Excavations near a 12th-century tower reveal the summer capital of a forgotten Islamic empire
By ERIC A. POWELL
Monday, September 23, 2019
In the remote province of Ghur in western Afghanistan, the Hari and Jam Rivers meet in a narrow valley where mountains tower 7,000 feet high over a seemingly impassable landscape. Far from any urban center, this valley is home to one of the world’s great architectural monuments—a 200-foot-high minaret rising above the valley floor in what seems to be splendid isolation. Built in 1174 of baked brick, the Minaret of Jam is covered in intricate geometric brickwork, with verses of the Koran rendered in blue-glazed tiles. It is one of the few surviving buildings commissioned by the Ghurid sultans, a seasonally nomadic dynasty that, from 1148 to 1215, ruled an empire that at one point stretched from eastern Iran to the Bay of Bengal. “They are like a flare that burst from nowhere,” says David Thomas, a research associate at La Trobe University and director of the Minaret of Jam Archaeological Project (MJAP). “They knock over previously established dynasties, amass territory all the way to northern India, and then, bang, they are gone again.” Though today they are obscure even to many scholars, the Ghurids had a major impact on the trajectory of history in a region whose inhabitants continue to play a geopolitical role that belies their remote location. The recently published work of MJAP is placing a renewed focus on the Ghurids and providing an opportunity to reassess the history of a little-known people.
Thomas’ research is based on fieldwork he and his team conducted at Jam in 2003 and 2005. Extensive looting had exposed large areas of archaeological deposits to the elements, and officials tasked MJAP with investigating trenches that had already been illegally dug. The team’s work enabled them to confirm, after many years of speculation, that the site of Jam was Firuzkuh, the Ghurid Dynasty’s summer capital. “When you look at the site, it seems there is nothing there apart from the minaret,” says Thomas. “But we’ve been able to marry together archaeological evidence and historical accounts that show this is Firuzkuh, and it gives us new insights into what a medieval nomadic capital looked like.” The site has been inaccessible to researchers since MJAP’s initial work, but Google Earth’s aerial imagery has given Thomas the chance to identify additional possible Ghurid-period sites in the area, and to put Jam in a larger regional context. Analysis of artifacts and samples from the looters’ holes has also given the team a compelling, if still incomplete, picture of life in the Ghurid summer capital, whose international reach and flourishing economy suggest this narrow valley in remote Afghanistan was once an important center. “It’s not what we would expect a capital city to be like today,” says Thomas. “But it can tell us a lot about who the Ghurids were, and how they thought about power.”
After the Arab conquest of Central Asia began in the seventh century, most Persian-speaking and nomadic Turkic-speaking peoples in the area quickly converted to Islam. One notable exception were the pagan inhabitants of Ghur. Medieval Islamic sources describe them as hardy mountain folk who spoke a dialect of Persian and lived in isolation on the eastern edge of the Islamic and Persian worlds in the largest non-Muslim enclave in the Islamic world. By the eleventh century, however, a Turkic dynasty known as the Ghaznavids had managed to bring Ghur to heel. Islamic missionaries ventured into the mountains and converted the Ghurids. By the 1140s, the power of the Ghaznavids was on the wane, and an upstart branch of Ghurids from the Shansabanid tribe came to prominence. In 1148, a Shansabanid sultan led an army against the Ghaznavid capital of Ghazni, putting the city to fire and earning the sobriquet “World Burner.” From there, the Ghurids expanded east and west, eventually establishing secondary capitals in the then-obscure city of Delhi on the northern Indian plain, and in the cities of Herat, in modern Afghanistan, and Lahore, in present-day Pakistan. Unlike other medieval Islamic dynasties, the Ghurids had corulers, and power was not inherited by descendants, but shared by multiple sultans who set up court in different locations throughout the empire. The senior sultans stayed in the Ghurid heartland, making their summer capital at Firuzkuh. They sponsored a building program that included erecting mosques, mausoleums, and madrassas, or Islamic schools, across what is now Afghanistan.
