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Eight Sealstones and a Sealing from the Stratigraphical Museum at Knossos1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

John G. Younger  and
John H. Betts
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Extract

In the summer of 1972, while participating in the excavation of the Royal Road South at Knossos under the direction of Professor Peter Warren now at Bristol University, I undertook a limited examination of certain boxes in the Stratigraphical Museum in the reasonable hope of supplementing John Betts's earlier discovery of five sealstones and sixty-six sealings that could be related to the Palace. The boxes I examined all carry the label of ‘Evans's Personal Property’, and contain an extraordinary number of faience, clay, and stone objects, all with provenance unknown, but many, if not all, surely from Evans's own excavations. The box containing the seals was marked ‘Box 1878, Evans's Material’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 74 , November 1979 , pp. 271 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1979

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References

2 Betts, , BSA lxii (1967) 27 ff.Google Scholar

3 Vapheio: CMS i. 220 (LH IIA context); Archanes, Tholos B: HM 2301 (LM IIIA1 context), Archaeology xx (1967) 276 ff., fig. 7b; Kalyvia Tomb 9: HM 179 (LM IIIA1 context), MA xiv (1904) 501–666, figs. 10aand 619, no. 4 (for the date of the tomb, Furumark, Chronology 104); Royal Tomb at Isopata: HM sealing 415 (LM IIb context), PM i. fig. 515 and GGFR pl. 98.

4 Ayia Pelagia is located approximately 20 km. north-west of Herakleion near the tip of Cape Rogdia. The change in the saint's status from Hosia (Blessed) to Ayia (Saint) constitutes no severe toponymie problem. Though the late settlement (LM IIIB) nearby is partially excavated (ArchRep 1972–3, p. 30), the cemeteryto the north has yielded a few finds mainly through tomb robbing. From another, or perhaps, the same tholos as CS no. 285 and 19P is said to come CS no. 357, which has been condemned as a forgery by Biesantz (Kretisch-mykenische Siegelbilder, p. 117 no. 4) and Gill (BICS viii (1961), 7 ff.). The cemetery, however, produced some genuine pieces: CS nos. 270, a ‘talismanic’ amygdaloid (MM III–LM I);285, another amygdaloid (LM I); 14P and 15P, two good examples of the LM II–IIIA ‘cut style’.

5 Pylos: Lang, , AJA lxiii (1959) 134 f.Google Scholar; Mycenae: Bennett, , The Mycenae Tablets ii (1958) 102 ff.Google Scholar and Eranos lvii (1959) 1 f.; Knossos: Betts, , Kadmos vi (1967) 1 ff.Google Scholar and BSA lxii (1967) 27 f.

6 e.g., BSA lxii (1967) 28, no. II (Knossos, LM IIIAi context?); CMS vii. 238 (Knossos, north of the Palace); CMCG no. 300 (Knossos); AGDS iii. 354 no. 8, pl. 247 (from the Johannes Jantzen Collection which seems wholly Cretan); CMS xiii. 125 (from the Edith Hall Dolan Collection which came essentially from Crete); CMS viii. 79 (from the Richard M. Dawkins Collection which contained mostly Cretan pieces); CMCG nos. 296–9 and 301 (all from Cretan provenances); HM 72, 888, 1217 and 2138 (all from Crete); CMS ix. 143 (provenance unknown); and CMS x. 155 and 156 (both from unknown provenances).

7 This method of producing material can be paralleled in the same period (LM IB) by a lentoid or discoid seal from Gournia House D 11, which is of clay witha black coating to resemble steatite; Boyd-Hawes, , Gournia (1908) 54.Google Scholar fig. 28, 4 a.

8 The pose, with three or more animals in this kind of radial symmetry, was compositionally ambitious and not often attempted. A carnelian lentoid with three small crouched lions depicted full face, in radial symmetry, comes from Dendra/Midea—CMS i. 194.

9 e.g., CMS i. 510 (Mitsotakis Collection, from Crete); CMS iv. 302 (Metaxas Collection, from Spilia in north central Crete)—close in style to our group; CS no. 370; a not dissimilar version of the same motif also occurs on an agate lentoid from the cist of the Vapheio Tholos (context LH IIA)—CMS i. 254, whose style is very close to that of i. 194 from Midea (see above, n. 8).

10 The identification of the animal as a griffin in CMS xii is patently wrong and that of the victim as a goat questionable. A broken lentoid of dark-red jasper bears a similar motif in the same style as (vii) and (viii); it is in the Edith Eccles collection, to be published shortly in BSA.

11 Normally the French ‘chalcédoine’ refers to chalcedony, similar to the material of no. (iii). Mrs. Sakellariou, however, also describes the material of most of the so-called talismanic seals in the Giamalakis Collection as ‘chalcédoine’ (e.g., CMCG nos. 217–20, 347, 356, 381–7, 390–3, 399–409, etc.), many of which must be really of carnelian. In fact, nowhere in the book is carnelian (French ‘cornaline’) mentioned as a material for sealstones; instead, ‘chalcé-doine’ is used throughout as a generic term for all chalcedonies: agate, sard, sardonyx, carnelian, etc. It is possible, therefore, that our no. (ix) is really of carnelian, and its amygdaloid shape does not preclude this; well over 50 per cent of Minoan amygdaloids are carnelian.

12 AASA viii–ix (1925–6) 71 ff., no. 45, fig. 66, pl. viii; JHS xxii (1902) 76 ff., no. 109, pl. ix.

13 Cf. e.g. Kadmos vi (1967) 39 f.