Pallas (Apr 2016)
Questions insolites sur Athéna, l’olivier domestique et la culture mycénienne
Abstract
This paper is part of a long-distance research on the Athena of the Athenians. In the Greek area, she is the only one to be at the same time a parthenos tied with bound to the domestic olive tree (elaia) and a poliad goddess, who founded and ruled the territory and its inhabitants. Such a singularity is even more surprising in as much as the Olympian gods, with a poliad dimension, do not found any city. Athena settled on the Acropolis since the emergence of the polis: Kylon’s followers found refuge beside her. Is she by that time already the divine founder bound to the domestic olive tree? Does it make sense to connect this singularity with her past? A potnia (mistress, lady) of Athana belongs in fact to the polytheism of Cnossos and the olive tree is domesticated on the Aegean shores since the Chalcolithic. Unusual questions indeed! The analysis which tried to establish a continuity between the polytheisms of the second and first millennia BC, beyond the “dark ages” has been so far neglected on behalf of the archeological rupture between the period of the palaces and the period of the poleis. But one should keep in mind that a culture – which should not be reduced to its “cultural” dimension – does not need neither “tangible traces” nor literacy to persist. The expertise and the techniques of production and fabrication, as well as the symbolic configurations and the religious beliefs, belong to a tradition and can be transmitted for a long time, “through the mouth and the ear”, according to Marcel Detienne’s expression. Thus the point is: can we consider the possibility that the figure of the Poliad goddess bound to the olive tree has a palatial substrate, and that, supported by a strong tradition, she was reorganized and redefined according to the historical context of her mention? This paper simply aims at suggesting that a goddess who looks like Athena and the domestic olive tree are present in the Mycenaean culture.
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