Their empire was short-lived. In 1199, people rioted in Firuzkuh, protesting the sultan Ghiyath al-Din’s conversion from a conservative sect to a more moderate strain of Islam. Ghiyath al-Din then moved the capital from Firuzkuh to Herat, where he rebuilt a magnificent mosque, parts of which still stand. But the end was near. In 1215, as political tensions threatened to tear the empire apart, a Turkic people known as the Khwarazmians descended on the fast-disintegrating state. In the Ghurid heartland, the Khwarazmians held sway for less than a decade. By 1222, the armies of Genghis Khan had penetrated the remote mountain fastness of Firuzkuh and destroyed the onetime Ghurid capital, leaving the Minaret of Jam as a solitary testament to the reign of the Ghurid sultans.
When David Thomas and his codirector, University of Southampton archaeologist Alison Gascoigne, expanded the initial MJAP survey of looters’ holes around the Minaret of Jam in 2005, they turned to recent satellite imagery of the site to guide their work. “The site was pockmarked with robber holes,” says Thomas. “We only had a limited window of time in which to work, so we had to pick what to study carefully.” One area that first drew their attention was a series of holes right next to the minaret.
There they quickly made a discovery that they believe has definitively established that Jam was the summer capital of Firuzkuh. Historical sources recorded that a great flood destroyed a mosque at Firuzkuh around 1200. In a series of holes close to the tower, Thomas and his team discovered the remains of a large brick-paved courtyard that had been covered by river sediment in a single catastrophic event. “It was clear from the stratigraphy that layers of mud and gravel had been deposited by floodwater,” says Thomas. “There was no question that we had evidence for this historical event, making it almost certain the Minaret of Jam was once part of the Firuzkuh mosque.” Thomas notes that, while historical sources do briefly refer to the mosque itself, they make no mention of the minaret. “It’s almost as if, back in the day, a magnificent tower like this was not out of the ordinary. It was just a typical part of the architectural landscape,” says Thomas. “We know there were towers in other Ghurid centers, so chroniclers may just have not considered it remarkable enough to describe.” Reports of a tall tower in the area were first noted in the late nineteenth century by British surveyors, but they were unable to go to the site. In the 1950s, a Belgian archaeologist, acting on a tip from an Afghan historian, visited the tower and publicized it widely.
The Ghurids and their contemporaries often erected towers to commemorate important victories, and it’s possible that the Minaret of Jam was raised to celebrate a military triumph over the Ghaznavids or some other adversary. However, some researchers, including Thomas, believe there may have been a different inspiration behind the construction of the minaret. The main theme of the Koranic verses that decorate the minaret is Mary, the mother of Jesus, who is revered in Islam. There is evidence that a powerful woman in the Ghurid Dynasty commissioned a madrassa to the north of Jam, whose ruins still stand. Given the Minaret of Jam’s emphasis of verses on Mary, perhaps a noblewoman was also responsible for commissioning the tower.
During their surveys and excavations of looters’ holes, Thomas and his team found that the settlement around the minaret was once quite extensive, surprising many longtime observers of archaeology in the region, such as Warwick Ball, former director of the British Institute of Afghan Studies. “Like most, I viewed Jam as an isolated monument,” he says. “Having visited the site, I assumed there was no room for a settlement of any extent.” Previously, most scholars thought if Jam was indeed Firuzkuh, then it functioned as a symbolic center, a capital in name only. “David’s work proved conclusively that there was a city, or at least an urban settlement, associated with the minaret—that it was a capital in practice as well as in name,” says Ball. That discovery led Thomas and his team to speculate about why the Ghurid sultans chose such a rugged and remote spot for such an important center, which would have combined permanent structures with temporary encampments. Thomas notes that, along the Jam River a few miles to the south, there are sections of flat land where Ghurid nobles could have set up their tents with much greater ease. “Maybe there was a personal reason that had to do with the selection of the location. Or maybe they felt safe nestled in this river valley,” says Thomas. “They were an incredibly adaptable and flexible people, and I think you see it in their choice of this valley as their capital, even if we don’t know quite why they made that choice.”
