GROWING VOGUE OF ANTITHETIC GROUPS 515

Oriental

and its stablisher. Moreover, just as in other cases we see the column between
its lion guardians replaced by the Minoan Rhea, so also on an intaglio of late
fabric we find, in place of her sacred column, a
female divinity, wearing the sacral knots on her
shoulders, between two opposed Griffins.

The ' antithetic' scheme of the divine person-
age or object between two ramping monsters had ""^Jn °
itself penetrated to the Nile Valley from Chaldaea 'anti-

1 , thetic'

at a very remote period—witness the appearance schemes.

of the hero Gilgames in Sumerian dress at grips

with two lions on the ivory handle from Gebel-el-

Fig. 362. Two Lions 'Arak.1 But although amongst Early Minoan seal-

SgSgfS. cSF&S *?* se^uent or Visional' animals, perhaps
ing, Zakro. ultimately from the same source, are frequent,as well

as reversed figures that stand in relation to Nilotic
prototypes, dating from the Vlth Dynasty onward, confronted types are
rare.

But from the time of Hammurabi, which corresponds with the opening
of the Middle Minoan Age, a direct influence from the East sets in of which
we have the evidence, as shown above, in imported Babylonian cylinders. It
is doubtless owing to this later Oriental current that, towards the close of the
same Minoan Age and, with growing frequency, in the ensuing Late Minoan
phase, religious types of the Gilgames and Isdubar cycle show their influ-
ence on Cretan Art, not only in the reproduction of the divine protagonists
themselves2 but in the predilection for the scheme of opposed monsters. It
is in the Transitional Age represented by the Zakro sealings that we find for
the first time such a device as two lions heraldically posed on each side of an
altar, like that of the Lion's Gate3 (Fig. 362). It is noteworthy indeed that,
neither in this case nor in the parallel seal-type showing a portal above the
altar between the two lions, does a column appear. On the other hand, in
the somewhat later intaglio reproduced in Fig. 361, the two Griffin supporters
who set their feet on a similar altar, are bound to a central column, thus
completing the resemblance to the Mycenae tympanum relief.

1 See P. of M., ii, Pt. I, p. 27, and Suppl.
PI. XII,*.

2 See above, p. 466.

s Hogarth, The Zakro Sealings (J.H.S.,ns.n),
p. 88, and PI. X, No. 128. It is there described
as ' two cocks facing across an altar', but the

figures are beyond doubt lions, as shown in
Fig. 362. The design is in fact a variation of
the type (ibid., p. 87 (No: 112), Fig. 28) in
which the lions are symmetrically placed on
each side of a gateway, showing a similar altar
within it. (See P. of M., i, p. 308, Fig. 227, c.)

Ll 2