Bronze Age Mediterranean: 1500 BC
Mycenaean Greece: Goddesses
15th16th 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 the garden of the Great Mother!
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, resting her head against a table. A man appears to be in the act of taking fruit from a tree that is growing out of another table, but he is looking intently down behind him, at his leg or his foot. 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 more likely that it belongs to a lion. But how did you know that? asked Quintin.
She is everywhere! replied Miranda. 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.
'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.
'Jacquetta Hawkes. 1968. Dawn of the Gods,' said Miranda.
