Octopus the magnificent and its Aegean Bronze Age connections

By Dimitra Mylona.

This post was born out of awe at a piece of kirie art, by Japanese artist Masayo Fukuda. Fukuda created a magnificent paper-cut octopus. It appears as if fashioned out of fine Belgian lace, yet it is made of a single piece of paper patiently cut to create the desired intricate effect. The lively, yet not always naturalistic, octopuses that embrace some Minoan Marine Style vessels painted 3.500 years ago are similarly fascinating!

What is so inspiring about the octopus? What makes it such an attractive subject in art? What makes it delicious food for some and abhorrent for others? The octopus is very familiar to all, yet, its body and life style are truly bizarre. It holds a fascination for different cultures around the world. This post will mostly focus on the Prehistoric cultures of the Aegean Sea in Eastern Mediterranean, but many more enthralling stories can be found elsewhere too. These will be the subject of a future post of the Archives of the Sea.

The octopus biology: an inspiration for cinematic extra-terrestrial characters

Octopuses along with cuttlefish and squid belong to a class of animals called cephalopods (Greek for head-legs), which means that their tentacles come straight out of their head. They have eight tentacles and that is why they are called octopuses (Greek for eight legs). Several of their organs are kept inside their mantle, a sack-like body right on top of their head. The body of an octopus is extremely flexible and soft. It can squeeze itself through the smallest opening, and it can fill spaces of any shape.

Its appearance is definitely weird, but that is not the strangest thing about this animal (and its relatives the cephalopods).

Octopuses can move in two ways.  They can crawl on the sea bottom using the innumerable suction cups of their tentacles;  οr, in dire situations, they can use jet propulsion, by sucking water in their mantle cavity and ejecting it through a narrow siphon.

Octopuses have three functioning hearts!  Two of them pump blood to the gills, and the third sends blood to the organs.  There are only a handful of animals that have more than one heart: squids and cuttlefish also have three hearts, earthworms have five, hugfish have four and cockroaches have no less than thirteen!!!

This abundance of nature’s gifts, however, is not easy for the octopus to manage.  When it uses jet propulsion to move, its third heart stops functioning and the octopus becomes weak.  That is why it prefers crawling rather than speeding!

Octopuses are true blue bloods.  Unlike most other animals’ iron-based red blood, theirs is copper-based and thus blue in colour. Only cephalopods, horseshoe crabs, spiders, crustaceans such as lobsters and shrimps, some other molluscs and royal figures of past eras have this type of blood.

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4^th c. BC. considered octopuses as rather dump creatures (History of Animals, 622a), but today scientists have shown that octopuses are ultra intelligent and their intelligence is of an entirely non-human variety.  They are able to learn and remember. Nothing strange to that! What is truly unexpected, however, is that their brain’s neurons are not all in one place, in their head, but they are scattered throughout their tentacles, each of which has literally a mind of their own. Multitasking is easy for the octopus!

The natural death of octopuses is very dramatic and comes after copulation!  The males mate and just die.  The females, however, hang on for a few months, to tend their eggs and make sure that they hatch. Once the baby octopuses leave the nest the mother’s body undertakes a cascade of cellular suicide, and her organs and tissue dissolve, until she dies. 

Argonauts…the fancy octopuses

Most octopuses live on the sea bottom, in shallow or deep waters, but always near some shelter.  They need rocks and crevices to protect their soft, vulnerable bodies, but most importantly, to lay their eggs.  Each female octopus produces as many as 400.000 eggs, once in its lifetime. She lays them in long, grape-like bunches, egg garlands that hung from the roof of underwater caves and rocks.  Finding such a protected nesting spot is essential. 

There is one type of octopus that is different.  It is the argonaut (also known as paper-nautilus).  Argonauts lead a lifestyle of their own.  They are pelagic, they wander around the open seas, floating near the surface, resembling in this their mythical namesakes, the Argonauts (check them out here). The problem these creatures face is clear: where to lay their eggs in the liquid, everchanging vastness of the oceans?  The solution is nothing short of ingenious.  They create their own nesting spot, a small calcareous “pocket”, a shell that the females carry with them. 

Fine and fragile, these shells are rarely found on the beach, yet mariners, who at different times noticed the argonauts floating in the open sea, got fascinated and immortalized them in art and literature. The Minoans and Myceneans, those seafaring people of over 3000 year ago, who roamed the Eastern Mediterranean, depicted the animal and its shell on clay vessels and sculpted likenesses of them in faience or other fine materials. Paper nautiluses were chosen for as objects in art along with other oceanic creatures, especially the dolphin and some benthic ones such as tritons, purple shellfish, sea urchins and octopuses.

The form of octopus and the Marine Style Pottery of Bronze Age Crete.

