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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
The curious head which is illustrated, in actual size, on Plate VI., was bought by my colleague, Captain F. N. Pryce, and me from a well-known Greek dealer at Cairo in December 1918, and is now in the British Museum. It is carved in the beam of a stag's antler, the natural burr or coronet of the horn representing either a crown or curled, upstanding hair, while the longitudinal corrugations imitate hanging tresses. The smooth, round base of the shed antler very aptly resembles the top of a man's head (Fig. 1). All these features are unworked. The rest of the horn is carved in the shape of a human face wearing a full beard and turned-up moustaches. Across the forehead is a heavy ridged moulding, which runs into the edge of the beard on each side of the face. Whether this moulding represents the band of a headdress, or a ceremonial fillet, or the rim of a crown, or is simply a decorative device to help the transition from the projecting hair to the receding face, it is not possible to decide, for its details will not bear strict interpretation. The hair of eyebrows, moustache and beard is marked with close striations.
1 A.J.A. xix. (1915), p. 237, Plates X.-XVI.
2 See Fig. 3 below, the bull-fighters from Cnossos (B.S.A. vii. Plates II.-III.), and the helmeted head from Mycenae, (Ἐφ Ἀρχ. 1888, p. 166Google Scholar, Plate 8).
3 Hall, , Ancient History of the Near East, pp. 50Google Scholar and 293, note 1.
4 Seager, Explorations in MocMoi, Fig. 21.
5 Hall, , Ancient History of the Near East, Plate IV. 1Google Scholar.
6 Monumenti Antichi, xix. (1908), p. 66, Fig. 19, Pl. I.
7 Hall, , Aegean Archaeology, p. 242Google Scholar.
8 So in the twenty-one gold heads inlaid on a silver cup from Mycenae, Ἐφ Ἀρχ 1888Google Scholar, Plate 7) and on the Warrior Vase.
9 Lydekker, , The Deer of All Lands, p. 68Google Scholar.
10 I can find no instance of such treatment in classical art. Mr. R. A. Smith (without expressing an opinion) suggests comparison with ‘animistic flints.’ See Newton, W. M. in Journ. Brit. Arch. Ass. 1913, ‘On Palaeolithic Figures of Flint…called Figure Stones.’Google ScholarDr. G. Macdonald calls my attention to some curious parallels in the same material (antler-burrs) of provincial Roman origin. See Curie, , A Roman Frontier Post: The Fort of Newstead, p. 314Google Scholar, Plate LXXXIV. 14.
11 Schliemann's crystal and gold ‘dragonsceptre’ now turns out to be a sword-hilt (Staïs, , Coll. Mycénienne: Guide Illustré du Musée National ď Athènes, ii. p. 42Google Scholar). The other ‘sceptre-heads’ from the third shaft-grave, gold and crystal balls, are probably heads of hair pins. This was a women's grave, and contained no weapons. Schliemann, was probably right in assigning to sceptre-shafts certain gold tubes and studs (Mycenae and Tiryns, pp. 203, 305)Google Scholar, the best tube or sheath, inlaid with a spiral stripe in silver with a knob at each end, from the fourth grave (Tsountas and Manatt, Mycenaean Age, Fig. 64). Tsountas found several similar sheaths, one in the Vapheio Tomb ‘of bronze with transverse fluting, about an inch thick’ (ibidem, p. 168). A separate head (though not from a sceptre) is the facetted ball of brown and white breccia from the Mace-bearer's Tomb at Cnossos (Evans, in Archaeologia, 65, (1913–1914), p. 18Google Scholar, Fig. 25.
12 Hdt. i. 195.
13 Iliad, i. 234 ff.
14 Hogarth, in J.H.S. xxii. (1902Google Scholar), The Zakro Sealings, Figs. 12, 26. Cf. Hall, , Aegean Archaeology, p. 208Google Scholar, ‘Herne the Hunter,’ and the Minotaur himself.
15 As in A.J.A. xix. (1915), Plate XIII. ‘The portion of the crown which puzzles me most is the central excrescence, which when I wrote the article I assumed to have been originally cylindrical. It is fragmentary, and consists at present of two vertical projections.’—L.D.C.
