Crosses & Triangles

Petrie dates the cross as an emblem to about -3000, at Susa and in India — the Mohenjo-daro cross, SA 4 — set off by a double border in SA 1 to 4. That, he argues, makes the contemporary Egyptian signs, A 6, 7, emblems rather than mechanical line-work; Cilicia and Aleppo, A 8, 9, fill the gap between.

By -2600 Crete began elaborating it, SD; the plain equilateral cross of the Knossos shrine, SF 4, about 2300 B.C., is, he says, exactly the well-known Greek cross of Christian times.

No note of Petrie's heads this plate, but the figure codes at the end of his Pl. LVII note land here: the fanciful woven crosses G 7, 8, the degraded forms SJ, and the Assyrian crosses with emphasized terminals, SK 5 to 9, copied in the north at SK 2.

The page carries the series from about -1400 to Roman times: Mykenaean quartered discs, knobbed Assyrian crosses, a black chequer from Khorsabad, Etruscan and Italian pieces, and a foot row of Scythian, garnet-inlay and Nydam discs.

Petrie's point here is continuity: reaching Christian times, the pagan forms were simply kept on. The Baden disc M 3 continues as N 1 and N 12, the Ficoronian cista design M 1 as N 15, and the Mykenaean N 4 as N 45 at Tynan Abbey. None of the ornate pagan forms, he adds, were used religiously until the fifth century A.D., citing O 9 and O 97.

The page ends with Irish and Italian slab crosses worked in interlace.

Petrie dates the sequence closely. The XP monogram runs +331 to +470; the variant whose P is Horus' lock of hair, +440 to +560, and stays common in Egypt later. The plain cross first appears in +380, the jewelled cross in +425, expanded terminals about +450. The Arian cross carries discs at the terminals, SX 1, 12.

He then notes the adored cross at Palenque, in Central America, with terminals of the +600 type, and wonders whether the Nestorian mission of +638 to China could account for it.

The class T plates open here, with no note from Petrie. The page collects grouped triangles: rows of hatched and cross-hatched triangles (TA), solid black zigzag bands (F), lighter outlined and dotted friezes (G), and at the foot triangles filled with smaller triangles or set point to point (H).

Dates on the drawings run from -3000 at Jemdet Nasr to about -570 at Naukratis, with Britain, Cappadocia, Susa and Greece all represented.

No note from Petrie. Where Pl. LXI grouped triangles side by side, this page compounds them — chevrons nested inside chevrons, zigzags doubled and trebled, and hatched triangles run together into continuous bands (TJ, K, L).

Lower down the forms turn angular and hooked: Apulian bands that fold into key-like spirals, three Irish half-round panels from Clonmacnoise of +890 and +950, and a closing group of solid black-and-white triangle chequers from Cappadocia.

Petrie singles out the peculiar half rhombs, TR 7, 8, 9. On the last, from Glastonbury, the circles contain two small circles, as in late Celtic work elsewhere, and he suspects "some meaning may have been attached to the sign".

The triangle with a disc on its point is as early as -1100 (TS 1) and reappears at -400 (TS 56); the main example, on the tomb of Theodoric (TS 6), he calls too late to explain it. Subdivided rhombs were the favourite about -600 (TZ).

No note heads this plate, but Petrie's Pl. LXIII note ends by pointing at the TZ group, which is printed here: the subdivided rhombs he calls the favourite type about -600, including the two chequered panels from Defneh.

Above them the page runs through lozenge friezes and lattices, a Mykenaean rhomb with spiral corners (X 2), plaited bands from Chiusi and Lindisfarne, and lozenges filled with key patterns from Woodchester and Koban.