The present thesis examines Homer's description of the Shield of Achilleus and Minoan miniature frescoes, particularly the Sacred Grove and Dance Fresco and Grandstand Fresco. It uses them as examples to explore the transmission of ideas between cultures - the intensely visual Minoan civilisation of the Bronze Age centred on Crete and the earliest cultural strata of ancient Greece - that preferred different means of representation, painting, and poetry. Because Minoan fresco painting was essentially non-narrative and not accompanied by readable written records, so that "deciphering" its iconography is not an option, the thesis argues that we can learn about general cultural perceptions from interpreting and analysing how techniques of representation in painting and poetry treat the representation of time and space. From the relationship that these techniques establish with the beholders of the representation, we can infer their self-understanding. If the world appears to us as an intricate complex of cultural representations, the way we interact with them reflects our sense of our human place in the world. The non-narrative techniques of Minoan frescoes - particularly the use of vertical perspective, the absence of a fixed point of view, suppressed focalisation, and map-like composition - are shown...

Saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) is a male-sterile, triploid flower crop, and source of the spice and colorant saffron. For over three millennia, it was cultivated across the Mediterranean, including ancient Greece, Persia, and other cultures, later spreading all over the world. Despite saffron crocus’ early omnipresence, its origin has been the matter of a century-old debate, in terms of area and time as well as parental species contribution. While remnants of the ancient arts, crafts, and texts still provide hints on its origin, modern genetics has the potential to efficiently follow these leads, thus shedding light on new possible lines of descent. In this review, we follow ancient arts and recent genetics to trace the evolutionary origin of saffron crocus. We focus on the place and time of saffron domestication and cultivation, and address its presumed autopolyploid origin involving cytotypes of wild Crocus cartwrightianus. Both ancient arts from Greece, Iran, and Mesopotamia as well as recent cytogenetic and comparative next-generation sequencing approaches point to saffron’s emergence and domestication in ancient Greece, showing how both disciplines converge in tracing its origin.

Aujourd’hui, la Crète offre une flore riche et en partie unique. Cette thèse a pour objectif d’étudier les plantes dans le monde minoen (Crète et Théra, actuelle Santorin), en identifiant les espèces grâce à divers supports, en analysant les procédés de préparation et les utilisations que les Minoens pouvaient faire de ces plantes. La première partie de notre travail est un catalogue iconographique qui répertorie les plantes dans l’art, les écritures et les analyses scientifiques. Les études publiées jusqu’à présent se concentrent sur l’identification des motifs floraux ou sur une plante spécifique et les relations hommes-plantes ne sont pas ou peu analysées. La particularité de notre démarche est d’être complétée par une analyse contextuelle qui permet de pallier cette lacune. La deuxième partie de nos recherches concerne la préparation des plantes, c’est-à-dire les attentions qu’elles nécessitaient avant d’être utilisées dans la vie quotidienne. Les domaines d’utilisations envisageables étant nombreux, notre étude se focalise sur l’utilisation des plantes dans les cérémonies religieuses et dans l’artisanat du textile. / Today, Crete offers a rich and partially unique flora. The aim of this thesis is to study plants in the Minoan world (Crete and Akrotiri, Thera), by identifying the species thanks to diverse media, by analyzing the methods of preparation and uses which Minoans could make of these plants. The first part of our work is an iconographic catalog which lists plants in art, writings and scientific analyses. Previous studies focus on the identification of floral patterns or a specific plant, and relationships between men and plants are not or not much analyzed. The special feature of our approach is to be completed by a contextual analysis which allows to compensate for this gap. The second part of our researches concerns the preparation of plants, that is to say the attention which they required before being used in everyday life. The possible fields being numerous, our study focuses on the use of plants in religion and in textile industry.