Thomas and his team excavated a series of other looters’ holes located throughout the site to get a sense of how complex the capital was. They found one looters’ hole dug into the middle of a substantial mudbrick house. A niche in the side of the structure still had an oil lamp that had been placed there more than 800 years earlier. “We think there were people in residence at the site year-round, despite the fact that the sultans were only here in the summer,” says Thomas. “It would not have been very hospitable in the winter, but we think there was perhaps a caretaker population that watched over the capital in winter.”
It’s possible that some of the more permanent residents belonged to Firuzkuh’s Jewish population, which left behind a substantial cemetery filled with headstones inscribed with Judeo-Persian text. During the medieval period, and well into the twentieth century, most urban centers in Central Asia had significant Jewish populations. Historical sources also record a Ghurid tradition that bound the Jewish population to the success of the Shansabanid Dynasty. In one of the dynasty’s legendary origin stories, a Shansabanid prince planned a journey to Baghdad to gain the support of the Abbasid caliphs, who then maintained nominal control of the Islamic world. It was said that the prince was aware that his mountain upbringing and rough-and-ready appearance and manners might not place him in good stead at the palace in Baghdad. On the journey he met and sought the advice of a Jewish merchant, who advised him on his attire and suggested ways to improve his manners. The Shansabanid prince then made a successful appearance at the Abbasid court and won support for his claim to the Ghurid sultanate. Thereafter, it was said, Jews were welcome in the Ghurid heartland.
Thomas and his team identified four Jewish headstones, which added to a collection of more than 70 that had been found by Italian researchers in the 1960s. All but six of the headstones recovered thus far memorialize men who lived between 1150 and 1220, the historically recorded period of occupation in Firuzkuh. That there are no headstones from the cemetery belonging to Jewish women suggests to Thomas and his colleagues that the men likely came to the capital without families, and perhaps married local non-Jewish women. The professions listed on the gravestones include goldsmith, teacher, and religious specialist, in addition to more workaday trades. Along with the dates on the gravestones, this suggests a long-lived community had put down roots at Firuzkuh and occupied the town year-round.
In addition, the variety of ceramics recovered from the site show that the prosperous capital was part of a far-flung trade network. Gascoigne, MJAP’s pottery expert, identified fine ware not only from Iran, but also from China. “It’s interesting to see how the population in this incredibly remote area was provisioned,” she says. “Some of this pottery had come a very long way.” The team also found elaborately molded water jars, one of which featured a humorous depiction of a smiling, puffy-cheeked individual. Some of the pottery they collected could have been produced on-site. The team identified the remains of an industrial-sized kiln to the south of the settlement that may have been used to fire pottery, but they were unable to study it in detail. Surrounding the capital was a complex system of mudbrick fortifications, much of which seems to have been designed without an external threat in mind.
Thomas analyzed the views from the still-extant towers, and found that most of them did not command vistas that extended beyond the valley. Rather, many of the towers seem to have been constructed to conduct surveillance of the valley itself. Thomas speculates that the fortifications might have been built in the wake of the religious riots that swept Firuzkuh toward the end of the Ghurid Dynasty’s reign. It’s possible that even after the Ghurid sultan Ghiyath al-Din quit the remote summer capital for Herat, he wanted to keep an eye on his rebellious subjects in Firuzkuh. A network of fortifications intended to monitor threats inside the capital, rather than approaching foes, might have been a result of his concern. The sultan was perhaps right to be preoccupied with the possibility of internal instability. His successor was assassinated in 1215, an event that led to the collapse of the Ghurid Empire. It had lasted less than 70 years in all.
Thomas and his team have been unable to conduct fieldwork since 2005 due to unstable political conditions in the region. Using Google Earth, Thomas has since identified a host of possible sites in central Afghanistan that could date to the Ghurid period, or may have been occupied and repurposed by the Ghurids. In 2014, Thomas and two Afghan colleagues identified an unrecorded tower not far from Jam. But confirming these sites will have to wait for a return to stability, which could be far off. In spring 2019, Taliban units advanced close to Jam and fought troops loyal to the Afghan government before retreating. Eighteen people were reportedly killed during the Taliban attack.
