Photo: The collection of Archaic Greek terracotta figurines at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), image courtesy of author.

Food for Thought: Women’s Domestic Roles through the Culinary Iconography of Archaic Greek Terracotta Figurines

By Camille Blanco

 

Among the corpus of ancient Greek artifacts found in the eastern Mediterranean, ceramics and pottery remain the most abundant and significant. The practical and decorative uses of pottery, as well as their exquisite depictions of the mythological and mundane, convey the vitality and values of ancient Greek life and transcend time, becoming a celebrated element of art-historical analysis.

There is one form of ceramic artifact, however, that has been overshadowed by the grandeur of monumental sculptures and ornate pottery: terracotta figurines. When interest in the material remains of a distant Greco-Roman past increased dramatically at the turn of the eighteenth century, only artifacts of “considerable commercial desirability”1—those of high artistic quality and ornamentation—satisfied scholars’ “romantic nostalgia for the past,” while other figurines with an “iconographic emphasis on everyday life” were of less interest.2 Thus, profound scholarship into their origins and purposes was not taken seriously until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when “significant campaigns of excavation and exploration”3 were undertaken and monumental catalogs of terracotta types, such as Die Typen der figürlichen Terrakotten (1903, trans. Types of Figurative Terracottas), were published. Such efforts were fueled by nineteenth-century archaeologists’ and antiquarians’ “macabre interest in graves and skeletons,” along with other curiosities, that were the catalyst for investigations into these and other votive figures, which they thought were representative of fertility and underworld cults.4

The terracotta figurines that depict the preparation of foodstuffs are particularly fascinating. At only about ten centimeters in height, these artifacts almost always represent women preparing food. These figurines seemed to have been handmade initially, as suggested by the non -detailed nature of their facial features and the lack of attention to anatomical proportions, but toward the sixth and fifth centuries BC, they became more standardized with molded faces.5 In The Athenian Woman: An Iconographic Handbook, Sian Lewis writes that these terracottas are mostly Boeotian in origin and prioritize “scenes of women cooking, often with younger girls in attendance.”6 Victoria Tsoukala notes that throughout the second half of the sixth century BC and first half of the fifth century BC, the highest density of terracottas was discovered in Southern Italy, Sicily, and Cyprus.7 

This paper studies representations of food and food preparation in Archaic Greek terracotta figurines through the lens of the roles of Archaic Greek women in the domestic sphere. The rarity with which some of these figurines occur in the archaeological record implies that they deserve their own profound analysis and place in the corpus of Archaic Greek art and artifacts. This study, therefore, reexamines a collection of Archaic Greek terracottas, depicting images of food preparation, ranging from cereal processing to cooking in a cauldron, as a means of interpreting and highlighting iconography and aesthetics of representation. Food is innately linked to identity and “provides us with a prism through which to analyze the dynamics of past communities.”8 By virtue of their “indoor”9 roles of food provision in the domestic sphere, women constantly engaged with their households and communities, which inherently shaped their ancient identities.

First, I would like to consider the wider representations of cereal processing and bread making in the terracottas. Tsoukala outlines the various stages in this process, using information from the primary sources—roasting and separating barley grain from its hull, pounding with the mortar, milling, kneading, then baking.10

Figure 1 | A woman leaning over a mortar, containing pellets, with a pestle laid at her feet.

 

Created in Boeotia, discovered at Tanagra. H: 11cm, ca. 500 BC.11

 

In Figure 1, a woman with a molded head sifts her hands through the contents of a mortar, which is filled with small sculpted pellets. A small pestle lies to her left and a container with even more pellets sits in front of her, to her right. This is clearly a scene of pounding, but the woman, rather than engaging in the direct action of pounding, checks that the hull has indeed been separated from the grain so that she can begin turning it into a coarse meal.

