It was unearthed in a burial chamber of a Minoan princess. It indicated that Crete, even in its “dark age” nourished a brilliant civilization….
“An unusual find was made however, close to the entrance to the side chamber, when the dismembered corpse of a horse was discovered. A bull’s skull was also found and it would seem that both animals had been sacrificed in honour of the person buried in the side chamber….
"This seal is by far not the only one we have. On the spectacular series of seals you can see above, we can see scenes of a different story: a sort of a divine romance. The protagonist is a female figure, undoubtedly a goddess, who appears as being seduced by a male figure (almost certainly a god), with the help of giant fennel (Ferula sp.) branches. Why am I drawing this conclusion? First of all, the upmost seal shows a depiction of love prototypical to later Greek art: there is a tiny figure floating in-between the two main ones. In Classic Greek art, this exactly how they depict Eros (the personification of 'love', 'passion' or 'romance') between the characters involved (see the beautiful statue of Aphrodite and Pan from Delos below). The other argument is less direct; and it involves exploring the connotations of Ferula plants. ... read more: http://minoablog.blogspot.com/2010/05/mythical-figures-on-cretan-jewellery.html
When the side chamber was excavated a single burial in a clay larnax was discovered. It proved possible to establish the position in which the body had been laid to rest (with the head facing west and the body in a foetal position) and therefore the position on the body of the various small objects, mainly of gold, that were found in the larnax. One of the more important (and beautiful) finds was an amazing gold ring showing a cult scene.
Although the sex of the person buried in the side chamber could not be determined from the skeletal remains, the nature of the funerary offerings showed that the person was without doubt a woman and the richness of the finds imply that she must have belonged to the royal family. The fact that the rings all showed cult and religious scenes suggest that she may have also been a priestess. And this view is supported by the evidence of a bull sacrifice in her honour. Read More: http://www.uk.digiserve.com/mentor/minoan/phourni.htm a
An earlier discovery: The boy’s father, a destitute farmer in the same area, handed the ring over to the meddlesome village priest father Polakis who presented it to Sir Arthur Evans with the intention to sell it. However, there was no deal between the two, since the former demanded a whole lot of money. Nevertheless, Evans made two copies of the ring, one in gold and another in amber. Today these copies are found in the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxfordshire Approximately in 1933 or 1934 father Polakis turned to the Museum of Iraklion. It was the period when distinguished archaeologists Nikolaos Platon and Spyridon Marinatos were in service. N. Platon decided that the ring was genuine while S. Marinatos thought the ring was forged. Being in disagreement, the archaeologists decided to return the ring to the priest. However, N. Platon kept a copy of the ring by casting it in plasticine. The cast was later found in N. Platon’s archive. Many years later, when N. Platon manifested fresh interest in the ring, the priest reported that he had given it to his wife for safekeeping but she had lost it! Since then all traces of the ring were lost. The only information about the ring came from the copies made and a number of archaeological reports associated with those copies. read more: http://www.stigmes.gr/br/brpages/articles/minosring.htm
The rocky hills of Crete have seemingly been the haunt of Gods since the dawn of time. Zeus is alleged to have been born there, and his grave is said to be hidden on Mount Juktas, a few miles south of Knossos, where the legendary King Minos, son of Zeus by Europa, built his labyrinth palace and founded the civilization that we call by his name. At the foot of Mount Juktas today lies the village of Arkhanes, inhabited mainly by farmers and vineyards. Customarily, one of the grape growers used to retreat from trhe midday heat into a cave a short distance from the village.
It was only in the 1960’s that anyone realized that the cave was not a natural formation at all, but the work of man; in fact it resembled the upper chamber of a tomb similar to the famous Mycenaean tholos tombs on the Greek mainland. Serious excavation began in 1965 and it uncovered the unplundered burial chamber of a princess, or more likely a priestess-queen, who died around 1400 B.C. and was interred with extraordinarily rich grave offerings. The rings all depict the Mother Goddess conducting some form of religious rite.
