Bull from the sea

2600 BC, during the Bronze Age, the Greek-Armenian ancestors had not yet embarked upon the wine-dark sea. Far south in the Cyclades, the islands were still populated by who-knows. Semites? Egyptians? Anatolians?

Some islanders from the Syra-Keros Culture found a small outcrop off the latter; it's its own island now, "Dhaskalio". They thought it was a grand place for a monument. So they quarried Naxian marble - a lot of marble. And they remade Dhaskalio into a fitting platform for a pyramid.

The researchers report to The Independent that the top of the pyramid was empty, at first. Also, they found 1,000 ritually broken religious marble figurines (mainly depicting women in symbolic form), again brought there [to Naxos] from all over the Cyclades archipelago. The figurines were from all over the Aegean; there's also obsidian tools and "blades" from Melos.

I think, here, is the Threshing-Floor rife in protohistoric Bronze Age farming-culture. Syra-Keros harvested (emmer) wheat, which they needed to thresh. 2600 BC is too early for horses, and I doubt they ever had much of a horse-culture in Keros or even Naxos. The animals in these islands tend small, like the sheep. But the Aegean shores did, by then, have cattle (even if they weren't retaining water so well). So the threshers were oxen.

Further, I am scenting the iron tang of sacrifices in the area. In the preliterate Near East, it was common for symbolic figurines be taken to the site of trade. There, mediators smashed the figurines in such a way as could only be deliberate. There the defaced images remained, to confirm receipt of the cargo. If the figurines were humanoid ...

Later, the pious locals contented themselves with smashing figurines in effigy.