Laudator Temporis Acti

Walter Burkert (1931-2015), Greek Religion, tr. John Raffan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985; rpt. 2001), p. 53, with note on p. 367:

The peculiar form of the Greek sacrificial ritual is of very great antiquity and post-Mycenaean at one and the same time, and not without connection to the East: the communal meat meal of men combined with a burnt offering to the gods, primarily of the inedible parts and the bones. For this reason the fire altar which stands open to the sky⁶² is the most essential part of the sanctuary. This is not an exchange of gifts celebrated by a hierarchical society of gods, king, priests, and commoners: together on the same level, men and women stand here about the altar, experience and bring death, honour the immortals, and in eating affirm life in its conditionality: it is the solidarity of mortals in the face of the immortals. This amounts to a negation of the Mycenaean organization: no king stands higher than all others, no priest can appropriate the sacral portions for himself. From the corporate beginning of the equality of men in contrast to the divine, the path could lead on through aristocracy to democracy and humanity. Nourished by numerous currents of tradition, the Greek experience here found its particular path into the future.

62 Sanctuaries for the sacrifice of oxen in the open air are found as early as Myrtou-Pighades and Ayia Irini on Cyprus (see nn. 7 and 21), and Ayia Triada on Crete (n. 17), then on Samos (n. 56) and on Lindos (E. Dyggve, Lindos III, 1960, 457–66); characteristic of these open-air altars are wheel-made terracotta votive bulls, cf. Nicholls, n. 22.