Figure 2 | A woman in front of a mortar, holding a
long pestle. Discovered at Akanthos tomb 1427.12

Figure 2 depicts an image of a woman pounding that is unlike Figure 1. Clearly, there is a variation in the representation of pounding between Figures 1 and 2, which can perhaps be attributed to their locations of discovery and creation. The figurine in Figure 1 was created and discovered in Boeotia, while that in Figure 2 was found in a tomb at Akanthos, located in the Athos peninsula of Chalcidice in northern Greece. The main differences between these figurines lie in the size of the women’s bodies—long and lanky versus short and squat, respectively—and the shape and height of the mortar—a wider opening, resembling a smaller kylix or kantharos versus one with less tapering at the mouth, reminiscent of an alabastron or lekythos, respectively. 

Regarding the wide variation between these figures, Jaimee Uhlenbrock notes that during the late nineteenth century, people in İzmir, Turkey discovered terracottas in the plains surrounding the ancient city of Myrina.13 Apparently, these terracotta figurines were so different from those discovered in Tanagra—which are prized for their naturalistic features and bright pigments—that many suspected them of being forgeries. Just as regional differences in pottery decoration or design can give clues as to the workshops in which they were made—and the images and/or values that different peoples around the Mediterranean desired—it seems that the regional differences in pounding depictions do the same.

In the depictions of grinding and milling in Figures 3 and 4, there are two different methods at work: grinding by hand and milling with a saddle quern.

Figures 3 and 4 | (right) A woman grinding. Created and discovered
in Boeotia. Discovered at Akanthos tomb 1427. Women milling flour. Created in Cyprus, Cypriot terracotta. H: 6.2 cm, ca. 600–480 BC. (left)14

In the figures above, women kneel down next to a wide basin and grind grain by hand, presumably by holding a large stone over the grain and pushing it in a back-and-forth motion. The task of grinding was so labor-intensive that it took hours for each female member of a five- to ten-person oikos to complete, resulting in signs of arthritis in the unearthed skeletons of Mycenean and Minoan women.15 Figure 4 depicts two women rather than one in true Cypriot style16—wide-open eyes, a prominent nose, and severe expressions—making flour with the saddle quern.

In representations of kneading, the next stage of the process, women kneel in front of a trough, which could be in the form of either a basin (denoting group work) or a pedestal (illustrating solo work).

Figure 5 | Women kneading bread, accompanied by a musician.
Created in Boeotia, discovered in Thebes. H: 9.2 cm, ca. 500 BC.17

Figure 5 depicts four women standing side-by-side around a basin, kneading distinct loaves of bread while a musician serenades them with music18 from what seems to be an aulos (an ancient double-reed pipe), based on the positioning of his (or her) arms and the long, tube-like elements that peek out from his (or her) clenched hands. These women, who have similar hairstyles, defined facial features and expressions, and bodies that lack anatomical details, are relaxed as they simultaneously knead identical, oblong loaves.

Figure 6 | A group of 4 women kneading dough.
Unknown provenance. H: 6.0 cm, ca. unknown.19

In Figure 6, four women also stand side-by-side as they bend over a kneading-board and make loaves of bread. These four women have cylindrical bodies that lack anatomical detail, stubs of clay in place of their arms, and heads with irregularly incised mouths.20 Marcella Pisani observes, in her description of the figurine, that there seems to have been a fifth figure who was “perhaps standing in profile at the end of the table.”21 Could this have been a musician as the kneading scene in Figure 5 depicts? Perhaps, but without the complete representation, one may only speculate as to who the figure could have been.  

Figure 7 begins a series of figurines that depict kneading at the pedestal. This Cypriot terracotta woman is bent at the waist and kneads dough on a floating pedestal. 

Figure 7 | A woman possibly kneading dough. Created in Cyprus,
Cypriot terracotta. H: 17.3 cm, ca. 600–480 BC.22

 

 

 

 

Figure 8 | A woman kneading dough at a kneading trough.23

In contrast, Figure 8 depicts a similar scene of a woman standing over a kneading trough. In this figurine, the dough is shaped into distinctive roundels inside the basin and has lines that ensure their recognition as little loaves of bread or cakes. From these figures, it is evident that kneading could either be a solo or communal activity, whether at home or in commercial bakeries, with similar scenes represented in figurines from all over ancient Greece.

