Mycenaean Lions and Cover Artwork
A few weeks ago, someone asked why I had used Minoan artwork for the cover art of The Young Lion, the point being that the novel is set in the Mycenaean culture.
The lazy answer is that my stock photo choices were rather limited. The other answer is that the lion/griffin figure on the cover actually is Mycenaean artwork.
The Mycenaeans took over Knossos in 1450 B.C., two hundred years before the Trojan War, and it was a Mycenaean king, Idomeneus, who led the second-largest contingent to Troy. So the ruling class that commissioned the artwork you see today at the reconstructed Knossos and in the nearby Heraklion Museum was Mycenaean.