Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the Archaic period, from the end of the seventh and above all in the sixth century bc , sphinxes are ubiquitous in the figured decoration of Greek temples. They appear not only as acroteria, but also on antefixes and simas. As acroteria, they always occur as lateral versions, flanking the central acroterion at a distance. Although these figures have recently been the subject of several exhaustive studies, their significance remains a matter of debate. In the absence of explicit texts, the only means of comprehending their meaning is by examining the combinations of figures in which the sphinx makes an appearance. It is their association in three-part or heraldic compositions with a central vegetal or floral motif which provides the key to the explanation. This group is similar to that known in the Levant in which two sphinxes flank a ‘Tree of Life’, a group which the Old Testament texts allow us to identify as the cherubim guarding the Tree of Life of Genesis 3.24. This group was transmitted to Cyprus and to the Aegean world without losing its meaning. A series of documents allows us to verify that the ‘extended’ group of acroteria that we are concerned with has not lost its symbolic value by comparison with the ‘compact’ group known particularly from Archaic Greek vase-painting. An explanation in terms of eschatological ends and aspirations also permits us to interpret the other associations of the sphinx – with gorgons, with horsemen and with ‘Nike' figures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".