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Concept
Minoan snake goddess figurines
Summary
Two Minoan snake goddess figurines were excavated in 1903 in the Minoan palace at Knossos in the Greek island of Crete. The decades-long excavation programme led by the English archaeologist Arthur Evans greatly expanded knowledge and awareness of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization, but Evans has subsequently been criticised for overstatements and excessively speculative ideas, both in terms of his "restoration" of specific objects, including the most famous of these figures, and the ideas about the Minoans he drew from the archaeology. The figures are now on display at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum ("AMH").
The Knossos figurines, both significantly incomplete, date to near the end of the neo-palatial period of Minoan civilization, around 1600 BCE. It was Evans who called the larger of his pair of figurines a "Snake Goddess", the smaller a "Snake Priestess"; since then, it has been debated whether Evans was right, or whether both figurines depict priestesses, or both depict the same deity or distinct deities.
The combination of elaborate clothes that leave the breasts completely bare, and "snake-wrangling", attracted considerable publicity, not to mention various fakes, and the smaller figure in particular remains a popular icon for Minoan art and religion, now also generally referred to as a "Snake Goddess". But archaeologists have found few comparable images, and a snake goddess plays little part in current thinking about the cloudy topic of Minoan religion.
The two Knossos snake goddess figurines were found by Evans's excavators in one of a group of stone-lined and lidded cists Evans called the "Temple Repositories", since they contained a variety of objects that were presumably no longer required for use, perhaps after a fire. The figurines are made of faience, a crushed quartz-paste material which after firing gives a true vitreous finish with bright colors and a lustrous sheen. This material symbolized the renewal of life in old Egypt, therefore it was used in the funeral cult and in the sanctuaries.
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