Bronze Age Mediterranean: 1500 BC
Mycenaean Greece: goddesses
15th—16th century BC, Mycenaean culture, southern Aegean.
'Perhaps the figure looking worriedly at his injured ankle is Adam-Achilles, punished with mortality for daring to try to steal the forbidden pomegranates from under the watchful eye of the Great Mother.'
Image on a Myceneaen gold ring (redrawn)
'On this ring from Mycenaean Greece,' said Quintin, 'there seems to be a scene from one of their myths. A lady is weeping or perhaps just asleep, burying her head in her arm against a table. A man appears to be in the act of taking fruit from a tree that is growing out of a shrine of some sort, but he is looking intently down behind him, perhaps at his heel or at a lump on the back of his leg. Perhaps he is Adam-Achilles, punished with mortality for daring to try to steal the forbidden pomegranates! Indignant and standing god-like in the centre of the scene...'
'Is a lady,' interrupted Miranda, not looking at the picture that Quintin was holding. 'A lady with bare bosoms in a flounced skirt.'
'And a face so ugly it looks like it belongs to a lion.'
'Well then she is uglier than most,' replied Miranda, 'but I have five of them on these two Mycenaean rings here, all in similar skirts, all with bare bosoms. Not a man to be seen anywhere. Two of them seem to be venerating something phallic in a shrine. Another two are speaking with a lady who is sitting beneath a tree, with a girl behind them who seems to be venerating this seated lady against the backdrop of a double-axe.'
Images from two Myceneaen gold rings (redrawn)
'A Goddess was worshipped on Crete in Minoan times,' said Miranda.
All over South-west Asia,
she read, early farming communities seem to have focused their worship upon fertility and the life-creating forces expressed through a maternal figure in human form... It was accepted among the stone-using farmers all the way from the Levant to Britain... In the later centuries of the third millennium BC, [visitors to Crete and then to Greece] would have found little difference in the prevailing worship of the Great Mother.
Hawkes, Jacquetta, 1968. Dawn of the Gods. Chatto and Windus. 1: The Birth of Athena.