Homer and the Griffin Warrior

Beneath the Palace of Nestor

The so-called Griffin Warrior’s Tomb was discovered on the grounds of the Palace of Nestor near Pylos on the west coast of Greece on May 28, 2015. Excavations at the Palace of Nestor had been in hiatus since 1966; I doubt that anyone expected to find anything so magnificent as this.

The burial shaft yielded bountiful treasure. Carnelian, amethyst, amber and gold beads; gold and silver cups; gold rings. Boars’ tusks, ivory combs, and dozens of delicately carved signet rings and seal-stones.

The bones at the bottom of the burial shaft lay sprawled amid thin bands of curling bronze. The leather binding of it’s armor had rotted away like so much flesh long ago, but archeologists Davis and Stocker knew they were looking at the body of a warrior. A mirror of polished bronze had been deposited near an ivory plaque depicting a griffin surveying a rocky landscape; this was the Griffin Warrior, then.

Near at hand lay the unsheathed sword of the Griffin Warrior; it had a hilt of gold and a bronze tang almost a full meter in length. This in itself is remarkable; later Greek armies depended on the spear. The ancient Greek sword was a secondary weapon, a leaf-shaped instrument a half-meter in length called the xiphos. One meter is closer to the length of the European long-sword, a military convention that would catch on in Greece only after their Roman conquerors had adopted it from the Celts. While researchers think that the Griffin Warrior’s tomb…