubts also by challenging “what is Canaanite iconography?”, a term used by Niemeier to describe an iconography from which he wanted to set apart the wall paintings from Tel Kabri (Knapp as a response to a paper of Barbara and Wolf-Dietrich Niemeiers at the Aegaeum conference in 1997, published 1998, 98). The term “Greater Canaan” has been used by Niemeier, following Amiran, to describe the area between the Amuq plain to the north and the deserts to the south and east, which appeared to him as a largely uniform civilization, with regional variations, in the Middle and Late Bronze Age (Niemeier 1991, 196; Amiran 1969, 167–70).The uniformity expressed by this term has to be strongly questioned, and given especially its ethnic and political connotations, it has to be treated with caution.
23 Negbi 1994, 73–112, esp. 77–81.
24 See von Rüden 2011.
25 Sherratt 1994, 238.
26 Sherratt 1994.
27 Knapp followed her in this regard, see Knapp 1995, unpublished lecture at Reading, UK, December 1995; Knapp 1998, 198–202.
28 For a definition of that term, see Feldman 2002, 6–8; 2006, 25–9, relying partly on Smith’s idea of “international style”, see Smith 1965, esp. 35, 97.
29 Feldman 2006, 30; see more explicitly in regard to the wall paintings, Feldman 2007, 44, n. 8.
30 With regard to painting on a flat surface, Ann Brysbaert’s technical study provides a very important and excellent base for further comparative studies (Brysbaert 2008, 2011).
31 See also Marchand 2010.
32 Kopytoff 1986, 64–94.
33 Compared to the concept of the more production-focused chaîne opératoire, suggested by André Leroi-Gourhan already in 1966 (Leroi-Gourhan 1964–1965), it has the advantage of also including the social life of the finished object; but of course the chaîne opératoire remains an integral part of the general approach.
34 For example Turgeon 1997, 1–29; Gosden and Marshall 1999, 169.
35 See also Marchand 2010, S1–21; Hodder 2012.
36 Polanyi 2009, 3–25.
37 Exceptions are two fragments depicting the hip of a more or less life-size woman from the Argolis (Kaiser 1976, 306, fig. 473; Rodenwaldt 1912, n. 152) and an example of a quite low relief of a decorative pattern on Thera. Outside Knossos, reliefs have been detected in Pseira, Gournia, Palaikastro, Kato Zakro, Hagia Triada, and Khania (for an overview, see Kaiser 1976, 299–304).
38 Kaiser 1976, 296.
39 Kaiser 1976, 296, fig. 464 on the right side.
40 Kaiser 1976, 296, fig. 451b.
41 See also Brysbaert 2008, esp. 188–89.
* First of all, I would like to thank the organizers of the conference Sarah Cappel, Ute Günkel-Maschek, Torben Keßler, Yasemin Leylek, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, Noach Vander Beken, and Eva Wacha for providing a nice and convenient setting to present our research at the conference in Heidelberg and for the hospitality during our stay. Furthermore, I want to thank Manfred Bietak for inviting me in 2007 to work with him on the wall paintings from Tell el Dabca and his confidence in giving me the organizational and scientific freedom in the last few years to build up a team of students and young scholars. The relief plaster is part of this larger comprehensive project on the wall paintings of Tell el Dabca, currently conducted by the following group of researchers: Manfred Bietak, Johannes Becker, Irina Huller, Johannes Jungfleisch, Lyvia Morgan, Clairy Palyvou, Erico Peintner and myself. For the opportunity to study parts of the Cretan material in the museum of Iraklion I am very grateful to Maria Vlasaki, Georgios Rethemniotakis, and Athanasia Kanta.