Is this the greatest single piece of art from the 2nd millennium BCE?

Archaeology Magazine is published every two months, and represents the results of work done in every corner of the world concerning the relics and relicts of civilizations of all eras.  I was amazed when I received my copy of the September/October 2019 issue.

It has an article on the 200ft Minaret of Jam in western Afghanistan.  Another article reports the finds near the Elvet Bridge over the river Wear in Durham, northeastern England.  However, these are completely upstaged by the article on the discovery of the tomb of the Griffin Warrior (in 2015), and the subsequent cleaning of a seal stone (in 2017) which has become known as the Pylos Combat Agate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pylos_Combat_Agate#/media/File:Pylos_Combat_Agate.jpg).

It is an incredibly rich find, so far the archaeological find of the 21st century to compare in importance to the 20th century discoveries of the tomb of Tutankhamen (Egypt) and the Terracotta Army (China).

Although the information had been published in the relevant science journals, this was the first publication in a semi-popular magazine.  It is documented in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin_Warrior_Tomb, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pylos_Combat_Agate, and other associated articles.  This tomb and the seal have made major contributions to two or three major fields of study.

This is a tomb near the palace of Nestor near Pylos, western Greece and it has yielded 3,500 items.  The grave is Mycenaean and the artifact is almost certainly Minoan.  This does not jibe with the prevailing thought since the mid-nineteenth century that, although the two cultures existed side-by-side, they did not mix.  Here is evidence to the contrary.

The Agate is spectacular: it is merely 1.4"/3.6cm across, but the artistry is amazing.  The tomb is dated to around 1500-1450 BCE, which is roughly the same time as the Egyptians of the 18th dynasty, at the end of which, 100-150 years later, they were creating works of incomparable beauty (the bust of Nefertiti, the mask of Tutankhamen, etc.), but all their depictions of motion are fairly bland.  The action, motion, and emotions showed in the Agate are of the highest artistic quality; the anatomical accuracy is superb.  In fact it is so advanced that these attributes would not appear until the statuary in the age of Classic Greece a thousand years later.

[The details on this and other seals in the collection are so fine that some believe that the only possible way to create them is with a magnifying glass.  Although there are ancient references which seem to be to magnifiers, these too are a thousand years in the future; the best initial historical evidence for them does not come along until 1000 CE, 2500 years later.  Perhaps the existence of these seals is sufficient inferential evidence that magnifying lenses were available in the 2nd millennium BCE.]

As mentioned above, the date of the tomb is c.1500 BCE, which sets it before the neighboring palace of Nestor was constructed.  The fact that it survived intact is one of the amazing circumstances that surround the find.

Note that I was also attracted by the name Pylos.  When I was a kid, one of the major intellectual advances was the deciphering of Linear B by Michael Ventris, who tragically died in a car accident in 1956.  Many of the tablets used by Ventris had been found in Pylos.

However, to go back to my original comment, I have to say that from my art classes, a work of art must not only have beauty, but a focus and motion; this also has impressionist elements.  In all aspects, it clearly ranks as one of the greatest works of art of the 2nd millennium BCE, perhaps the greatest.

Gareth Hunt, (updated) 17 April 2020