:THE RING OF NESTOR/ ETC.

67

YElUX RED BLUE OftEE

tholos ossuaries. The king of beasts is here seen not as a devourer, but as
serenely guarding the body of the dead man.67

It would seem from the Egyptian analogy that the couchant lion in this
section of the ring should be looked on as the divinely appointed warder of
the entrance to the Under-world, and in close relation to the Goddess in her
chthonic character. This connexion is, in fact, clearly brought out by the
two diminutive female figures, who are obviously attending to the lion's wants.
In these we must recognise the two small handmaidens—the Aia9 Kovpcu,—
who, as shown above, are re-
peatedly seen accompanying the
Goddess, attired as if they were
little Minoan women.68

Care was taken, moreover,
to make the lion's sojourn in
the Elysian fields agreeable by
providing him with a leafy
canopy above. The ivy-like
sprays issuing from behind the
trunk and rising beside the
lion's head are not, as already
noted, to be regarded as
branches of the tree itself.
They belong indeed to no ter-
restrial species. Their origin is
to be sought in a decorative
combination of double lines of
running scrolls with a motive
derived from the papyrus sym-
bol of the Delta Goddess, Wazet
—-an ornamental growth that
specially characterises the Third
Middle Minoan Period.69 The
space between the interconnected scrolls, filled in its broader part by the expand-
ing head of the papyrus tuft, was acuminated above, resembling a pointed leaf,
and by the beginning of the First Late Minoan Period the motive thus evolved
began to be actually treated as a vegetable. It thus takes its place beside
various rock plants on wall-paintings of the transitional M.M. III. 6, L.M. I. a
phase, as a species of ivy, but with the outUne of the original papyrus tuft

*ig. 57.—Part of Wall-painting (restored)
prom ' House of Frescoes,3 Knossos, show-
ing the ' Sacral Ivy.'

67 I may refer to my remarks, P. of M.,
ii. p. 55, and see Fig. 26. The seal is from
the tholos of Kalathiana, and is given in
Xanthudides, op. tit., H. VIII. p. 821.

68 See above, p. 13, and Figs. 13-15.

69 See P. of M., i. p. 509, and compare
the pedestal of the lamp, p. 345, Fig. 249.
It recurs on a bronze cup of the ' Vapheio '
type from a M.M. III. sepulchral deposit at

Mochlos (Seager, Moclilos, p. 62, and Fig.
xii. f.) and on the upper part of the body
of an unpublished steatite rhyton with
reliefs (Candia Museum). The * waz'
motive, as seen on Xllth Dynasty scarabs,
affected a series of Minoan sphragistic types
well illustrated by the Zakro sealings (see
P. ofM., i. pp. 705, 706, and Figs. 528, 529).

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