ancientart:Hedgehog. Aryballos, opening in the left ear, metaphoric scales for the spine armor. An

ancientart: Hedgehog. Aryballos, opening in the left ear, metaphoric scales for the spine armor. Ancient Greek, ca. 600 B.C.E. Courtesy & currently located at the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich, Germany. Photo taken by Bibi Saint-Pol. Okay so I’m supposed to believe this is a hedgehog, and not just that, but that this hedgehog is an aryballos, a small flask for oil or perfume. These come in all kinds of shapes, and later on (in the medieval period) they were really popular for containing holy water or oil gathered at sites of holy pilgrimage. It’s really old, practically from the dawn of time as far as ancient Greek art goes. I’m talking late archaic, here. Who would want such an object, however? Who woke up thinking, “I need to keep my perfume in a hedgehog! No one will suspect a thing!”? Well, this kind of stuff isn’t exactly unpopular among the Greeks. They loved cute containers for perfume just as much as we love videos of cats climbing into cereal boxes. So maybe some fancy lady kept her perfume in here because it’s cute! This doesn’t solve our problem, though: what kind of hedgehog looks like that? The first half I’ll take, with the pointillism-stickers, very impressionistic, I believe it. Those archaic craftsmen were doing a great job representing the front half of a hedgehog in this functional item. But that back half? Clearly armadillo scales, and from this evidence I believe we can conclude that this is no hedgehog, but instead some kind of mythical hybrid, possibly related to the mythical salamander which lives in the flames, and possibly related to the chimera who burps fire (too much Taco Bell?) and whose body is made of goat, lion, and snake. So we have the Hedgehogmadillo, the most terrifying creature of the archaic Greek world, now just a memory of a memory. I assume if we read the first letter of every other line of the Iliad, we might find a secret acrostic poem describing the mass-slaughter of the hedgehogmadillo by the vengeful Greeks, who were sick of getting poked by these little guys. What jerks! -- source link
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