Kroisos Kouros, ca. 530 BC.

A kouros (plural kouroi, Ancient Greek κοῦρος) is the modern term^[1] given to those representations of male youths which first appear in the Archaic period in Greece. The term kouros, meaning (male) youth, was first proposed for what were previously thought to be depictions of Apollo by V. I. Leonardos in 1895 in relation to the youth fromKeratea,^[2] and adopted by Lechat as a generic term for the standing male figure in 1904.^[3] Such statues are found across the Greek-speaking world, the preponderance of these were found in sanctuaries of Apollo with more than one hundred from the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoios, Boeotia, alone.^[4] These free-standing sculptures were typicallymarble, but also the form is rendered in limestone, wood, bronze, ivory and terracotta. They are typically life-sized, though early colossal examples are up to 3 meters tall.

The female sculptural counterpart of the Kouros is the Kórē or Koúrē (Plural: Korai or Koúrai).

[edit]Purpose

Kleobis and Biton, (Delphi:Archaeological Museum)

The kouros type appears to have served several functions. It is certain that it was used to represent the god Apollo, as attested by its depiction on a vase painting in the presence of suppliant.^[5] As does the description of the statue of the Pythian Apollo at Samos by Diodoros^[6] as “Egyptian works, with his arms hanging by his sides and his legs parted”. However, not all kouroi are images of a deity; many have been discovered in cemeteries where they most likely served as commemorative tombstones of the deceased, also the type was used as a memorial for victors in the games (like trophies) (Pausanias describes the statue of Arrhichion, an Olympic pankratiast, as in the kouros scheme^[7]), and some kouroi have been found in sanctuaries other than that of Apollo. Indeed some kouroi placed in sanctuaries were not inscribed with the name of the god but with a mortal, for example the ‘Delphi Twins’ Kleobis and Biton were honoured for their piety with matching kouroi.^[8]

A direct influence between Egyptian monumental sculpture (in particular the figure of Horus) and the kouros type has long been conjectured, not least of all because of known trade and cultural relations that had existed since the mid-seventh century. A recent study by Eleanor Guralnick applied stereophotogrammetric measurement and cluster analysis to a number of Greek and Egyptian statues and found the correlation between the Second Canon of the 26th Dynasty and Greek kouroi to be widely distributed but not universal.^[9]