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Alexander the Great and the Persian Lion-Gryphon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

G. F. Hill
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Extract

Although the coinage of Alexander the Great has of late years been intensively studied, and an immense advance made, almost entirely by the efforts of Mr. E. T. Newell, in its classification and dating, little attention has been paid to one detail which seems to me worthy of more careful consideration. This is the decoration of the bowl of the helmet of Athena on the gold coinage (Fig. 1). Müller (Alex, le Grand, p. 3) says merely that the bowl is most usually adorned with a serpent, sometimes with a running gryphon, rarely with a sphinx, and sometimes with nothing at all. He makes no attempt to explain these emblems, regarding them doubtless as purely decorative. There is no doubt that from quite early times such creatures had been used for purely ornamental purposes to support the crests of helmets. Between using them actually to bear the crest and as decoration in relief on the bowl there is no significant difference. If, therefore, no plausible explanation of the meaning of these emblems on the coinage of Alexander is forthcoming it is not unreasonable to suppose that they are purely decorative; but that position should not be assumed until the possibility of their having a meaning has been thoroughly explored.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , 1923 , pp. 156 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1923

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References

1 Daremberg et Saglio, s.v. galea, pp. 1450 f.

2 Catal. No. 449.

3 Gaebler, in Nomisma xii. (1923) p. 8Google Scholar (Period II. c. 490–470 B.C.); p. 19 (Period III. 470–387 B.C.).

4 The detail is so small that it hardly appears in the reproduction. I must ask my readers to take it on trust.

5 See the articles ‘Gryps’ by Furtwängler in Roscher's Lexikon and by Prinz and Ziegler in Pauly-Wissowa's Realencyclopädie; cp. also Dalton, , Treasure of the Oxus, p. 87Google Scholar; and Rostovtzeff, , Iranians and Greeks in South Russia (1922), p. 80Google Scholar: ‘the lion-headed griffin’ of Panticapaeum ‘is the Iranian animal, created in Babylonia, and thenceforward common throughout Asia, especially in the Iranian area.’

6 I have to thank the Director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for permission to reproduce the cylinder.

7 In this (as in all the questions of chronology and classification hereafter dealt with) I am specially indebted to Mr. Newell, who, when I called his attention to the real character of the monster with the curled wings, at once examined the whole of his unrivalled collection from this point of view and placed his notes at my disposal. I may note here that he knows of one, but only one, example of a bird-headed gryphon with a curled wing, viz. on a stater which is a variety of Müller 770.

8 I understand from Mr. Newell that he now inclines to the view that some if not all the staters and distaters which he had placed in his first group at Sidon, dating them from the end of 333 to circa 330 B.C., may really have been struck at Damascus, and not earlier than Gaugamela. This revised view suits my purpose admirably.

9 Mr. Newell informs me that there are coins dated 25 struck with his obverse die J (Coinage of Sidon and Ake, Pl. VII. 4) which he had hitherto supposed to be used first in year 26.