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Bronze Age Stone Anchors as Material Metaphors
In ancient navigation, the safety of a ship depended in no small measure on the stability of her anchors, and this crucial role at sea was not overlooked in the ritual symbolism of maritime communities. Accordingly, there is a general consensus on the fact that the anchors deposited at Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age temples were important carriers of meaning for seafaring groups. Nevertheless, little effort has been made to understand the role of anchors in the conceptual world of the ancient seafarers beyond the fact that they were powerful symbols of maritimity. Borrowed and adapted from linguistics, Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) provides the theoretical framework to use material culture as a source for the investigation of ancient thought processes. In this paper, I apply the perspective of CBT to the anchors found at the Late Cypriot sanctuary of Kition-Kathari, with comparisons to those from Byblos and Ugarit, and I examine the cognitive implications of anchors as material metaphors and investigate how they embody the blending of the mental spaces of the sacred, the city, and the sea.
In the Tower Temple, the earliest phases of which can be dated to the EB II (c. 3000–2800 BCE), the lowest course of the flight of steps leading to the single entrance to the building is constituted of six anchor-shaped stone blocks (Dunand & Lauffray, 2008, pp. Even more than between city and ship, we can clearly visualize the common cognitive structures shared by the temple and the sea in the Mediterranean Bronze Age: they are both powerful liminal spaces and as such potentially dangerous in a natural and/or supernatural way, a similarity that facilitates conceptual blending. This work is part of the author’s project Underwater Realms, supported by the Polish National Science Centre under the Polonez Bis 1 grant number 2021/43/P/HS3/0135, co-funded by the European Union Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND agreement no.
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