While at the Archaeological Museum of the Larnaca District, I absentmindedly took a picture of a mask I liked. Later that day I would read about Phoenician-Punic masks and their connections to Archaic Greek masks found at Artemis Ortheia. I realized that the mask I had liked was one of these Phoenician-Punic masks, and I promptly fell down a bit of a rabbit hole. This particular 12th-century BCE mask in Larnaca was found in Kition and is a type of “hero mask” which was typically paired with a grotesque demonic mask. These paired Phoenician masks followed a tradition of creating grotesque masks based on the Babylonian demon Humbaba and possibly served as a type of protection to scare off evil spirits. The Phoenicians would include the hero mask as an archetype of an ideal Phoenician hero. The specific purpose of these masks is not fully known, but they are numerous in areas with Phoenician influence.

The Phoenician masks would be fairly similar in appearance to several terracotta masks found in Sparta. The Greek masks date to a later period (around 600 BCE) and only depict the demon masks. These mask bear a similarity to both the image of the gorgon and later Greek theatre masks. This very particular artistic trend demonstrates the slow progression of culture from the Near East to Cyprus to Greece. I found it particularly interesting how the many carriers of these cultural trends were the Phoenicians; They not only carried this trend across the Mediterranean but altered and evolved the trend. 

audrey