Cycladic art - Ancient Greece in the 3rd millennium BC

Ancient Greece is for us the most famous civilization of antiquity. Mathematics and astronomy, genres of poetry and prose, fundamentals of engineering and shipbuilding. There are countless branches of human activity in which the achievements of the ancient Greeks would not have had a decisive influence on the further development of European civilization. But this civilization developed on the basis of the previous ones, and the earliest was the Cycladic culture, separated in time from Ancient Greece by the same time interval as Ancient Greece from our time. The illustrations on the map show the islands of the Cyclades located in the Aegean Sea in a ring around the island of Delos, on which, already in the historical period, the temple of Apollo and the treasury of the Athenian Maritime Union were located. Fish-rich waters, a wonderful climate and wide opportunities for maritime trade, led to the settlement of the islands as early as the 6th millennium BC. In the period from 3100 to 2300 BC. Early Cycladic culture flourished on the islands, its main centers were Keros and Syros. The islands of Paros and Naxos contain deposits of excellent marble. He served as raw material for the elegant figurines of the first sculptors of ancient Greece. Most of the early Cycladic sculptures are of female figures. Most of them are highly stylized, but there are also realistic representations of the human form, many of which have realistic proportions. Chemical analysis showed that the surface of the marble was mineral-based paints azurite for blue and cinnabar for red. In ancient Greece of the classical period, marble statues were also painted! Our review presents two delightful figurines of harpists. The one on the cover is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the second one is from the National Museum in Athens. Exceptional evidence of the development of musical art in the 3rd millennium BC! In some museums and private collections, items made of silver and even gold are also presented! Our review presents a silver bowl from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ancient Greece was a teacher of European civilization and was itself a student of the Cycladic civilization about which we know so much and so few!