Other parts support it, KT. Like "This animal was no simple composite; it didn?t seem to belong with the obviously imaginary hybrids of Greek tradition like Pegasus (a horse with wings), the Sphinx (a winged lion with a woman?s head), the Minotaur (a man with a bull?s head), and the half-man, half-horse Centaurs. Indeed, the griffin played no role in Greek mythology. It was a creature of folklore grounded in naturalistic details.Knight Templar said:
Unlike the other monsters who dwelled in the mythical past, the griffin was not the offspring of gods and was not associated with the adventures of Greek gods or heroes. Instead, griffins were generic animals believed to exist in the preset day; they were encountered by ordinary people who prospected for gold in distant lands." Page 16
"The griffin was much more than a static decorative motif; it was imagined and depicted as a real animal with recognizable behavioral traits. ? I sought out that unique bronze metope, a decorated plaque created for the Temple of Zeus in about 630 B.C. The artist had portrayed a fierce mother griffin with a baby griffin nestled under her ribs (fig 1.5). Sarah Morris, now a professor of classical archaeology at UCLA, showed me another griffin family scene on a Mycenaean vase of about 1150 B.C., painted well before the first known written accounts of the griffin. In that vignette, a griffin pair tends two nestlings. What inspired such naturalistic images of griffin life? The imagery of griffins did not follow any standard mythological narratives-instead, the artists seemed to be imagining the behavior of an unusual animal they had heard described but had never seen. " Page 26
What would make the Greeks think up the Griffins as motherly? To come up with such far fetched details that even now our Scientists have to make HUGE leaps of faith to come up with instead of treating them as the same as mythical creatures.
