Cycladic figurines explained: what they are and where Athens shows them

The short answer

Cycladic figurines are carved marble human figures made by the Early Cycladic culture, which the Museum of Cycladic Art says flourished on the islands of the central and southern Aegean in the third millennium BC. Its visiting guide dates that culture to about 3200-2000 BC, and most of the figures, it says, are naked women.[2][1] The museum's guide says their use and meaning remain unknown.[2]

In Athens two museums show them, and they are different kinds of institution: the Museum of Cycladic Art, whose Cycladic exhibition is on the first floor of its permanent exhibitions building, and the National Archaeological Museum, where they belong to the Collection of Cycladic Antiquities within its prehistoric galleries.[7][1]

The islands and the people

The Cyclades are a group of about thirty islands and many islets in the south-western Aegean; the Museum of Cycladic Art explains that the ancient Greeks gave them the name because they thought of them as a circle around Delos, the island of Apollo's sanctuary. The islands had copper and lead ores, silver, emery, obsidian and marble, and the museum links that wealth to trade, metalworking and above all marble carving.[1] The name "Early Cycladic culture" itself, its guide says, was given by Christos Tsountas, whom it calls the founder of prehistoric archaeology in Greece.[2]

The National Archaeological Museum's Cycladic page describes the Early Cycladic islands as centres of seafaring and exchange, with ships shown on clay "frying pans" and lead models. It divides the longer Cycladic story into three periods: Early (3200-2000 BC), Middle (2000-1600 BC), when marble production fell, and Late (1600-1100 BC), the period of the wall paintings of Akrotiri on Thera.[6] Hellenic Heritage's page on the same museum gives the whole Cycladic range as 3200 to about 1100 BC.[8] XTOUR's reading is that the figurines belong mainly to the first of those periods, since the museum's page says marble production fell in the second.[6]

How the figures changed

The Museum of Cycladic Art's visiting guide sets out a sequence.[2]

• Violin-shaped. The first figurines followed Neolithic tradition and were very schematic, carved from pebbles or marble with an outline like a violin.[2]
• Plastiras and Louros types. With metal tools, the figures gained anatomical detail and became more naturalistic.[2]
• The canonical type. In the mature period, about 2700-2400/2300 BC, came the type the museum calls "canonical": naked, mostly female figures with lyre-shaped or triangular heads tilted back, arms folded under the breasts, knees slightly bent and legs pointing downwards. Its varieties, Kapsala, Spedos, Dokathismata and Chalandriani, are named after the places on different islands where they were found.[2]
• Post-canonical. In the last centuries of the third millennium BC the features of the canonical type break down.[2]

Not every figure is small or female. The guide describes a canonical sculpture 1.40 metres high, and says large-scale works are thought to have been intended for public worship in open-air sanctuaries; it also describes a male sculpture that once stood about a metre tall.[2] The National Archaeological Museum's page also names life-size statues and three-dimensional figures such as musicians among the Early Cycladic achievements.[6]

What they were for

The honest answer is that it is not known. The Museum of Cycladic Art's guide says their use and meaning remain a mystery because there are no written sources, and that the evidence that does exist is incomplete because the figures' value on the antiquities market led to widespread looting in the Cyclades in the 1950s and 1960s. Systematic excavations in recent decades have shown, it says, that most come from graves, though they also appear in settlements.[2]

The same guide sets out the interpretations scholars have proposed: a deity of fertility, on the evidence of how the body is carved; worshippers or devotees; guides who accompanied the dead; or objects used in rites of passage such as coming of age or marriage. It concludes that their use was probably more than one of these.[2] XTOUR does not pick one.

The Keros Hoard

According to the Museum of Cycladic Art's essay, it is a group of Early Cycladic objects said to come from Kavos on Keros, an uninhabited islet between Naxos and Amorgos, said to include at least 350 fragments of canonical figurines along with vases and obsidian blades. The objects were smuggled out of Greece in the 1950s and 1960s and dispersed; 81 fragments have come back and are exhibited in the museum, most bought at London auctions in 1990 and 1992.[3]

Excavation has since changed the picture. The essay says the University of Cambridge and the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades have excavated at Kavos since 1987 and found a second, undisturbed deposit, leading scholars to conclude that Kavos was a large sanctuary shared by the Cycladic islands, where fragments were deliberately deposited. In a 2005 study, Peggy Sotirakopoulou compared the museum's fragments with those from the official excavations and found pieces that join, proving that both came from the same deposit.[3]

Two museums, two ways of being run

The two Athens collections answer the same question in different settings.

The Museum of Cycladic Art describes itself as a non-profit legal entity under private law, supervised by the Ministry of Culture, which receives no state funding and whose collections belong to the Greek State.[4] Its Cycladic exhibition opened in 1986 and, its guide says, presents more than 350 objects in six sections covering every phase of the Early Cycladic culture.[2][1] It sells its own tickets, and its visit page says it is closed on Tuesdays. The same page says the main building's entrance on Neofytou Douka Street is under construction during a renovation and that visitors enter through the Stathatos Mansion on Vasilissis Sofias Avenue; for visitors with disabilities, one section of the page names the Neofytou Douka entrance and another a wheelchair ramp at the Stathatos Mansion, so XTOUR cannot say which applies during the works and suggests asking the museum.[5]

The National Archaeological Museum is, according to the Ministry's Odysseus page, a Special Regional Service of the Ministry of Culture.[9] Its Cycladic figurines are one part of a prehistoric collection that also holds the Mycenae treasures and the Thera wall paintings.[7] Its tickets are sold on tickets.hh.gr, the official store run by ODAP, with timed entry.[10] The National Archaeological Museum guide covers that museum in full.

XTOUR's reading: someone interested mainly in the figurines and their context is asking the Museum of Cycladic Art's question; someone who wants them alongside the rest of Greek prehistory is asking the National Archaeological Museum's. XTOUR does not rank them.

Related reading

The Cyclades' Bronze Age neighbours, and the Late Cycladic town of Akrotiri on Thera where the wall paintings were found, are covered in Minoan and Mycenaean explained. Delos, the island the Cyclades were named around, is the subject of Delos, the island that is an archaeological site, and the island groups themselves of Greek island groups explained. For the city where both museums are, see the Athens destination page.

What XTOUR does not tell you

XTOUR does not publish either museum's prices, opening hours or accessibility arrangements, and does not say how long a visit takes. It does not attribute any figurine to a particular island beyond what the museums' own pages say, and it does not offer a view on what the figurines meant.