In the final stage of breadmaking—baking—Tsoukala notes that “a woman at the oven is another popular category among terracotta statuettes.”24

Figure 9 | A woman baking bread in a barrel cooker.
Created in Cyprus, Cypriot terracotta. H: 7.6 cm, ca. 600–480 BC.25

As is evident from both Figures 10 and 11, there were two different types of ovens where one could bake bread, depending on the type of bread that was to be produced. The oven in Figure 9 is a barrel cooker, whose wide basin and open top was suitable for cooking flatbreads. This type of oven was “not frequently represented in terracotta statuettes from Greece” and is mostly seen in those from “Cyprus or Magna Graecia,” thus bolstering the notion that this figurine is Cypriot in origin.26 

Figure 10.1 & 10.2 | A woman baking bread. Created in Boeotia,
discovered at Tanagra. H: 9.68 cm, ca. 525–475 BC.27

The more common “Greek oven” comprises a barrel-vaulted baking chamber and a spot for the firing chamber underneath (Figures 10.1 & 10.2). In this figurine, the woman tending to the oven puts a loaf of bread into the chamber, where many other loaves are also sculpted inside. To the woman’s left and right, there are two baskets, which are both filled with bread loaves—it is hard to determine based on the images which basket contains the loaves needing to be baked versus the freshly baked loaves. In these types of figurines, the maker of the figurine, or coroplast, devotes much time to rendering the loaves in detail, which suggests that much significance was attached to this part of the process.28

In the final set of terracotta figurines, two different types of cooking methods are displayed: cooking over a cauldron and cooking over open fire. The act of cooking with a companion, usually a younger female, is a typical scene in Boeotian Tanagra terracottas, such as the figurine depicted in Figure 11. 

Figure 11 | A woman cooking in a cauldron over a fire, with a young girl
watching over. Unknown provenance. H: 10.7 cm, 500–475 BC.29

 

While a similar scene is depicted in Figure 12, the woman has a canine companion to her left, rather than a young girl, who sits in front of a plate of food and seems curious about whatever the woman tends to in her cauldron. The small scale of this cooking depiction suggests that the woman is in a domestic space and, as a result of this, the small dog to her left is likely a household companion.

Figure 12 | A woman cooking in a cauldron, accompanied by a small dog.
Created in Boeotia, discovered in Tanagra. H: 8.8 cm, 525–475 BC.30

Clearly, the detail and volume with which some of these scenes are recreated—such as the shape of the loaves, the pellets and loaves inside the mortar and oven, etc.—illustrate that it was a topic deemed important enough to be portrayed on terracotta figurines. The fact that some of these figurines were found in tombs suggests either a ritualistic or funerary purpose, chosen either as a reminder of the woman herself through her toys or as grave goods to accompany her to the afterlife.31

While the idea of women keeping order in the house and managing foodstuffs is a central idea in Greek literature, archaeologist Dr. Alexandra Neagu writes that there is a notable absence of women engaged “in culinary activities in Greek ancient literature.”32 Furthermore, in the few scenes that do depict a culinary theme, the ancient authors describe women “cooking with magic or social disorder,” rather than reducing their actions to simple aspects of daily life in the domestic sphere.33 She argues that this was due to an overarching need to control women, especially in the “sensitive and critical domain of daily life which is food.”34

So what does this say about the representations of women cooking and engaging in other culinary tasks in these Archaic terracottas? If we understand that women’s “access to food,” including the cooking and consumption of it, “was in fact, controlled, by men,” then these terracottas reveal a sphere within this patriarchal society where a woman was empowered to engage in her domestic tasks and exert her own power and control in a limited domain.35 The depiction of these homely scenes presents women as more than just chaos-makers, socio-political denaturers, and witches in the culinary and gastronomic realms of everyday Archaic Greek society. In these terracottas, women become the continuous nurturers and caretakers behind a functioning, successful oikos and, in turn, a functioning, successful society. These figurines celebrate daily life, summon us into the intimacy of the domestic sphere, and reveal a world that is hidden behind the vitriolic words that the ancient authors use to describe common, rather than epic, women.36 This space that the figures embody are those places “where the most important things are quotidien tasks and those forms of relationship that sustain life in any human society,” as Marina Picazo beautifully puts it.37 

