Mycenaean Larnakes from Tanagra - I
On the long sides representations of characters and symbols of religious nature. On this face an imaginary hybrid creature, similar to a sphinx, and a male figure are standing on either side of a sacred pillar supporting a cushion capital. In Minoan Crete, these pillars were stone columns having a sacred and religious meaning.
The column is the focal point of the scene, where the male figure approaching from the right and wearing an elaborate bordered robe is met by a large sphinx coming from the left. The standing figure without weapons and wearing a long robe could be regarded as a priest, rather than a priestess, engaged in some funeral ritual of blessing the house of the deceased. The sphinx is wingless, and equipped with human arms (as well as four legs!); both figures touch the column, and both wear the flat cap characteristic of sphinxes; the sphinx’s one has the usual floating plume. Two animals (bulls and/or horses) are floating over and under the sphinx body.
The association of the sphinx with death in the iconography of the larnakes is not limited to this example, which is, however, the most compelling in its suggestion of the sphinx as guardian of the house and tomb, a role it was destined to play also in Archaic Greece.
The Pillar cult, and its dual version in association with the “Sacred Tree” cult, was so widespread that it may be said to mark a definite early stage of religious evolution. These primitive cults of trees and pillars, or rude stones, could be regarded as an identical form of worship. The group is indeed inseparable, and a special feature of the Mycenaean cult scenes which we have to deal is the constant combination of the sacred tree with pillar or dolmen. The same religious idea - the possession of the material object by the “numen” of the divinity - is common to both. No doubt, as compared with the pillar-form, the living tree was in some way a more realistic impersonation of the godhead, as a depositary of the divine life manifested by its fruits and foliage. In the whispering of its leaves and the melancholy soughing of the breeze it was possible to hear, as in Dodona, the actual voice of the divinity.
Monsters are often associated with these pillars as guardians. The griffins, sphinxes and lions that we see before the sacred pillars were, probably, all taken from the Egypt.
Source: Immerwahr S., “Death and the Tanagra Larnakes” in “The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule”
Clay Larnax
Height 51.0 cm, width 69.0 cm
14th - 13th century BC
From Tanagra, Boeotia
Thebes, Archaeological Museum
Mycenaean Larnakes from Tanagra - I
On the long sides representations of characters and symbols of religious nature. On this face an imaginary hybrid creature, similar to a sphinx, and a male figure are standing on either side of a sacred pillar supporting a cushion capital. In Minoan Crete, these pillars were stone columns having a sacred and religious meaning.
The column is the focal point of the scene, where the male figure approaching from the right and wearing an elaborate bordered robe is met by a large sphinx coming from the left. The standing figure without weapons and wearing a long robe could be regarded as a priest, rather than a priestess, engaged in some funeral ritual of blessing the house of the deceased. The sphinx is wingless, and equipped with human arms (as well as four legs!); both figures touch the column, and both wear the flat cap characteristic of sphinxes; the sphinx’s one has the usual floating plume. Two animals (bulls and/or horses) are floating over and under the sphinx body.
The association of the sphinx with death in the iconography of the larnakes is not limited to this example, which is, however, the most compelling in its suggestion of the sphinx as guardian of the house and tomb, a role it was destined to play also in Archaic Greece.
The Pillar cult, and its dual version in association with the “Sacred Tree” cult, was so widespread that it may be said to mark a definite early stage of religious evolution. These primitive cults of trees and pillars, or rude stones, could be regarded as an identical form of worship. The group is indeed inseparable, and a special feature of the Mycenaean cult scenes which we have to deal is the constant combination of the sacred tree with pillar or dolmen. The same religious idea - the possession of the material object by the “numen” of the divinity - is common to both. No doubt, as compared with the pillar-form, the living tree was in some way a more realistic impersonation of the godhead, as a depositary of the divine life manifested by its fruits and foliage. In the whispering of its leaves and the melancholy soughing of the breeze it was possible to hear, as in Dodona, the actual voice of the divinity.
Monsters are often associated with these pillars as guardians. The griffins, sphinxes and lions that we see before the sacred pillars were, probably, all taken from the Egypt.
Source: Immerwahr S., “Death and the Tanagra Larnakes” in “The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule”
Clay Larnax
Height 51.0 cm, width 69.0 cm
14th - 13th century BC
From Tanagra, Boeotia
Thebes, Archaeological Museum