Intricate detail of 3,500-year-old Minoan seal stone only seen through a microscope

Posted On: Mar 28th, 2018 at 17:49

Greece
Dubbed the best archaeological discovery in Greece during the last 50 years, the Mycenaean grave of the “Griffin Warrior” has produced one of the most incredible feats of artistry ever seen. In fact, this kind of detail was only previously considered to exist from the time of Classical Greece, 1,000 years after the Griffin Warrior was buried with his grave goods.
But more astonishing is this:
“Even more extraordinary, the husband-and-wife team point out, is that the meticulously carved combat scene was painstakingly etched on a piece of hard stone measuring just 3.6 centimetres, or just over 1.4 inches, in length. Indeed, many of the seal’s details, such as the intricate weaponry ornamentation and jewellery decoration, become clear only when viewed with a powerful camera lens and photomicroscopy.”
One has to take a step back to try and conceive that notion, especially when one considers the Griffin Warrior died 250 years before the Trojan War.
Strangely, the article then goes on to say this:
“Scholarly consensus has long theorized that mainlander Mycenaeans simply imported or robbed such riches from the affluent Minoan civilization on the large island of Crete.”
Well that’s not the history I am familiar with. As far as I know the Minoans and the Mycenaeans were very closely related, not only by trade but by DNA. It’s even likely that the surviving Minoans (after the Thera eruption) landed on mainland Greece and highly influenced the Mycenaean culture in many more ways than scholars think. In other words, many of them may be one and the same.
Ironically the date given to the Griffin Warrior’s burial is very similar to that of the burial Heinrich Schliemann uncovered at Mycenae itself. Although Schliemann thought he had uncovered the grave of Agamemnon, the lavish grave goods were later found to date from around 300 years earlier, placing it almost exactly at the time of the Griffin Warrior – 1500 BC. The priceless gold artefacts uncovered by Schliemann are some of the most intricate and beautiful ever seen, which could imply this level of artistry was perfectly normal for 1500 BC, a concept that means archaeology needs to rewrite its own history.

https://phys.org/news/2017-11-team-rare-minoan-sealstone-treasure-laden.html