Description
"Sphinx, dog of Hades, whom are you guarding, watching over the dead?"-funerary inscription from Thessaly.
The role of the sphinx as a guardian spirit was often a funerary one. Like the griffins that adorned earlier cauldrons of the Orientalizing period, sphinxes such as this one served as "watchdogs" over the precious contents of bronze vessels, which sometimes held the cremated remains of the deceased.
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