"The Minoan culture survived one serious earthquake around 1700 BC which destroyed many palaces, but never really recovered from the destruction of Knossos in 1450 BC by another earthquake. Yet the talent was not quickly extinguished. In 1965 the tomb of a Minoan princess, who died around 1400 BC, was found in a cave above the vineyards near Mount Juktas. It proved one of the richest burial sites ever found on Crete. The princess was surrounded by 140 gold ornaments. Gold ribbons with rosette patterns lay at her waist and feet, five necklaces of gold and two small gold boxes lay on her breast. She wore five signet rings of gold. The largest necklace was of twenty papyrus flowers strung together. As John Sakellarakis, then Assistant Curator of the Archaeology Museum in Heraklion where the treasure now rests, observed, "The jewellery is as fashionable today as it must have been in 1400 BC". That is a fitting legacy for one of the liveliest of ancient Mediterranean civilisations." read more: http://info.goldavenue.com/info_site/in_arts/in_civ/in_civ_greece.html image: http://rolfgross.dreamhosters.com/Greece-Web/Crete/Crete.htm
The outer chambers had been looted, but the odd shaped stones in the inner tomb had apparently fooled the thieves. Buried close to the door was a skeleton of a horse that had been cut into pieces as well as the skull of a bull which had been sacrificed in her honor. Her remains were sealed up in a painted larnax, a type of ancient coffin. The treasure trove was quite substantial: golden bands, necklaces, rings, and lesser offerings in bronze. A total of one hundred and forty gold ornaments. A semi-divine treasure fro someone with semi-divine status.
Oddly, the period of her burial had usually been thought of as a Cretan dark age, a troubled time when the island was inhabited by what Sir Arthur Evans called “squatters” hardly worthy of their illustrious Minoan predecessors. But a burial so lavish points no
poverty but to a civilization that continued to flourish in spite of natural disasters. (1996.521a,b) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art”]
The Cretan princess survived to bear witness that the Minoans and the mainland Greeks were not strangers to one another, and that the island of Crete, where Zeus was cradled, was also the cradle of a dazzling and brilliant civilization.
ADDENDUM:
Read More: http://minoablog.blogspot.com/2010/05/mythical-figures-on-cretan-jewellery.html
http://www.eleusinianm.co.uk/VictoriaLine/Victoria_GreenPark.html
http://info.goldavenue.com/info_site/in_arts/in_civ/in_civ_greece.html a
"It is perhaps no wonder that when Evelyn Waugh visited Heraklion in the 1920s he found a disconcertingly modern collection of paintings in the museum. “It is impossible to disregard the suspicion,” he wrote in Labels (an account of his Mediterranean travels, published in 1930), “that their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue.” The story of the ancient palace of Knossos itself is much the same. Instantly recognizable with its squat red columns, ceremonial staircases, and “throne rooms,” it is the second most visited of all archaeological sites in Greece, attracting almost a million visitors each year. Yet none of those columns are ancient; they are all restorations (or, in his words, “reconstitutions”) by Evans. ...Read More: http://crete.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/evans-knossos-and-the-minoans-facts-and-forgeries/
“In some recent accounts of the history of Minoan archaeology, Evans himself has taken a lot of criticism. At best, he has seemed a dupe of his own obsessions with a particular vision of prehistory and of his fixation with the idea of a primitive mother goddess (a fixation unconvincingly explained in J.A. MacGillivary’s hostile 2000 biography, Minotaur, by the loss of Evans’s own mother when he was only six years old). At worst, he has been presented as a rich, upper-class racist, working out his sexual hang-ups and his British imperialist prejudices on the archaeology of Minoan Crete. … Read More: http://crete.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/evans-knossos-and-the-minoans-facts-and-forgeries/
…Evans is vulnerable to some of these charges. On any estimate, he was an archaeologist of “the old school.” He was only able to excavate Knossos because he bought the site wholesale, and he lived almost a parody of an English expatriate life there. According to the account in Dilys Powell’s memoir The Villa Ariadne (1973), Evans refused ever to drink Cretan wine and had French wine, gin, and whisky, as well as English jam and tinned meat, specially imported to Crete at huge cost. (Though she is better known as a movie critic, Powell had been married to the British archaeologist Humfry Payne and knew the set-up at Knossos well.) Evans was also capable of writing with contempt of the “inferior races,” and at the age of seventy-four he was convicted in London of “an act in violation of public decency” with a young man (he had been married briefly—but whether this offense was part of a habitual pattern of conduct or a one-off incident we do not know).
There is also the question of quite how far he was aware of the brisk trade in Minoan forgeries during the early decades of the twentieth century, many of which he authenticated, some of which he bought for himself…. Read More: http://crete.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/evans-knossos-and-the-minoans-facts-and-forgeries/
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