Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
While Mediterranean peaks do not reach Andean and Himalayan heights, the visual
contrast produced by their verticality and the surrounding landscape, accentuated by
the brightness of the southern light, has made them objects of awe since the dawn
of civilization. Faith and lore have further elevated these summits, while visual
interconnectedness made them nodes of cultural networks, providing ancient cults
and myths with both geographical and narrative continuity. Holy mountains are
attested from the Bronze Age in the religious traditions of the Levant and were
central features in Minoan Crete (Horden and Purcell, 2001, p. 413). The Minoan
civilization flourished on the island between 3000 and 1500 BC. Its religion centred
on the cult of the 'mountain mother', a female goddess associated with the fertility
of the land and worshipped on high places.
Neither too high to be forbidding nor too low to pass unobserved, Cretan peaks
offered relatively easy points of access to the divine. More than 50 mountain-top
shrines are present on the island and could be reached within a 3-hour walk from
the main settlement. Almost all of them are located in altitudinal regions associated
with the summer transhumance of sheep and goats, perhaps 'to relieve the fears and
cares of the shepherds and breeders' (Rutkowski, 1986, p. 185). More significantly,
the sanctuaries are set in sight of each other, and in sight of the villages in the valley
below (Peatfield, 1983; Rackham and Moody, 1996). Large sacrificial bonfires were
lit as part of ceremonies, providing spiritual comfort to those villagers in the valley
who would lift their gaze to heaven. During festival nights a network of sacred
beacons would unite various regions and allow the faithful to perform a 'visual'
pilgrimage through the peaks (Peatfield, 1983, p. 277).
At the close of the Middle Bronze Age, Minoan peak sanctuaries were abandoned
for caves. The catastrophic eruption of Thera (Santorini) in the second millennium
BC one of the largest volcanic events on Earth ever recorded in history, which dev-
astated the island as well as coastal regions of Crete, caused Minoans to turn from
the powerless gods of the skies, from where the poisonous ashes came, to chthonic
divinities that might put an end to earthquakes. At the same time, successive waves
of invaders from the Eurasian interior had gradually started to penetrate Greece,
introducing a religion dominated by masculine deities ruled by a god of thunder
and lightning. Out of the encounter between the culture of these tribes and that of
the Minoans, the classical civilization of Ancient Greece was born - and with it
new sacred mountains and mountain myths (Bernbaum, 1997, p. 106; Rutkowski,
1986, p. 201).
In ancient Greece, each typology of landscape with pronounced physical prop-
erties became a manifestation of a particular divinity (Norberg-Schultz, 1979,
pp. 29-31). Separated from mankind and yet still in the world of humans, Greek
gods found mountains congenial dwellings between earth and heaven. As with
Minoan peak shrines, many Hellenic sanctuaries are famous for their spectacular
cliff-side or mountain-top settings: 'there seems to have been an idea that the gods
needed to live where they could gaze down upon the world' (Williams, 1989, p. 79).
As the highest summit, snow-capped Thessalian Olympus (2917m asl) hosted
the throne of Zeus and the 12 gods. Further south, Mount Parnassus (2457m asl)
