Strike the lyre: notes on an Eastern Celtic motif
Strike the lyre: notes on an Eastern Celtic motif

Summary/Abstract: One of Miklós Szabó’s major contributions to the study of the Iron Age archaeology of Europe is to have identified the particularly eastern nature of much of early Celtic art. In addition to specialist studies he has drawn attention to this eastern element in the context of a number of syntheses. There is however one particular motif, most particularly to be found as design elements in stamped pottery, to which perhaps more attention should be made and which indeed is missing from the useful charting of ‘Celtic curvilinear motifs’ – following the more extensive ‘grammar of Celtic ornament’ of Paul Jacobsthal and Paul-Marie Duval – found in Szabó’s valuable recent revision of earlier work. This is the so-called ‘lyre’ which in many forms has a key role to play in the development of the later fourth-century ‘Vegetal’ or Waldalgesheim style. Notwithstanding, even in its simplest form, two confronted but separate S’s, it is not that common and in fact it is chiefly distributed in Central and Eastern Europe (Fig. 1–2).

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