Archaeologists Were Shocked to Find This Golden Pendant of an Ancient Egyptian Goddess—in Greece

A golden pendant depicting the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor
was found this week in a tomb dated 1500 BCE— but it was uncovered
in Greece, not Egypt. The unexpected find has illuminated unknown
trade connections between ancient Greece’s southern city of Pylos
and Egypt, just across the Mediterranean Sea.

“We were very surprised to find an Egyptian goddess,” Sharon
Stocker, an archaeologist leading the excavation with her husband,
Jack Davis, told Artnet News. “No other depictions of
Egyptian deities are known from Pylos, nor, for that matter, from
palatial phases of the Bronze Age, either on Crete or the Greek
mainland.”

Hathor was identified by her cow-like ears, a typical
characteristic of the goddess of the sky and fertility. The pendant
was found in the larger of two underground, beehive-shaped tombs,
called tholos, that have been excavated by a team of University of
Cincinnati archaeologists over the past 18 months. The tholos were
themselves an unexpected find. “We were hoping to find remains of
the lower town surrounding the Palace of Nestor, including
workshops and houses,” Stocker says. The couple have been working
in Pylos since 1992.

The team’s previous major excavation, in 2015, was a nearby
burial site now known as the Griffin Warrior grave. It unearthed
gold and silver treasure, jewelry, a bronze sword, and Minoan art
objects that showed a strong network of exchanged goods between
Pylos and Crete. That discovery, too, revealed that there was more
cross-cultural complexity in the region than was originally
assumed.

Together, the couple’s recent excavations in Pylos have shown
that the city may have played a bigger role in Mycenaean
civilization (a period that lasted roughly between 1650 and 1100
BC) than was previously believed. The civilization was thought to
have originated in Mycene, another Greek city.

“What is emerging as a result of these excavations,” Jeremy B.
Rutter, a Mycenaean archaeologist at Dartmouth College, told the
New York Times, “is that Pylos was a real powerhouse in
the early Mycenaean period.”

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