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Show 256 Hannah Jones EXPLORING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SCALES AND BALANCES IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD Hannah Jones (Elizabeth Peterson) Department of Art and Art History University of Utah honors college spring 2012 The image of the balance or scales in the ancient world is laden with significance. My research fo-cuses especially on depictions of weighing from the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE in Greece, unravel-ing the balance's history by examining the evolution of the scene in art, mythology, and religion. I begin with the balance's technical conception and mythological presence in Predynastic Egypt and chart its use and development into Attica. Scales have been found commonly in archeologi-cal sites and were mundane items, used in ancient life for banking, trading, or shopping. Their metaphorical significance developed early and the weighing scene became centrally important as a metaphor for divine truth, fairness, competition, and harmony. The balance, having been improved and likely invented by the Egyptians, was a prominent sym-bol in the Egyptian myth of the afterlife. Maat, the goddess of truth and justice, was weighed as a feather against the human soul to determine whether the person could enter the paradise of the afterlife. In Egyptian art showing the soul's journey, weighing is a prominent metaphor for ordering life and death, as well as divine fairness and judgment. Similar goddesses, and arguably directly influenced by Maat, are the early Greek deities Metis and Themis, the goddesses of wis-dom, law and order- crucial components of balanced universe for the Greeks. The Greek fascina-tion with the ordering of extreme opposites against each other and the establishment of order plays out in a vast number of myths, dramas, and works of art, and can be better understood with the visual metaphor of the balance in mind. Especially in the scene of underworld weigh-ing in Aristophanes' Frogs and on vases featuring erotostasia (the balancing of Eros), the use of the instrument gives valuable insight into the way that abstract Greek thought is expressed via weighing imagery. The evolution and adoption of the weighing motif is an important component in understanding how the Greeks ordered their reality. |