One line, folded at right angles
Take squared paper and draw a line: go right, up, left, down a little less, then right again, and repeat. You have drawn a meander. The rule is simple, one line that turns at right angles, folds back on itself and moves on, and that is why it works on any length of border, from the neck of a jug to the hem of a dress. It is the same principle as a rope laid in loops along a deck, except that every corner is square.
Within that rule there is plenty of room for variety. The line can be single or doubled, the hooks short or deep, and the band can even be broken into separate segments, a “key” repeated rather than a continuous path; even then the eye reads it as Greek. Its close cousin is the wave pattern, a running scroll with rounded curls instead of square corners, and both belong with the other Greek patterns such as palmettes and lotus flowers.
Why “meander”? A river in Asia Minor
The name comes from geography. The Maeander, today’s Büyük Menderes in western Turkey, flowed between Caria and Lydia and reached the sea between the Greek cities of Miletus and Priene. The geographer Strabo, writing in the early first century CE, described its course across the plain as so exceedingly winding that “everything winding is called ‘meandering'”. The river’s name became an ordinary word for anything that winds, and a border pattern with the same restless turns borrowed it.
The favourite border of the Geometric potters
The meander became a Greek signature in the Geometric art of the ninth and eighth centuries BCE. In this period Athenian painters covered their vases with horizontal bands of straight-line ornament, and the meander, which fills a band evenly and can be stretched or shortened at will, suited that taste perfectly. On the great grave vases of eighth-century Athens, such as the Dipylon amphora (1.60 metres tall), bands of pattern wrap the whole pot, and the human figures, when they appear, are drawn with the same geometry.
The meander outlived the Geometric style and stayed one of the most common designs in Greek art long after.
On clothes, too
We tend to see the meander on pottery, because pottery survives. But vase paintings show that Greek fabrics were brightly coloured and patterned, and the Greek key was among the most common designs on them. A jug painted by the Meidias Painter around 420-410 BCE, now in the Metropolitan Museum, is one of the examples of this rich variety of patterned textiles on Greek clothes.
Did the Greek key mean eternity?
Read about the pattern online and you will find it explained as a symbol of eternity, of infinity, of eternal love or of the flow of life. Is any of this ancient? Probably not. The ancient text that explains the name, Strabo’s, speaks of a river and its bends, not of an idea, and the readings about eternity come with no ancient source attached. For the potters of Geometric Athens, as far as the evidence goes, the meander was a border: a disciplined way of filling a band.
Why it never went away
Of all the motifs on ancient clothing, the Greek key and the wave pattern are the ones that appear most often in modern fashion meant to look classical, and even a key broken into segments is enough to suggest antiquity. That is the answer to the title: the meander is everywhere because it is easy to draw, fits any border, and for more than two and a half thousand years has been the quickest way to say “Greek” with a single line.
Where to see it
The National Archaeological Museum in Athens has the Dipylon amphora; the Metropolitan Museum in New York has the Hirschfeld krater and the Meidias Painter’s jug in its Greek galleries. Check opening times on the museums’ websites before you go.
Sources
- Strabo, Geography 12.8.15 (Perseus Digital Library).
- H. Koda, “The Greek Key and Divine Attributes in Modern Dress”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Geometric Art in Ancient Greece” (2004); collection records 14.130.14 and 75.2.11.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Dipylon amphora (National Archaeological Museum 804).