The Minaret of Jam is now listing dangerously and was also recently threatened by heavy spring floods. UNESCO has sponsored conservation work at the site in the past, and intends to continue to do so in the near future if security conditions permit. In the meantime, the work Thomas and his team conducted at Jam remains the most complete study of any Ghurid center in Afghanistan. “The robber holes should never have been dug in the first place,” says Thomas. “But at least we were able to use them to learn more about the Ghurids. The remains at Jam tell us that while they were a tough, resourceful mountain people who needed to watch their backs, here in their heartland, they built a capital fit for a sultan.”
A single grave and its extraordinary contents are changing the way archaeologists view two great
ancient Greek cultures
By ANDREW CURRY
Monday, August 12, 2019
The age of Homer was an age of heroes—Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, and Nestor, the king of Pylos, among others—whose deeds are chronicled in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Many archaeologists believe that Homer’s tales, despite being composed 500 or more years after the Late Bronze Age events they describe, had roots in a real past. “There’s always a kernel of truth to stories handed down from generation to generation,” says archaeologist Jack Davis. Whether these men were real people is unknown. But the culture they belonged to, which dominated Bronze Age Greece from around 1600 until 1200 B.C.—known as Mycenaean since it was given that name by nineteenth-century scholars—was certainly the model for the poems’ dimly remembered heroes from the deep past.
Over the past century, archaeologists and linguists have largely focused their studies on the Mycenaeans’ place in the early development of later classical Greek civilization. Excavations at Pylos, and at sites all across mainland Greece, have provided a great deal of evidence of the Mycenaeans in their prime. This research has revealed that at their peak they were tied into a world that encompassed most of the eastern Mediterranean, including ancient Egypt, the city-states of the Near East, and the islands of the Mediterranean. One such link, though, stands out as perhaps the most important: a deep connection to the island of Crete, which, in the Late Bronze Age, was inhabited by members of a culture scholars call Minoan after the legendary King Minos, a culture very different from that found on the mainland.
Scholars have long debated the nature of the relationship between the Mycenaeans and the Minoans. This discussion has centered on whether Mycenaean culture, and what is thought of as ancient Greek culture, dating to half a millennium later, was imported from Crete, or was a homegrown phenomenon. But the exceptional discovery of a man’s grave filled with more than 2,000 artifacts just outside Nestor’s palace in Pylos suggests that the concept of competing cultures might obscure a deep interconnectedness. “Archaeologists have a way of cutting the world up into well-bounded cultural entities, but it seems that in the Late Bronze Age new identities were being formed,” says archaeologist Dimitri Nakassis of the University of Colorado Boulder. “There used to be clear lines between the Minoans and the Mycenaeans, but a lot of work now points out that these are our categories, not theirs.”
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Bronze Age Masterpiece
The extraordinary contents of this man’s grave may be the key to understanding a far more complex development. Scholars are now beginning to believe that the shift from the Minoan to Mycenaean world may not have been a sharp transition achieved through colonization or conquest, but a more complicated process of cultural mixture and communication that only came to an end when mainland Mycenaean culture took over Crete around 1400 B.C. Says Jan Driessen, a Minoan specialist at the Catholic University of Louvain, “There’s no way to overestimate the tomb’s importance.”
In 2015, Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, both of the University of Cincinnati, were in their third decade of research in and around the palace of Pylos. The palace itself was discovered in 1939 and excavated in the 1950s and 1960s. Davis, Stocker, and their colleagues had been exploring the complex and the area around it since the early 1990s. Archaeologists think that by the thirteenth century B.C. Mycenaean society was highly stratified, with a single ruler, called a wanax, who governed thousands of subjects living in and around his palace. Excavations at Mycenaean sites have traditionally focused on these royal complexes. Since the palace at Pylos can’t be further excavated without damaging its well-preserved floors and walls, Davis and Stocker expanded their investigation, seeing an opportunity to uncover the remains of the town or settlement outside the royal and administrative center, as other researchers had at Mycenae.
