THEIOS AOIDOS. A New Reading of the Lyre-Player Group of Seals

摘要

This paper offers an integrated reading of a well-known body of archaeological evidence, the so-called Lyre-Player Group of Seals. I assemble the fifty-five different specimens that show the Lyre-Player in seventeen different scenes, and argue that they constitute a single coherent iconographic sub-system, with each Type taking its meaning from the others. I propose that this material, whose origin can now be confidently placed in eighth-century Cilicia, offers our most thorough iconographical evidence for a Divine Lyre, a figure known from both Kinnaru, the divinized lyre of Late Bronze Age Ugarit, and Kinyras of Cyprus, whom one set of traditions connected with Cilicia and Syria.