The figurines’ visual language indicates that the role of the woman in the domestic sphere was a common portrayal that reflected the values, beliefs, and experiences of people in the Archaic Greek world and that “mark[ed] particularly the different events that constituted the life cycle.”38 It is no coincidence that among the corpus of discovered terracotta figurines, women engaging in household tasks remains the dominant group. While many view women’s roles in the culinary realm of the domestic sphere to be a testament to the inequality levied against them in patriarchal societies, these scenes truly reiterate scenes of solo and “collective work similar to those that have brought women together over the centuries.”39

Food as a maker and securer of identity is a powerful idea, one that shapes the cultural climate and gives a unique identity to those who interact with it. No longer shall the ambivalence of women in the domestic sphere dominate conversations about their importance in it. In rediscovering the compelling narratives within these “overwhelmingly cosmopolitan” figurines, the role of women in the domestic sphere is redefined as one that demands our attention, admiration, and profound appreciation, especially within the larger realm of Archaic Greek artifacts. As Uhlenbrock writes, “this is an exciting time for the terracotta specialist.”40 I could not agree more.

 

Camille Blanco (she/her) is a junior double concentrating in Classics and History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. 

 

Endnotes

  1. Jaimee P. Uhlenbrock, “The Study of Ancient Greek Terracottas: A Historiography of the Discipline,” Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 1, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 12, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4301471.
  2. Uhlenbrock, “The Study of Ancient Greek Terracottas,” 12.
  3. Marcella Pisani, “The Collection of Terracotta Figurines in the British School at Athens,” The Annual of the British School at Athens 101 (2006): 271, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/30073261.pdf. This reference to the “campaigns of excavation” is about the discovery of terracotta figurines from the cemeteries of Tanagra in Boeotia.
  4. Uhlenbrock, “The Study of Ancient Greek Terracottas,” 10.
  5. In this paper, I will only be focusing on those terracotta figurines with the rough-cut faces.
  6. Sian Lewis, The Athenian Woman: An Iconographic Handbook (Oxon: Routledge, 2002), Brown University ProQuest Ebook, 69.
  7. Victoria Tsoukala, “Cereal processing and the performance of gender in archaic and classical Greece: iconography and function of a group of terracotta statuettes and vases” (lecture, Proceedings of the XI Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, April 2007), 387.
  8. Christopher Kissane, “Thinking With Food: The Welcome Rise of Food History,” Faculty of History, University of Oxford, last modified 2014, https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/thinking-food-welcome-rise-food-history.
  9. See Xenophon, Oikonomikos, 7.35–6 and Euripides, Melanippe, fr. 499 N from Lewis, The Athenian Woman, 60.
  10. Tsoukala mentions in her article that pottery and vases do not “present such a diversity of images: so far it appears that pounding and baking are depicted on vases almost exclusively,” which supports the idea that more mundane activities, such as sifting flour and grinding grain, were ultimately depicted on terracotta figurines.
  11. Image courtesy of the Louvre, https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010261560, Inventory Number: CA 2141. The Louvre notes that this figurine was painted, as there are remnants of black paint on the woman’s hair; red paint on her arms, the bottom of her dress, her shoes, and pestle; and yellow paint on her face, pestle, and container.
  12. Image courtesy of Victoria Tsoukala, “Cereal processing,” 394. For both images 3 and 4, Tsoukala does not provide the height of the figurine, just its current location (Polygiros Museum) and where it was discovered.
  13. Uhlenbrock, “The Study of Ancient Greek Terracottas,” 13.
  14. Image courtesy of Victoria Tsoukala, “Cereal processing,” 394.; Image courtesy of The Met, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/241198?deptids=13&when=1000+B.C.-A.D.+1&what=Terracotta&ao=on&ft=terracotta+statuette+food&offset=200&rpp=40&pos=237, Ascension Number: 74.51.1643.
  15. Mariana Kavroulaki, “GRIND MILL, GRIND,” History of Greek Food, last modified November 28, 2009, https://1historyofgreekfood.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/grind-mill-grind.