Legal delays meant the team wasn’t able to excavate where they had originally planned. “Forty people showed up, and we had nowhere to dig,” says Stocker. Thwarted, they began investigating a stone formation nestled among the olive trees that surround the palace. Although the site was just over 200 yards from the palace’s front gate, Davis says he didn’t have high hopes for the area. He thought it might be the foundation of one of the palace’s outbuildings, or a water storage tank.
As the excavators dug into the site’s beige earth, they uncovered a few stones, and then a few more. Soon they were convinced they had discovered a grave. After days of digging, they uncovered a six-foot-by-three-foot shaft carved out of the hard clay. The first artifact the team found was a bronze vessel whose presence after thousands of years was an indication that the tomb hadn’t been robbed. Over the next six months, Stocker and Davis discovered bronze weapons, finely crafted gold jewelry, carved seal stones, ivory inlays, beads, and much more, all buried with a single individual who, the team estimates, was between 30 and 35 years old when he died. Very early on, they unearthed an as-yet-unconserved ivory plaque decorated with a griffin that gave the man his name—the Griffin Warrior.
During the warrior’s time, in the 1500s B.C., the Mycenaeans generally buried their prominent dead in huge, beehive-shaped structures called tholoi that were easily identified by tomb robbers. Thieves have taken a heavy toll on Mycenaean sites over the millennia, and the winding roads around Pylos are dotted with ruined tholoi, now just empty, stone-lined pits in the midst of sprawling olive groves. In fact, a tholos located near the Griffin Warrior’s grave was damaged and robbed long before archaeologists excavated it in the 1950s, and only a few beads and a handful of small artifacts were found inside the structure. The Griffin Warrior’s grave is a rare undisturbed exception, and Stocker is still amazed at the team’s luck. Not only had the grave escaped the tomb robbers’ notice, if it had been situated just a few feet in any direction, the roots of an olive tree would have penetrated and disturbed it.
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Bronze Age Masterpiece
The warrior’s solo shaft burial was unusual for his time. Most contemporary Mycenaeans were interred in shared graves, sometimes with up to 20 people in a single grave or tholos. The tombs were periodically reopened and the human remains separated and shuffled around with each new addition to the family crypt. This has made it difficult for archaeologists to distinguish which artifacts were buried with whom. “What’s surprising in the case of the Griffin Warrior is to find a complete example where you know exactly what was deposited with this individual,” says archaeologist John Bennet, director of the British School at Athens.
The sheer number of artifacts stands out, too. Later Mycenaean graves, whether individual or shared, rarely contain riches on the scale of the Griffin Warrior’s. “That much concentration of wealth in a single tomb is shocking,” Nakassis says. “I keep thinking, ‘What are they doing? How do they have all this stuff?’” But the discovery in Pylos is significant not only for the survival, quality, and quantity of its finds, but also because the artifacts are encouraging scholars to reconsider this pivotal era, when mainland settlements such as Pylos were on the rise.
Just 500 years before the Griffin Warrior lived, in the Middle Bronze Age, it would likely have been easy to distinguish a mainlander from a Minoan. Although Crete is separated from the Greek mainland by only about 100 miles, the people who lived on the island in the early second millennium B.C. did not have much in common with their neighbors across the Aegean Sea. By 1900 B.C., a sophisticated culture existed on Crete, boasting palaces built using finely cut stonework known as ashlar, a belief system that featured a central goddess figure and other divinities, and the widespread use of bull imagery in its art, none of which were in evidence at this time on the mainland. Excavations at Minoan sites on the island undertaken over the last century show that, starting in the late third millennium B.C., the Minoans’ trade networks were far more extensive than those of contemporary mainlanders. Artifacts found at such Cretan sites as Knossos include imported stone vases and jewelry from Egypt and the Levant, rare commodities on the mainland at this time. The Minoans further distinguished themselves from the mainlanders by their artistic prowess, particularly with regard to gold- and stonework. Minoan craftsmanship was, for centuries, superior to anything found on the mainland.
