One of the interesting aspects of imagining or recreating Minoan daily life - including religious practice - is that we don't have any textiles to speak of: no altar cloths, no curtains, no rugs or baskets. The damp Mediterranean Sea air tends to rot organic materials pretty swiftly. So we only have a few tiny fragments of the real thing, plus pictures of them in Minoan art.

But we have an interesting reflection of soft materials in some creative ceramics the Minoan potters made. Minoan pottery was pretty imaginative all round, including loads of 3d decorations and other fun details. But this particular class of ceramic vessels is unique: They all look like they're made of soft materials.

The one up top, for instance, is fairly small, with some delightful dolphins painted on the side. You can see that it's meant to look like some kind of soft material such as cloth or supple basketry, with a rope handle. But it's hard ceramic!

This one below, from Pseira, is covered with vegetative labryses. In the Tribe, this special type of labrys symbolizes Ariadne's rise from the Underworld with the first green sprouts of the rainy growing season, which begins in the autumn in the Mediterranean:

This one below, with its bold geometric design, puts me in mind of modern tote bags:

And these two plump little ones are just delightful:

We don't know exactly how these containers were used. Like all Minoan ceramics, they were unglazed - pottery glazes hadn't been invented yet - so they wouldn't have been used to hold liquids for extended periods of time unless they were coated on the inside with beeswax and/or resin the way wine storage jars were. Maybe they were filled with dried flowers. How might you incorporate a vessel like these on an altar or somewhere else in your home?