The jewelry is the big-eared Hathor god, charged with supervising the sky and fertility.
Golden pendant of the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor, discovered in Pylos ‘ tomb.
A golden pendant representing the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor was discovered this week in a 1500 BCE tomb, but in Greece, not Egypt, it was uncovered.
The surprising discovery illuminated unidentified trade links across the Mediterranean Sea between the southern city of Pylos and Egypt in ancient Greece.
Sharon Stocker, an archeologist with her husband Jack Davis, who headed the excavation, told Artnet News, “We were very surprised to find an Egyptian goddess,” she added: “No other depictions of Egyptian deities are known from Pylos, nor, for that matter, from palatial phases of the Bronze Age, either on Crete or the Greek mainland.”
Her cow-like ears, a common characteristic of sky goddess and fertility, described Hathor. The pendant was found in the larger of two beehive-shaped underground tombs, called tholos, excavated over the past 18 months by a team of archeologists from the University of Cincinnati.
The tholos were an unexpected find on their own. “We were hoping to find remains of the lower town surrounding the Palace of Nestor, including workshops and houses,” Stocker says. Since 1992, the couple has been working in Pylos.
A nearby burial site now known as the Griffin Warrior grave was the previous major excavation of the team in 2015.
It uncovered treasure of gold and silver, jewelry, a bronze sword and objects of Minoan art showing a strong network of exchanged goods between Pylos and Crete.
The discovery also showed that in the region there was more cross-cultural complexity than originally assumed.
Together, the current excavations of the couple in Pylos have shown that the city may have played a greater role in the Mycenaean civilization (a period that lasted roughly between 1650 and 1100 BC) than previously believed.
In Mycene, another Greek city, the civilization was thought to have originated.
Jeremy B. Rutter, Dartmouth College’s Mycenaean archeologist, told the New York Times, “What is emerging as a result of these excavations, is that Pylos was a real powerhouse in the early Mycenaean period.”
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