amuletsGorgoneionγοργόνειον

said gor-GO-nay-on, plural gorgoneia

also: Gorgon head · Medusa head · Medusa mask

amuletGreece and the AegeanRome and ItalyAnatoliaGreece Italy Turkeyconfidence mediumneeds checking

A face, not a body: wild eyes, tusks, tongue out, snakes for hair. It is moulded, cut or struck onto whatever needs guarding — a shield boss, a temple pediment, a terracotta roof antefix, a coin, the bottom of a drinking cup, a pendant. The archaic ones are hideous on purpose. From the fifth century BCE the face begins to be carved beautiful instead, and the Medusa Rondanini, a Roman copy of a Greek original, is the earliest such gorgoneion named in the literature.

cited

When

from the 7th or 6th century BCE through Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquity cited

Period	Archaic Greek through Roman
How the date is known	art-historical — dated by style
Note	The cited article gives the earliest representations of Gorgons and gorgoneia as mid-7th century BC in one place and mid-6th century BC for gorgoneia in another. This record takes the earlier date and flags the discrepancy rather than choosing silently. The upper end is the Roman period, which the article dates by copies rather than by a last attestation.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Plaque or tablet
Made of	Fired clay · Copper and bronze · Gold · Silver · Glass
Goes	At the neck · At the door · On a wall · On the roof
Made by	no restriction is recorded; the face appears on state coinage, temple architecture, armour and private jewellery alike
Note	The roof position is the antefix and acroterion; the wall position is the temple pediment. No published measurement was read.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

The evil eye — harm carried by a look, often an admiring one citedsaid by the consensus of classical scholars, who read the gorgoneion as an apotropaion — a device to ward away unwanted thingsJane Ellen Harrison's phrase, quoted in the cited article
a ritual mask misunderstood
Blades and bullets — invulnerability charms; reported, never recommended citedsaid by Homer, on Athena's aegis, which the head makes proof against Apollo's spear and Zeus's thunderbolt
Harm to a house or a field citedsaid by Greek builders, who set the face on pediments, antefixes and acroteria
Another person's sorcery citedsaid by Greek practice generally, as summarised in the account of apotropaic magic: the Gorgon was the most widely used image among the Greeks for averting evil

The story

Homer had already fixed what the thing was for. On Agamemnon's shield in the Iliad sits "the Gorgon, grim of aspect, glaring terribly, and about her were Terror and Rout"; on Athena's aegis the same head makes the aegis proof against Apollo's spear and Zeus's thunderbolt alike. Hector at his most frightening has "the eyes of the Gorgon". Odysseus, standing in the underworld and determined to stay, bolts at the thought of meeting "the head of the Gorgon, that awful monster".

Over six hundred Gorgon representations are catalogued in the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, and of all the depictions of Greek demons, the gorgoneion is by far the most frequent. The consensus among classicists is that its function was apotropaic — a device for turning unwanted things away — and that it began as a mask worn by a dancer. Jane Ellen Harrison put that view in the form everyone still quotes: the gorgoneion is "a ritual mask misunderstood".

Her argument runs backwards through the myth. What came first, she wrote, was "a grinning mask with glaring eyes and protruding beast-like tusks and pendent tongue", known in ritual. Then: "How did this Gorgoneion come to be? A hero had slain a beast called the Gorgon, and this was its head." The object comes first; the monster is invented to explain it; the hero is supplied to kill the monster. Two seventh-century BCE groups of terracotta Gorgon-like masks support her — wearable helmet masks from Tiryns, and votive masks, not wearable, from the Sanctuary of Orthia at Sparta.

Inference — the gorgoneion is the clearest case in the atlas of a charm that works by being looked at. Everything the sources say it does, it does to a viewer: terror, rout, flight. That is the same mechanism a Neapolitan coral horn or a blue glass bead is described as using, with the volume turned up.

cited