Arqueología y creencias del mar en la antigua Grecia

Resumo

This paper offers an approach to the seafaring religiosity of ancient Greece, from the Bronze Age until the Classical period. The speech that we propose leans on those main well-known today archaeological sources, among which we should include different artistic and epigraphic sources, as well as those sanctuaries dedicated to Poseidon and votive seafaring, besides varied literary stories and mythological narrations. Such sources remark the importance granted by the Greeks to Nature, and in particular to the powerful marine element, embodied in the figures of different gods, and whose anthropological and cultural projection shaped, in great measure, the fate of the Greek civilization. The marine element was considered by the Greeks as essence of the man�s life and as place of rest for the eternity. It is not strange that the superstitions, the beliefs, the myths and all luck of religious practices dedicated to serve as nexus of union between the man and the gods rectors of the marine means, have constituted one of the most excellent aspects in the old religiosity of Greece, and have converted this natural environment, so next to the daily human life, in a religious element, cardinal in the configuration of the cultural and social identity of the Greek world.