Found in a pit of sacred leftovers
The figurines come from the heart of the Palace of Knossos. They probably stood in its central sanctuary, together with other objects of worship, until a destruction around 1600 BCE. After it, the broken objects were not thrown away: they were buried as sacred relics in stone-lined pits sunk into the floor, which Evans called the Temple Repositories.
Evans’s team emptied them in 1903. Among the finds were the remains of six or seven figurines of the same kind, most of them in fragments. Two could be put back together as standing women, each about a third of a metre tall, and they became the most famous images of Minoan religion.
What they are made of
The figurines are made of faience, a material that has nothing to do with the glazed pottery of the same name made in Europe much later. Minoan faience is a paste of crushed quartz that, when fired, forms a glassy, coloured surface. It was shaped in moulds: each figurine was made in several parts, which were then joined with wire and painted.
The larger figurine is 33.8 cm high, the smaller 29 cm, about the height of a school ruler and a little more. Both date from around 1650-1550 BCE, the period before the destruction that sent them underground.
How much of them is Evans?
More than most visitors think. The restoration was carried out for Evans by the Danish artist Halvor Bagge. For the smaller figurine they created a matching arm and a striped snake, gave her a head, and set on it a headdress with a small cat, assembled from separate faience pieces found in the repositories. The museum lists the skirt, the left arm and the head of the smaller figurine as restored.
The result was a striking figure with no parallels among other Bronze Age images of women, which is exactly what makes scholars cautious. In 2011 the archaeologist Emily Miller Bonney went back to the original fragments alone, a head, two torsos and the remains of a flounced skirt, to see what the evidence supports without the restorations.
Goddess or priestess?
Evans saw a goddess and a priestess, and the name “Snake Goddess” has stuck ever since. The truth is that we cannot know. The Minoans wrote in a script, Linear A, that is still unread, so no text tells us who these women were. They could be goddesses, priestesses or worshippers, and the museum itself presents them as goddesses or priestesses.
What is reasonably clear is where they belonged: in a sanctuary of the palace, among other objects of cult, important enough to be buried with care when they broke.
Fame, copies and fakes
Their fame came fast, and with it a market. In the early twentieth century other “Minoan goddesses” appeared on the antiquities market and entered museums abroad. The best known is an ivory and gold figure in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in the museum since 1914 and dated by the museum itself either to around 1600-1500 BCE or to the early twentieth century, because tests have not settled the question.
Where to see them
Both faience figurines are in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, on Crete, with other finds from the palace of Knossos.
Sources
- Heraklion Archaeological Museum, collection records of the faience figurines from the Temple Repositories.
- S. German, on the restoration by Halvor Bagge and Arthur Evans (Smarthistory, 2018).
- E. M. Bonney, “Disarming the Snake Goddess: A Reconsideration of the Faience Figures from the Temple Repositories at Knossos”, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 24 (2011).
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, collection record 14.863.