Nearly 150 years of archaeological excavations on the Greek mainland and Crete have shown that, beginning around 1600 B.C., the comparatively unsophisticated culture on the mainland underwent a radical transformation. “In time, there’s a blossoming of wealth and culture,” Stocker says. “Palaces are built, wealth accumulates, and power is consolidated in places such as Pylos and Mycenae.” The reasons for this leap forward are unknown. For a few centuries, the mainlanders imitated the Minoans. Pylos was an early Mycenaean power center, and buildings there at the time of the Griffin Warrior resembled the large houses with ashlar masonry found at Knossos on Crete. “There were probably four or five fancy mansions in Pylos at the time of the Griffin Warrior, all very Minoan in style,” Davis says. For example, the mansions had painted walls, a type of artistry pioneered by the Minoans.
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Bronze Age Masterpiece
For a time, the Mycenaeans both imported Minoan luxury goods and incorporated Minoan symbols, including the bull, into their own art. The richest Mycenaeans were buried with Minoan luxury goods, while some other graves included locally produced Mycenaean objects, such as painted pottery, that were often excellent-quality copies of Minoan originals. The Mycenaeans also borrowed the Minoan script, called Linear A, and adapted it to their own use; this script is now called Linear B. Mycenaean society, too, began to change shape. What began as a loose collection of small villages became more and more hierarchical, with power concentrated in the hands of the palace-dwelling members of society featured in the works of Homer.
When archaeologists first excavated the later phases of Minoan palaces in the very early 1900s, the direct parallels with sites on the mainland, including similar architecture, artifacts, wall paintings, and pottery, led them to think that mainland Greece might have been little more than a series of Minoan colonies. Minoans, these researchers thought, were the true founders of Mycenaean society, setting up trading outposts and exporting their palace-oriented social structure and distinctive script to a less-sophisticated mainland.
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Half a century later, that interpretation was upended. When clay tablets found at Pylos and other sites, including Mycenae, were deciphered in the 1950s, the story was pushed in a completely different direction. Linear B resembled Crete’s Linear A, but recorded an entirely different language—Mycenaean Greek. It became clear that it was related to the language of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and, more distantly, to the other Indo-European languages, from Sanskrit to English. Scholars today can peruse the bureaucratic records left behind in the Palace of Nestor, while Linear A and the language it records remain an impenetrable mystery.
The discovery and decipherment of Linear B led scholars to rethink the relationship between Mycenae and Crete. Not only were the Mycenaeans the true forebears of the ancient Greeks, scholars argued, they were indiscriminate thieves who imported or copied Minoan objets d’art without understanding their meaning or significance. “At the time, most scholars were thinking of hostile takeovers, not cooperative ventures,” says archaeologist Cynthia Shelmerdine of the University of Texas at Austin.
The Griffin Warrior’s grave and its contents are once again changing interpretations of the relationship between the Minoans and Mycenaeans. Much of this has been made possible by the fact that he was buried alone, and that his tomb was discovered undisturbed. This has allowed the team to both study the objects themselves and show how they were originally positioned. Among the thousands of artifacts from the Griffin Warrior’s grave are Minoan-style seal stones of amethyst, carnelian, and agate. Other objects are harder to place, including a sword whose hilt is decorated with tiny gold staples, giving it an embroidered effect, and a boar-tusk helmet, a style of armor that Odysseus wears in Book 10 of the Iliad and that is found on both Crete and the mainland.
Stocker and Davis have spent the last several years building a case that the Griffin Warrior, and the people who buried him, were not just avid collectors of Minoan art but were also highly clued in to its symbolism. “The Griffin Warrior is saying, ‘I’m part of that Minoan world,’” Stocker explains. “There’s a story we can get at with this burial that we haven’t been able to before.” Scholars agree that the grave is more than a random collection of Mycenaean and Minoan objects. “Here, Cretan art is being reused and repurposed in a local context,” says Nakassis. “That tells us there was a strong connection between people living in Pylos and Crete, a highly informed network of goods, and probably of people, across the Aegean. These weren’t unsophisticated rubes who didn’t understand the beauty and grace of the art they were burying.” Instead, they were deliberately creating a reflection of their worldview.
