This fearsome bronze hybrid, a mythical beast called a griffin, originally had a gaping bird’s beak, the ears of a donkey and the body—now missing—of a large cauldron. While a bird’s head and ass’s ears are common attributes of griffins, popular in Near Eastern art throughout the second and first millennia B.C., they were generally depicted with a lion’s body. As the Greeks established trade contacts in the Levant and the Nile Delta during the early first millennium B.C., their sculptors began to create a new style of art by reworking standard eastern Mediterranean motifs, such as lotus blossoms, […]
