The Great Minoan bake off
- Minoan Larnax
Minoans were fond of baking. Not of cakes (or maybe cakes too) but of clay, to be precise. Out of this clay, they could make smaller everyday objects, but also pithoi (large vases used for storing goods which were buried underground) and, of course, larnakes.
The Minoans used standard procedures for baking larnakes. The clay was first collected near the production area, which was in turn close to the prospective burial site. The clay is often coarse-grained and contains stones of different colors, straw or red limestone. This combination of materials prevents the clay from cracking. Then, the clay is hand-shaped and smoothed out with tools, such as a flat piece of wood. While wet, the holes in the floor of the chest are made. When the larnax is shaped in the right way, it is dried and then baked. Larger ovens were needed, which were presumably built for single use only. It is assumed that an oven was built around the larnax and broken down after the baking process was finished.
Clay was not the only material used for larnakes. There are, for instance, some stone and limestone examples. The clay versions were probably modelled after a wooden prototype. The cubic shape and the existence of legs under the chest and a ridge-pole on top of the lid fit perfectly in the image of a wooden predecessor. You can also see this in the painted straight lines around the legs, which imitate wooden boards. This is called skeuomorphism, the imitation of the design or look of a similar object made of a different material. Wood is a perishable material, and unfortunately only fragments of any type of wooden coffins have survived. The definitive evidence to back up this theory is therefore lost.
One very special larnax is the one of Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great. His larnax was not made of wood or clay, but of gold! You can visit his tomb and see his precious coffin in Vergina in the Greek mainland. Philip II died in 336 BCE, about a thousand years after the Minoan larnax we see here. It cannot be ruled out that metal larnakes existed in earlier periods as well. Still, it is interesting to see how a burial custom remained so similar for over a millennium, but at the same time developed to even befit an important figure such as the Macedonian king!
Work on the larnax did not end in antiquity. In order to preserve the object, museums are required to perform regular restoration when needed. If you would like to read more about this, the extended reading link below will perfectly suit your interests.