Evans, Arthur J.: The Palace of Minos: a comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustred by the discoveries at Knossos (Band 3): The great transitional age in the northern and eastern sections of the Palace (London, 1930)

412

MINIATURE GOLD LION

Gold

lion

jewel.



Fig. 275 a. Gold Lion.

originally modelled on a core or matrix, no doubt of steatite, the exquisite

details being afterwards added by means of

a graver. The whole is rendered with great

naturalistic fidelity, such features as the

fins being very finely engraved. It evi-
dently represents the most esteemed of

Cretan fishes,the Scams Cretensis,a. spirited

illustration of which on a contemporary

gem is here reproduced in Fig. 275.1

An example of a technique analogous
to the gold fish on a more microscopic scale

is supplied by a small figure of a lion found by the stairs of the ' Long
Corridor', and is here given for comparison on an enlarged scale in Fig. 275 a.2
The original is only 15 millimetres in length. It is beautifully moulded,
its two plates being joined together in a similar manner, but in this case the
addition of granules infuses into it an element of a purely decorative nature.
In a less refined form this granulation appears on a gold pendant in the
form of a duck formed in a similar manner by means of two thin plates joined
above and below found about a metre below the floor of the Upper East-
West Corridor and belonging like other associated relics to the closing epoch
of the Palace.3 That this minute form of granulation was already known in
Crete at the beginning of the Middle Minoan Age—the date, be it observed,
of an early wave of direct influence from the East4—is shown by the occur-
rence in the tholos tomb B at Kumasa of a gold pendant jewel in the form
of a toad—only 10 millimetres in length—with similar microscopic globules
on its back.5 But the lion jewel goes far beyond this. In its microscopic
execution it anticipates, on the same lines and with unsurpassed delicacy, the
finest Etruscan goldsmiths' work of a thousand years later, its naturalistic
modelling, however, showing a greater sympathy with the Greek.

' Repeated from P. ofM., i. p. 677, Fig. 498.
(From near Lappa :—A. E.)

2 A. E., Report, Knossos, 1901, B.S.A.,
vii, p. 50. An illustration of this was sup-
plied by me to Dr. Marc Rosenberg for the
section ' Granulation ' of his important work
Die Geschkhte der Goldschmiedekimst auj tech-
nischer Grundlage (see p. 29, Figs. 43, 44).
Compare, too, G. Karo, Art. Goldschmiede-
kimst in Max Ebert's Reallexikon der Vor-
geschichle, p. 389 and PI. 166, b.

3 A. E., Report, Knossos, B. S. A., viii,
PP- 38, 39 and Fig. 18. Cf. Rosenberg, op.
cit., p. 29, Figs. 41, 42.

4 Granulated decoration also appears on
Egyptian jewellery of the Xllth Dyn. (e. g. in
the Treasure of Dahshur), but the method does
not seem to be of Egyptian origin. Large
granulation occurs on a dagger-blade of Ur.

5 Xanthudides, Vaulted Tombs of Messara
(transl. Droop), p. 29 and PI. IV, 386.