Browsing by Author "MacDonald, Bronwen Elizabeth"

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    Vanth: An Iconograpical Study of an Etruscan Psychopomp
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-03) MacDonald, Bronwen Elizabeth; Masters, Samantha; Stellenbosch Unviersity. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Ancient Studies.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Death and what happens to the soul when our bodies fail has enthralled humanity across the ages. No less so for the Etruscans. Vanth, a female daimon who acts as a psychopomp, is one of the most commonly represented chthonic figures in Etruscan funerary art. However, despite this proliferation, she is only named by inscription seven times. Complicating things further is the wide variety of her iconography amongst these seven examples. A close iconographic analysis of the seven epigraphic Vanths proved little cohesion in Vanth's iconography if only this small sample is considered. It also revealed that relying solely on the epigraphic Vanths for frequency analysis leads to unusual attributes such a nude Vanths being weighed far more heavily than they should when compared to a larger sample. In this study, a corpus of 100 Vanth samples drawn from open access online collections were compiled into a database and examined using exploratory data analysis. The results showed distinct trends in Vanth's iconography over the 5th to 2nd centuries BCE. They also showed a lack of trends along a north-south axis of the geographical locations of the seven Etruscan cities studied, implying that the expansion of the Roman Republic during the same period had little effect on changes in Vanth's iconography. There are, however, localized phenomena that occur and have been documented in this study. Examining the trends by object type revealed minor variations in her iconography and peculiarities specific to certain object types. A secondary result of this thesis was the discovery of an element of Hellenic bias, with Vanth sometimes being misidentified in online museum collections as figures such as Lasa or the Greek Erinyes. She might also be given insipid descriptive labels or simply referred to as a 'winged demon'. This incorrect or obscure attribution creates a vicious circle whereby scholars searching for Vanth cannot find her because she is inaccurately labelled in the extant metadata of these collections. The Vanth database created to facilitate this study is open access and will serve as a resource by which scholars and museum curators can secure a more reliable identification of Vanth in the future.