The Minoan artistic octopuses, naturalistic as they may appear, are not quite anatomically correct octopuses. They only have one row of suckers on their tentacles, which would normally make them curly octopuses (Eledone moschata).  But their shape, proportions and other anatomical features do not correspond to that species either. Their later, Mycenaean counterparts are even further from the correct octopus anatomy, yet there is no doubt about what they are once we stop thinking about them in terms of modern biological taxonomic schemes.   Octopuses are octopuses and what they did best in Bronze Age Art of the Aegean was to fill in large spaces with their tentacles.

There is much debate concerning their meaning.  Why were octopuses so popular in the art of the Bronze Age Aegean? 

Several theories have been proposed, especially for the beginning of the craze for octopuses and other marine creatures.  In the 15^th century BCE, a special pottery style appeared which lasted for a couple of generations.  Clay vessels of various shapes, sizes and functions were lavishly decorated with elements of the marine world, hence the name Marine Style. The floating argonauts that were discussed above, dolphins, tritons, purple shellfish, sea urchin, but also seaweed, underwater rocks, waves and reflections of the light on the sea bed make up watery dreamscapes that seem dazzling even today! In these artistic marine worlds the octopus is a star.

Penelope Mountjoy, a scholar who got fascinated by the Marine Style, collected all published vessels or vessel fragments with such decorations in a paper published in 1984, following a vivid exchange of opinions with her colleagues.  Although this collection does not include finds of the last 30 years or so, it still dazzles the reader with the richness and exuberance of its marine imagery. A visit to the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion on Crete, which houses countless examples of this style, offers a similar experience.

Marine style pottery was produced in palatial workshops. These vessels were certainly special, made to be used in ritual. Some, like Mountjoy herself, think that the marine motifs on them were just decorative.  Others believe that they had some message to convey. But what exactly?

Some scholars believe that the vivid representation of the seabed and sea life on Marine Style pottery is to be linked to a deep trauma shared by the inhabitants of Cretan shores during the Bronze Age.  According to this theory the retreating sea on the island’s northern shores during the tsunami caused by the eruption of the volcano on Thera island left a deep impression on people who witnessed it and lived to tell the story.  In a similar vein, it has been suggested that the animals depicted on Marine Style pottery are those that suffered the environmental ill-effects of masses of pumice floating on the waters near Crete after eruptions of the Thera volcano.  Similar observations have been made in the 20^th century after the eruption of several volcanoes in the world oceans that resulted in the poisoning of marine life.

The date of the Bronze Age tsunami and the chronology of the Marine Style pottery, however, do not seem to match, and this theory does not hold up to scrutiny. 

It seems more likely that the marine scenes do not reflect catastrophe and sorrows but rather celebrate life and prosperity on Crete at a time when economy expanded and people gained control over the sea in ways beyond simple fishing and seafaring.  At around the time when the Marine Style pottery was in fashion, the Minoans were diving in the depths of the sea, systematically collecting triton shells to make everyday and ritual objects (for more on this topic check this older post) and also purple shellfish to make purple dye, a product that brought wealth and probably international recognition.  In this context diving must have become a common practice and familiarity with the underwater world must have increased.  This is what is probably illustrated in art.  The octopus is one of the most impressive denizens of this world!

For reasons which are still poorly understood, the octopus is one of the very few elements of the Marine Style that survived and remained present in pottery decoration in subsequent centuries.  By the time Myceneans took over the Aegean, after 1450 BCE, the octopus seems to have gradually evolved into an idea and a symbol.  Its form became an abstraction and its tentacles became absurdly stretched in order to cover large clay vessel surfaces.  At this time octopuses got linked to the underworld and they are often found decorating funerary larnakes, clay coffins.

The sun dried octopuses

Was octopus eaten during the Bronze Age? They probably were.  We do not find them archaeologically because their body has no bones or other durable elements.  Art suggests that octopuses were caught along with other fish that hide in underwater rock crevices.  A Minoan seal, probably found at Knossos, depicts a fisherman holding a large octopus and a fish, most probably a grouper.

Some scholars suggested that the popularity of the octopus as a decorative motive probably reflects its popularity in cuisine.  Traditional fisheries in the southern Aegean of the 19^th and early 20^th century were after all octopus oriented.  The renowned archaeologist Christos Tsountas, in a paper on Cycladic culture in 1898 Archaeologiki Efimeris, cites relevant information given to him by his friend Ioannis Kampanis on the island of Antiparos in the Cyclades.  At that period, on that island of 600 inhabitants, eight vessels specialized in octopus fishing. Along with the fishermen who operated from the shore, they caught about 25 tons of octopus a year. Tsountas believed that the situation would not have been much different in the Bronze Age.

The rich octopus catches of the last century were sundried and exported to distant markets.  A photograph of a young Greek immigrant somewhere in land-locked Chicago, Illinois, in 1906 proves the point.  He is proudly holding a dried octopus and an octopus ball (the typical method of packaging dried octopuses in the Aegean at the time). Is the dried octopus a badge of his Greekness? Does it bring fond memories of his home island?  We can never learn.  One cannot ignore however the similarity in his proud posture with the Minoan fisherman we see on the seal above.

Want to know more?  We have suggestions!