In the typology of ancient Greek pottery, the kernos ( or , plural ''kernoi'') is a pottery ring or stone tray to which are attached several small vessels for holding offerings. Its unusual design is described in literary sources, which also list the ritual ingredients it might contain. The kernos was used primarily in the cults of

Demeter In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Demeter (; Attic: ''Dēmḗtēr'' ; Doric: ''Dāmā́tēr'') is the Olympian goddess of the harvest and agriculture, presiding over crops, grains, food, and the fertility of the earth. Although s ...

and Kore, and of Cybele and Attis. The form begins in the Neolithic in stone, in the earliest stages of the

Minoan civilization The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age Aegean civilization on the island of Crete and other Aegean Islands, whose earliest beginnings were from 3500BC, with the complex urban civilization beginning around 2000BC, and then declining from 1450BC ...

, around 3,000 BC. They were produced in Minoan and Cycladic pottery, being the most elaborate shape in the latter, and right through ancient Greek pottery. The

Duenos Inscription The Duenos inscription is one of the earliest known Old Latin texts, variously dated from the 7th to the 5th century BC. It is inscribed on the sides of a ''kernos'', in this case a trio of small globular vases adjoined by three clay struts. It w ...

, one of the earliest known Old Latin texts, variously dated from the 7th to the 5th century BC, is inscribed round a kernos of three linked pots, of an Etruscan type. The Greek term is sometimes applied to similar compound vessels from other cultures found in the Mediterranean, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and South Asia.

Literary description

Athenaeus preserves an ancient description of the kernos as: The kernos was carried in procession at the Eleusinian Mysteries atop the head of a priestess, as can be found depicted in art. A lamp was sometimes placed in the middle of a stationary kernos.The verb ''kernophorein'' means "to bear the ''kernos''"; the noun for this is ''kernophoria''; Stephanos Xanthoudides, "Cretan Kernoi," ''Annual of the British School at Athens'' 12 (1906), p. 9.

References

{{Greek vase shapes Ancient Greek pot shapes Eleusinian Mysteries Ancient Greek religion