RELIGIOUS SCENES ON SIGNET-RINGS

137

a spear and 8-shaped body-shield, reappears in the field of the well-known
signet-ring from Mycenae, where the affinities with painted designs are specially
manifest. The Minoan Goddess lily-crowned and holding poppy capsules,
as on an analogous gold signet-ring from Thisbe, is seated beneath her
sacred tree, from which one of her little twin handmaidens plucks her a
branch of fruit. The votary beyond, with the posy of lilies in her left hand,
here recalls the figure of a wall-painting from the Minoan Thebes who holds
out a similar bunch. The heavens, symbolized by the Sun and Moon, are
shut off above by a wavy curve, as if the scene itself lay in some Elysian
field.

In the case of an important Palace signet at Knossos, of which, besides
impressions, a clay replica was actually found,1 the refreshment is no longer
supplied by these Hesperid fruits. To the Goddess, seated in a rocky land-
scape, drink is offered in a funnel-shaped vessel, resembling a ' rhyton ' of that
type, while a mystic circle appears above its rim. In slightly variant forms
this ministration is repeated on clay impressions of signet-rings found at
Zakro 2 and Hagia Triada.3

The indications of landscape given on many of these signet designs, the

rocks and trees, and even the
rustic cult itself so often illus-
trated, with its little pillar shrines,
curiously recall that which meets
theeyein thebackgroundofmany
Pompeian wall-paintings. It is
an undoubted fact that in country
places throughout the Classical
world, much of the earlier pre-
historic cult such as in the West
we associate with dolmens and
menhirs had survived in an al-
most unchanged form. What is specially suggestive in this connexion, how-
ever, is that there exists a widespread class of Greco-Roman intaglios which
had formed the bezels of finger-rings that stand in direct relation to the rural
religious scenes paintedon thewalls. It may well be that the Minoan examples,
including those of a more elaborate character, stood in a similar relation.

Among special types, that reproduced in Fig. 89 may best be interpreted
as illustrating the adoration of a sacred spring descending from a height within

1 P. ofM., ii, Pt. II, pp. 767, 768, and Fig. 498. ! Ibid. Fig. 500.

3 Ibid., p. 768, Fig. 499.

S~»^J

v\> iiiT] , Hv

Land-
scapes
with
rustic
cult com-
pared
with Pom-
peian
paintings.

Fig. 89.

Intaglio on Signet-ring : Chamber
Tomb, Mycenae.

Sacred
spring
and trees