  16. At least, this applies to the woman on the left, who is holding the basin. It appears that the woman handling the saddle quern has a missing face, as the image depicts a piece of smooth clay-like substance that occupies the area where her face used to be.
  17. Image courtesy of The Louvre, https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010258992, Inventory Number: CA 804.
  18. Some scholars believe that this musician, rather than serenading them, was instead there to keep the production of the loaves sped up and ensure that no women fell behind in her kneading.
  19. Image courtesy of Pisani, “The Collection of Terracotta Figurines,” 313–314.
  20. Pisani, “The Collection of Terracotta Figurines,” 313.
  21. Pisani, “The Collection of Terracotta Figurines,” 313.
  22. Image courtesy of The Met, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/241180?deptids=13&when=1000+B.C.-A.D.+1&what=Terracotta&ao=on&ft=terracotta+statuette+food& offset=360&rpp=40&pos=396, Ascension Number: 74.51.1624.
  23. Image courtesy of Victoria Tsoukala, “Cereal processing,” 394. All Tsoukala provides is that this figurine is currently at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, and what I believe is an identification number, 4052.
  24. Tsoulaka, “Cereal processing,” 388.
  25. Image courtesy of The Met, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/241310?deptids=13&when=1000+B.C.-A.D.+1&what=Terracotta&ao=on&ft=terracotta+statuette+food&offset=200&rpp=40&pos=238, Ascension Number: 74.51.1755.
  26. Tsoulaka, “Cereal processing,” 389. 
  27. Image courtesy of The Louvre, https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010305665, Inventory Number: MNE 1333.
  28. Another fascinating terracotta, which seems to be the only one of its kind, depicts a woman grating cheese with a similar setup as the woman grinding in Figure 3. See more here: https://collections.mfa.org/objects/151728.
  29. Image courtesy of The MFA, https://collections.mfa.org/objects/151733/woman-cooking-watched-by-a-girl?ctx=45181ce5-3054-4623-ae60-7d9cc232dff8&idx=0, Ascension Number: 01.7783. 
  30. Image courtesy of The Louvre, https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010263048, Inventory Number: CA 634. 
  31. None of the sources I have consulted express the idea that all these representations of women are slave women. Furthermore, according to other online sources, slave women kept their hair short, because long hair denoted that the woman was free. As such, since these figurines have elaborate hairstyles that are wrapped in buns at the tops of their heads, it makes sense to believe that none of the depictions in these thirteen figurines are of slave women.
  32. Alexandra Neagu, “Women As Extraordinary Cooks in Ancient Greek Literature” (lecture, 3rd Symposium of Greek Gastronomy, Over a Hot Stove: Women in the Kitchen, Symposia of Greek Gastronomy, Karanou, Chania, Greece, July 25, 2015).
  33. Neagu, “Women as Extraordinary Cooks.” The specific example that Neagu calls to mind is that of Medea, especially in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Euripides’ Medea, and Moses of Choren’s Progymnasmata.
  34. Neagu, “Women as Extraordinary Cooks.”
  35. Neagu, “Women as Extraordinary Cooks.”
  36. I note common women here, because, in the realm of ancient Greek literature, women, especially independent women, were portrayed as deceitful, shameful, and manipulative, doing all they could to undermine man and the success of society. There are some instances where the Homeric, or epic, wife is the archaic ideal and the archetype of virtue and duty in the ancient world. There is no instance, however, in Homer’s description of the ideal wife that she be engaged in various culinary tasks—she was limited to “produce and raise heirs but also to preside over her household by weaving and watching over the domestic slaves and goods.” The task of “cereal processing,” as is the subject of Tsoukala’s article, and any other culinary task in wealthy households was assigned to slaves and the woman of the house was assigned the task of supervising them. See Katherine A. Gabriel, “Performing Femininity: Gender in Ancient Greek Myth,” (master’s thesis, Bard College, 2016), https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/cgi/view content.cgi?article=1009& context=senproj_s2016 for more examples of the ideal and non-ideal wife in ancient Greece.
  37. Marina Picazo, “Greek terracotta figurines: images and representations of everyday life,” in Engendering Social Dynamics: The Archaeology of Maintenance Activities, ed. Sandra Montón-Subías and Margarita Sánchez-Romero (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008), 63.
  38. Picazo, “Greek terracotta figurines,” 60. 
  39. Picazo, “Greek terracotta figurines,” 61.
  40. Uhlenbrock, “The Study of Greek Terracottas,” 20.

