The traditional view is that the Ancient Greeks constitute the basic principles of Western civilization. Nevertheless, democracy, philosophy and theatricality are invented. But it would be a mistake to imagine them particularly rationally. Their societies were shaped by strange and primitive forces as well as mind guides. And this is nowhere more visible than in arts.
One of the most intriguing aspects of ancient Greek art is that there are many fantastic creatures. When we think of Greek art, we can imagine the sculptures of Olympus gods made of marble - but gorgons, griffins, cantors and sphinxes are also quite common. Many of them have recently been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, at the beginning of the Classical Period, on the display of Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. What was the significance of these supernatural predators? Fantastic animals were already part of the repertoire of Aegean craftsmen at the beginning of the 5th century BC, a thousand years before the magnificent point of classical age in Athens. In the Bronze Age, for example, they were the mainstays of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations.
The famous 'Throne Room' in the Minoan palace in Knossos, Crete, is decorated with hybrid griffin frescoes - hybrid creatures mixed with a lion-bodied and predatory bird head. The so-called pond in the pond was supposed to give supernatural power to those who sat there.
The lion or the vulture? We do not know this because there are no heads of stone monsters surrounding the entrance of the Mycenae castle.
The magnificent 'Lion's Gate' in the mainland of Mykon, Greece, dominated an entrance to the castle with huge alpine creatures made of limestone in both columns. There is a theory that these creatures are griffin, that they are not lions because of their headlessness (since the missing heads were already fixed with the retaining pins and looked outwards) - perhaps in honor of the Griffins in earlier Minoan art.
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