Warrior dance, social ordering and the process of polis formation in Early Iron Age Crete

Located at the northern end of the valley of Amari, within the territory of the Greek and Roman town of Sybrita, the settlement of Thronos Kephala is one of those new sites founded after the collapse of the territorial state system of the Late Bronze Age, at the beginning of the 12th century BC, which marked the dawn of a new era. This paper will focus on the scene of dance performed by three male warriors depicted on a PG clay krater found in the settlement, which provides a major contribution for the reconstruction of the social identity of the local early Greek community. The scene codifies the ways in which a ruling group in the community of Thronos Kephala assigned to itself the privilege of male initiation, and celebrated it, perhaps for the first time, with a ceremony which also included a banquet. This ceremony may be considered as the symbolic representation of the institution that enabled the society to ensure its continuation. Thus the vase from Thronos Kephala allow us to identify processes of social discrimination whose origins are closely bound up with the birth of communal institutions: processes which were set in motion to uphold the privileges of the ruling groups which emerged on Crete during the Early Iron Age and have to be considered as an important stage in the development of a secondary state formation.