A cult statue rendered on a Mycenaean krater from Cyprus

Robert B. Koehl examines a Late Bronze Age Mycenaean pictorial style krater in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and argues that an unusual female figure painted behind one of its two chariot groups represents a cult statue. Found by Luigi Palma di Cesnola in a tomb at Ayia Paraskevi near Nicosia, the vessel belongs to the Late Helladic IIIB1 phase of the first half of the 13th century BC. Besides its two chariot scenes, the krater has symmetrical clusters of palm trees and flowers under both handles.

Koehl reviews how earlier scholars read the figure. Sarah Immerwahr, following Furumark's skepticism toward narrative readings of chariot vases, treated her as an elaborate filling motif created by adding a human head and psi-figurine arms to a voluted flower or octopus pattern. Louise Steel considered and rejected a mourning figure, while Emily Vermeule and Vassos Karageorghis analysed the floral clusters and Karageorghis later compared a related figure on a sherd from Ugarit with downturned arms and spiral breasts. Against these views, Koehl argues that both figures depict stationary cult images: their bodies are frontal and immobile while the chariots move, the Ayia Paraskevi figure has open splayed hands and a distinct forelock and back lock, and the Ugarit figure's profile and downturned arms recall Mycenaean phi figurines and a pictorial vase from Kalavasos.

To show that cult statues existed in the Aegean Bronze Age, the lecture surveys Minoan and Mycenaean candidates: a Middle Minoan II Kamares bowl from Phaistos, the terracotta feet from Archanes Anemospilia, the chryselephantine Palaikastro Kouros, bronze locks and a stone wig with Amorite parallels from Knossos, stone sphinxes from Crete, Late Minoan goddesses with upraised arms, wheel-made terracotta figures from Phylakopi, Mycenae, Tiryns and Midea, the painted plaster heads from Mycenae, and the Linear B term te-o-po-ri-ja ('carrying the gods').

Returning to Cyprus, Koehl contends that Cypriot viewers would have understood the scene. Cult statues were familiar on the island through the bronze Horned God and Ingot God from Enkomi, and Aegean ritual elements such as horns of consecration and planted or courtyard sanctuaries appear at Kition and Myrtou-Pigadhes. Read together, the Ayia Paraskevi and Ugarit vases show three episodes: arrival at an outdoor sanctuary, dismounting to venerate the statue, and departure under the goddess's protection.