Exercise of Dominance: Boar Hunting in Mycenaean Religion and Hyttite Royal Rituals

In the Late Bronze Age Aegean iconography, selected animals play out their designed roles in relation to human action and to a particular category of contexts. Animals, especially domesticated ones, would have been perceived with a pragmatic meaning, because their function was related to human activities in the social and economic spheres, such as agriculture and animal husbandry. Wild animals, on other hand, may have been seen as prey or as a threat, and their special role in the hunt provides a different mechanism of symbolic associations, including religious aspects and social functions.253257). The purpose of my paper is to re-examine the assumption that Mycenaeans delighted in representations of hunting and warfare, usually referred to simply as "scenes of daily life" that decorated the main rooms of their palaces. The essay is concerned with boar hunting which may be perceived primarily as a royal prerogative and a valued source of meat for the royal banquets and tusks for the palatial workshops. Boar hunting was also not only an aristocratic game, but can refer specifically to the ritual sphere, operating as a visual metaphor of the celebration of male maturation, in the same meaning as the athlon in the Greek archaic society.