Pyxis Lid: Mistress of the Animals Feeding Wild Goats
Unknown · Late Bronze Age, circa 1300 to 1150 BC
A disc of elephant ivory, less than fourteen centimetres across, once the lid of a cylindrical box. A seated goddess in a flounced skirt, bare-breasted and with elaborate hair, holds out ears of grain to two wild goats that rear up on either side of her. The symmetry, the flounced skirt and the goats are pure Aegean: the museum notes that the scene is of Mycenaean inspiration, and the goddess is the Mistress of the Animals familiar from Crete and Greece. Look at the delicacy of the carving on the goats' coats and the woman's dress, cut into a surface that curves because it follows the shape of the tusk.
The lid was found in nineteen twenty-nine in tomb three at Minet el Beida, the harbour town of Ugarit, in the very first season of the French excavations, and it was given to the Louvre in nineteen thirty. The box itself, hollowed out of the tusk's pulp cavity, has not survived. Minet el Beida was where Aegean traders landed, and this ivory, whether carved by a Mycenaean or by a Syrian craftsman working in the Aegean manner, is the finest evidence of that meeting of worlds.
Did You Know? The box this lid once closed was carved from the hollow pulp cavity of an elephant tusk, which is why the lid is slightly curved.
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