Bibliography

Aristophanes. “Ecclesiazusae.” Perseus Digital Library. Last modified 1938. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0019.tlg010. perseus-eng1:204-240.

Chrysopoulos, Philip. “Ancient Greeks were Gourmands with a Preference for Fish.” GreekReporter.com. Last modified August 4, 2022. https://greekreporter.com/2022/08/04/ancient-greeks-were-gourmands-with-a-preference-for-fish/.

Department of Greek and Roman Art. “Tanagra Figurines.” The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Last modified October 2004. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tafg/hd_tafg.htm.

Gabriel, Katherine A. “Performing Femininity: Gender in Ancient Greek Myth.” Master’s thesis, Bard College, 2016. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=senproj_s2016.

Girtzi, Maria. “Different Perspectives on Ancient Greek and Byzantine Cuisine (Part 1).” Archaeology Wiki. Last modified October 13, 2014. https://www.archaeology.wiki/blog/2014/09/29/different-approaches-ancient-greek-byzantine-cuisine-part-1/.

Kavroulaki, Mariana. “GRIND MILL, GRIND.” History of Greek Food. Last modified November 28, 2009. https://1historyofgreekfood.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/grind-mill-grind.

Kissane, Christopher. “Thinking With Food: The Welcome Rise of Food History.” Faculty of History, University of Oxford. Last modified 2014. https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/thinking-food-welcome-rise-food-history.

Lewis, Sian. The Athenian Woman: An Iconographic Handbook. London: Routledge, 2002. Brown University ProQuest Ebook.

Met Museum. “Terracotta Group: Making Flour | Cypriot | Cypro-Archaic II | The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/241198?deptids=13&when=1000+B.C.-A.D.+1&what=Terracotta&ao=on&ft=terracotta+statuette+food&offset=200&rpp=40&pos=237.

Mills Archive. “From Quern to Computer: The History of Flour Milling.” The Mills Archive – We Preserve & Protect Records of Our Milling History. Last modified September 6, 2016. https://new.millsarchive.org/2016/09/06/from-quern-to-computer-the-history-of-flour-milling/4/.

Neagu, Alexandra. “Women As Extraordinary Cooks in Ancient Greek Literature.” Lecture, 3rd Symposium of Greek Gastronomy, Over a Hot Stove: Women in the Kitchen, Symposia of Greek Gastronomy, Karanou, Chania, Greece, July 25, 2015.

Picazo, Marina. “Greek terracotta figurines: images and representations of everyday life.” In Engendering Social Dynamics: The Archaeology of Maintenance Activities, edited by Sandra Montón-Subías and Margarita Sánchez-Romero, 57–64. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008.

Pisani, Marcella. “The Collection of Terracotta Figurines in the British School at Athens.” The Annual of the British School at Athens 101 (2006), 269–368. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/30073261.pdf.

Tsoulaka, Victoria. “Cereal processing and the performance of gender in archaic and classical Greece: iconography and function of a group of terracotta statuettes and vases.” Lecture, Proceedings of the XI Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, April 2007, 387–395.

Uhlenbrock, Jaimee P. “The Study of Ancient Greek Terracottas: A Historiography of the Discipline.” Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 1, no. 3 (Spring 1993), 7–27. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4301471.