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Bronze Age Masterpiece
One notable category of objects buried with the Griffin Warrior is seal stones—some 50 of them, made of semiprecious materials. The seal stones, originally used by the Minoans for administrative purposes, are miniature works of art, intricately decorated beyond any functional necessity. In fact, after the stones were cleaned and restored, Stocker’s colleagues made impressions of their designs in putty and found that some of the detail is too small to see with the naked eye, even in the imprints. Many of the stones had been placed on the warrior’s right side, some probably worn as part of bracelets, and others gathered in a bag or pouch that decayed long ago. The most spectacular seal stone, dubbed the Pylos Combat Agate, is just 1.4 inches wide. Davis and Stocker believe that the artist who created this seal stone was Cretan, because there is, thus far at least, no evidence that artisans on the mainland possessed the skill required to create such an object. The stone depicts a leaping warrior stabbing an armored, spear-wielding foe, while another lies dead at his feet. The scene, like those on many of the other seal stones, is echoed by artifacts found in the warrior’s grave, such as the weapons and scepter laid on his left side. “The sword the victor is using is the same as the sword the warrior is buried with,” Davis says. Six ivory combs and a mirror in the grave suggest the warrior was concerned with his grooming, and perhaps had flowing locks similar to those of the stone’s triumphant warrior. Like the agate’s hero, the Griffin Warrior wore a gold necklace. There is also a nearly microscopic seal stone, less than two-hundredths of an inch across, depicted on a bracelet on the warrior’s wrist. The seal stones in the grave were drilled through, as though to accommodate just such a bracelet cord.
The sheer number of carved rings and seal stones reinforces the idea that there was something more than mimicry going on. Driessen says seal stones such as those found in the Griffin Warrior’s tomb were highly individual objects that were used by the Minoans for bureaucratic functions, such as to signal identity on official documents. A Minoan would have had one ring or seal stone, or maybe two—but not 50. “It doesn’t make sense to have fifty seal stones,” Driessen says. “The Griffin Warrior was showing off, or maybe the ones who buried him were showing off. There’s obviously Minoan influence, but I do think some of these objects were not used in the same way the Minoans used them.”
Other objects, too, seem like conscious references to one another. One of four gold rings in the grave shows a Minoan-style bull leaper, echoing a bull’s head once mounted atop a scepter buried nearby. On one seal stone a sun with 16 rays hangs in the sky above two otherworldly creatures with insect-like features, known to scholars of Minoan art as genii. Recent X-rays of a badly corroded bronze breastplate found on the warrior’s legs show that the same 16-pointed star once adorned his suit of armor. “There’s so much evidence that suggests that the Mycenaeans understood Minoan ritual concepts of power,” Davis says. “It seems to us likely that some beliefs originating in Crete had been transplanted intact to Pylos, if not by Minoan missionaries, by converted mainlanders.”
Driessen suggests that the idea of classifying art and artifacts as “Minoan” or “Mycenaean” at this time of cross-cultural ferment may not fully reflect the period’s complexity. For example, he believes that mainlanders might have carved the seal stones themselves, having learned from Minoan artisans, or Cretan artisans may have emigrated to the mainland, bringing familiar iconography to new audiences. The connections between the iconography and artifacts have convinced Stocker and Davis that the Griffin Warrior was an informed consumer of Minoan-style objects, not an indiscriminate looter. Somehow, Stocker says, the Griffin Warrior functions as a kind of bridge between the Minoans and Mycenaeans that provides evidence of just how closely interconnected they were. “There’s symbolic unity among the artifacts. We have things that match, assembled with intentionality,” she says. “It’s not randomly accumulated loot. It reflects a story that’s been purposely acquired.”
Andrew Curry is a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.