About some kind of an epiphany as pictured in Minoan glyptic art, and about its relevance to a myth as retold by Pausanias

Abstract

In this posting, I start by showing a sketch of a picture carved into a gold signet ring originating from the palace at Knossos in Crete and dating from the Late Minoan era. The sketch, in line with conventions followed nowadays by archaeologists, flips the right-to-left orientation pictured on the signet ring itself, so as to show the picture that the ring would make when it was used for stamping impressions on clay sealings, where the orientation, as intended for viewers, would be left-to-right. This picture that I show here in the first illustration matches in its orientation a picture that I showed as the first illustration in the previous posting, 2020.05.22, where we saw a sketch of a picture stamped by a signet ring that is likewise dated to the Late Minoan era. In that case, the ring has not survived, and the orientation of the sketch already matches what was pictured on the clay sealings stamped by the lost signet ring. I need to emphasize here, from the start, the parallel orientations of the pictures represented in these two sketches, since I will be comparing the scenes visualized in these two pictures from the perspective of their parallelism in left-to-right orientation. And my comparison of the two scenes, both of which visualize what experts in Minoan archaeology tend to view as some kind of epiphany, are relevant, I think, to a myth as retold by Pausanias in the second century CE.