Sacrificial tripod

Priestess of Delphi (1891) by John Collier; the Pythia was inspired by pneuma rising from below as she sits on a tripod.

An ancient Greek coin ca. 330-300 BC. Laureate head of Apollo (left) and ornate tripod (right).

A sacrificial tripod ^[1] was a type of altar used by the ancient Greeks. The most famous was the Delphic tripod, on which the Pythian priestess took her seat to deliver the oracles of the deity. The seat was formed by a circular slab on the top of the tripod, on which a branch of laurel was deposited when it was unoccupied by the priestess. In this sense, by Classical times the tripod was sacred to Apollo. The mytheme of Heracles contesting with Apollo for the tripod appears in vase-paintings older than the oldest written literature.^[2] The oracle originally may have been related to the primal deity, the Earth.

Another well-known tripod in Delphi was the Plataean Tripod; it was made from a tenth part of the spoils taken from the Persian army after the Battle of Plataea. This consisted of a golden basin, supported by a bronze serpent with three heads (or three serpents intertwined), with a list of the states that had taken part in the war inscribed on the coils of the serpent. The golden bowl was carried off by the Phocians during the Third Sacred War (356–346 BC); the stand was removed by the emperor Constantine to Constantinople in 324, where in modern Istanbul it still can be seen in the hippodrome, the Atmeydanı, although in damaged condition: the heads of the serpents have disappeared, however one is now on display at the nearby Istanbul Archaeology Museums. The inscription, however, has been restored almost entirely. Such tripods usually had three ears (rings which served as handles) and frequently had a central upright as support in addition to the three legs.

Tripods frequently are mentioned by Homer as prizes in athletic games and as complimentary gifts; in later times, highly decorated and bearing inscriptions, they served the same purpose. They also were used as dedicatory offerings to the deities, and in the dramatic contests at the Dionysia the victorious choregus (a wealthy citizen who bore the expense of equipping and training the chorus) received a crown and a tripod. He would either dedicate the tripod to some deity or set it upon the top of a marble structure erected in the form of a small circular temple in a street in Athens, called the street of tripods, ^[3] from the large number of memorials of this kind. One of these, the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, erected by him to commemorate his victory in a dramatic contest in 335 BC, still stands. The form of the victory tripod, now missing from the top of the Lysicrates monument, has been rendered variously by scholars since the eighteenth century.

The scholar Martin L. West writes that the sibyl at Delphi shows many traits of shamanistic practices, likely inherited or influenced from Central Asian practices. He cites her sitting in a cauldron on a tripod, while making her prophecies, her being in an ecstatic trance state, similar to shamans, and her utterings, unintelligible.^[4]

An ancient Greek sacrificial tripod on a late 3rd century B.C. coin. Laureate head of Apollo (left) and Tripod (right).

According to Herodotus (The Histories, I.144), the victory tripods were not to be taken from the temple sanctuary precinct, but left there for dedication.^[5]

Sometimes the tripod was used as a support for a lebes or cauldron or for supporting other items such as a vase.

Ancient China

A ding from the late Shang Dynasty.

Sacrificial tripods were also found in use in ancient China usually cast in bronze but sometimes appearing in ceramic form.^[6] They are often referred to as "dings" and usually have three legs, but in some usages have four legs.

In prehistoric times, around 2500 B.C., these tripods were found in the northeast culture, near to the provinces of Hopei (in which Beijing is located), Shantung, and southern Manchuria. The people of this culture were ancestors of the Tunguses and mixed with Paleo-Siberian tribes. They made pottery with basic forms which were long preserved in subsequent Chinese pottery, such as a tripod.^[6]

The Chinese use sacrificial tripods in modern times, such as in 2005, when a "National Unity Tripod" made of bronze was presented by the central Chinese government to the government of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to mark its fiftieth birthday. It was described as a traditional Chinese sacrificial vessel symbolizing unity.^[7]

Notes

1. ^ The tripod as seat or stand is the only form stable on uneven ground, hence its use is universal and ancient.
2. ^ Vase-paintings with the mythic motif begin in Geometric Style, but the identifications of Heracles and Apollo become certain only in the sixth century. (Walter Burkert, Homo Necans (1982) translated by Peter Bing (University of California Press) 1983, p 121, and bibliographical note.
3. ^ Harrison, Jane Ellen; Verrall, Margaret de G., Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens being a Translation of a Portion of the Attica of Pausanias, London and New York : Macmillan, 1890. Cf. p.243
4. ^ Martin Litchfield West, The Orphic Poems, p.147. "The Pythia resembles a shaman at least to the extent that she communicates with her god while in a state of trance, and conveys as much to those present by uttering unintelligible words. It is particularly striking that she sits on a cauldron supported by a tripod. This eccentric perch can hardly be explained except as a symbolic boiling, and, as such, it looks very much like a reminiscence of the initiatory boiling of the shaman translated from hallucinatory experience into concrete visual terms. It was in this same cauldron, probably, that the Titans boiled Dionysus in the version of the story known to Callimachus and Euphorion, and his remains were interred close by". See also Mircea Eliade, Spirit Language.
5. ^ Herodotus, The Histories (ed. A. D. Godley), Book I.CXLIV:

   "Just as the Dorians of what is now the country of the 'Five Cities'--formerly the country of the 'Six Cities'--forbid admitting any of the neighboring Dorians to the Triopian temple, and even barred from using it those of their own group who had broken the temple law. [2] For long ago, in the games in honor of Triopian Apollo, they offered certain bronze tripods to the victors; and those who won these were not to carry them away from the temple but dedicate them there to the god. [3] Now when a man of Halicarnassus called Agasicles won, he disregarded this law, and, carrying the tripod away, nailed it to the wall of his own house. For this offense the five cities--Lindus, Ialysus, Camirus, Cos, and Cnidus--forbade the sixth city--Halicarnassus--to share in the use of the temple. Such was the penalty imposed on the Halicarnassians." [1]

6. ^ ^{a b} Eberhard, Wolfram, A History of China, Berkeley and Los Angeles : University of California Press, 3rd edition, 1969. Cf. p.49 for illustration of Ancient bronze tripod found at Anyang.
7. ^ "National Unity Tripod" presented to mark Xinjiang's 50th birthday", People's Daily, China, October 01, 2005

References

• Smith, William, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1870. Cf. p.1162, article on Tripos
• West, Martin Litchfield, The Orphic Poems, Oxford, 1983.
• Wilson, Peter, The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: the Chorus, the City, the Stage, 2000. (cf. Chapter V - Monumentalising Victory, pp.198- for discussion and plates of tripods as awards) [2]

Further reading

• Benton, Sylvia, "The Evolution of the Tripod-Lebes", The Annual of the British School at Athens, Vol. 35, (1934/1935), pp. 74-130.

External links

• Lysikrates monument and Street of Tripods in Athens
• Photographs of the Lysikrates monument and Street of Tripods in Athens