Excavated Mycenaean shrines are generally small rooms or room clusters with ritual equipment. The palace reception rooms also probably witnessed political-ritual ceremonies. On Minoan Crete iconography and excavations suggest that alongside palatial ritual areas there existed true temple complexes as well as open-air sacrificial and ceremonial places, whilst Linear B archives and rare discoveries seem to indicate separate Mycenaean religious centers too. The Classical Greek temple however represents a complex fusing of several discrete EIA elements, although a striking central component appears to derive from the megaron-plan of the Lefkandi house and other larger residences believed to mark leading families. As noted above, this is considered to demonstrate that community leaders tied power to ritual, including ceremonies in their great houses. During the EIA, alongside the hypothesized ceremonial role
Figure 8.7 Eighth-century wooden temples of apsidal form underlying a later rectangular stone temple at Eretria. J. Whitley, The Archaeology of Ancient Greece. Cambridge 2001, Figure 7.6.
Of the chieftain in his “great house” (Mazarakis-Ainian 1997), we also find open-air ritual foci. Votive deposits at Kalapodi (Central Greece) are associated with an altar and a claimed continuity of cult practices from the twelfth to seventh centuries BC. At several famous Classical sanctuary sites, ritual deposits including votives appear in limited quantities from the Protogeometric period onwards, whilst sacrificial altars are gradually monumentalized. Crete is exceptional, and it is suggested that Minoan traditions were stronger here throughout the EIA, with recognizable shrines within settlements and in the countryside, as well as continued use of cult figures and figurine dedications (Lebessi and Muhly 1990, Hayden 1991). Although the later, Classical complex of temple, external altar, and sacred enclosure encompassing them (temenos) is only identifiable on the Mainland and Cyclades as distinct from previous cult structures in Archaic times, it significantly marks the repackaging of earlier diffuse activities into a coherent ceremonial focus serving the communal interests of the emergent cities or federations of towns. Specialist studies of early cult-sites on the Mainland and Crete emphasize that both communal shrines and the rural sanctuaries (including later interstate centers of cult like Olympia), were places where ritual eating and drinking and animal sacrifice
Typified communal ceremonies, under the leadership and to the prestige of leading local aristocratic families (Dickinson 2006).
The striking continuity of design elements needs detailing (Jameson 1990). One of the commonest forms of the earliest Greek temple plans of the eighth to seventh centuries BC is already in place at Lefkandi ca. 1000 BC: an elongated rectangle to which an apse (a semicircular wall) is added at one end, and with internal divisions denoting separate functions. When this particular hypothesized focus of community ritual separates from the elite dwelling, something seen in the critical LG eighth century BC (Figure 8.7), three key elements can be traced back into the elite house: an entry porch, a main room with a focus (originally a hearth, later the cult statue), and often an innermost chamber serving as private apartment-treasury (later temple treasury). Surely significantly, the word for the land domain reserved for the king in Mycenaean state archives (te-me-no), becomes from Homer’s time onwards the term for the locality reserved for a god, enclosing his or her sanctuary.
The creation of a community temple complex, symbolizing the reorientation of society away from the residence of the elite and toward the symbolic residence of the city’s patron divinity, is marked in another way (Snodgrass 1980).The oldest independent shrines receive a mere trickle of votive offerings until the era of state-formation in the eighth century BC, when the deposition of gifts develops into a flood. Moreover, many of these gifts are the result of a marked shift of deposition of dress-pins and weapons from individual burials to communal religious contexts, appearing to indicate a decline in the personalized social symbolism at funerals in favor of conceiving the public sanctuary as an arena of personal display for the evolving city-states.
The emergence of temples out of more multifunctional elite houses, means that non-residential cult houses only become generally distinct in the Archaic era, and can be ambiguous to interpret in their formative stages in the LG period (Snodgrass 1980, Morris 2000). In Figure 8.7, from the town of Eretria, there are two probable eighth-century temples underneath the Archaic Apollo temple. The earliest is an apsidal hut for a cult image, probably like the Perachora temple model with a high-pitched, thatched roof and a small portico with two columns. The second is larger and apsidal, reminiscent of Lefkandi; only the fact that its eastern end is open to face the altar makes it a temple. It still has a stone base with a timber frame and mudbrick wall supporting a thatched roof. The Samos Heraion illustrates the next stage in design development. This is a very early, still eighth-century, rectangular plan with a cult statue at the west and an entrance facing east to an altar; its dimensions already conform to the standard hundred-footer (hekatompe-don) size for a Classical temple. Nonetheless, it still possesses a central row of columns suggesting a thatched roof Ceramic roof-tiles are an innovation of earliest Archaic times, the seventh century, and first appear in the Corinth region, removing the need for a high thatched roof
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