Why Minoan?

What is the evidence that this is
an antiquity from the Minoan Bronze Age?

Why Modern?

What is the evidence that this is
a fake made in the early 20th century?

Why Here?

How and why did
the figurine arrive at the ROM?

What Now?

What are we working on
now to resolve the mystery?

Why Minoan?

What is the evidence that this is an antiquity from the Minoan Bronze Age?

The ROM “Goddess” was bought in the belief that it was a rare survival from Bronze Age Crete, dating to around 1600 BCE. This was based on the expert opinion of Arthur Evans, the archaeologist whose excavations at Knossos on Crete in the early 20th century uncovered the remains of the Bronze Age Minoan culture. Evans compared the ROM figurine to genuine Minoan objects that he had excavated at Knossos – several fragmentary wall-paintings showing similarly-dressed figures engaged in bull-leaping, and some small ivory figurines of male acrobats. However, Evans’ interpretation of the evidence was also influenced by his personal theories about the Minoans, which included the belief that they worshipped a mother goddess.

Ivory Minoan figurine of an acrobat excavated at Knossos in 1902. Heraklion Archaeological Museum Photo: Evans 1930, Palace of Minos, volume 3, fig. 296.

ROM “Goddess” standing in front of the ROM watercolour copy of the Minoan Bull Leaper Fresco from Knossos. Photo: c. 2001 ROM Archives.

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Explore the Stories

The ROM ‘Minoan’ Goddess: The Minoan Relations

Posted by ROM on April 8, 2014
Detail of the head of the ROM 'Minoan' Goddess

Here I continue the story of an icon of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection: the ivory and gold female figurine–ROM 931.21.1. For further information see the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess Research Project.

After looking at the best known of the dubious ‘Minoan’ figurines (which may be modern) in my previous article, I now consider some of the genuine Minoan objects discovered in archaeological excavations on Crete. 

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There are similarities between these certainly Minoan antiquities and the ‘Minoan’ figurines without a known archaeological findspot that I discussed previously. These similarities were originally used to prove that the ‘suspect’ figurines were also genuinely Minoan. However, it is now recognized that the parallels are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they may show that the ‘suspect’ figurines are of the right style to be Minoan, but on the other hand, they provide a model for forgers to copy when creating fake Minoan objects. It is important to consider when each of the Minoan objects was excavated, since this shows which of them were known (and so could be copied) before the ‘suspect’ figurines appeared on the art market.

Faience Snake Goddess figurines from Knossos

Shrine of the snake goddess as arranged by Evans, Palace of Minos vol. 1 (1921)

The ‘Shrine of the Snake Goddess’, a “conjectural arrangement” by Sir Arthur Evans of the excavated objects including the two faience figurines, around 1600 BCE, now in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete
Image: A. Evans, Palace of Minos volume 1(1921) figure 377

Some of the best known images of Minoan ‘goddesses’ are these two standing figurines holding snakes and made of faience (a glassy quartz ceramic material often used in ancient Egypt).  They are very similar in appearance, although not in material, to the ivory Snake Goddesses from Boston and Baltimore. 

They were found by Arthur Evans in 1903 in the excavations at Knossos (here on a map), in an area to the south of the Throne Room that he named the ‘Temple Repositories’. Evans believed they represented a Snake Goddess (the figure on the left of the image) and a Priestess, or perhaps another goddess (the figure on the right), and that they were votive objects that were part of a shrine. The image shows his suggested reconstruction of the figurines and other objects discovered with them. This is a highly imaginative reconstruction which unites objects found scattered in at least two deposits and both complete figurines have been reconstituted. The ‘Priestess’ had no head, which was added by Halvor Bagg, a Danish artist, together with the headdress that incorporates (on practically no evidence) a tiny feline also found in the excavations. The face of this figure is pure reconstruction. The ‘Snake Goddess’ was missing the lower skirt, which was restored based of the other figurines and plaques from the excavation area. 

Whether or not the details of reconstruction are accurate, the snake-handling women do seem to be associated with some aspect of Minoan ritual. The similarities between these faience figures and the ivory Boston Goddess explains why Evans was so eager to authenticate the ivory figurine when it appeared. He believed that it provided further support for the existence of Minoan Snake Goddess, but for other experts the resemblance was suspiciously convenient.

Ivory Figurines from Knossos

Minoan figurines made of ivory are relatively rare and have only been excavated in a few areas of Crete. Objects made of carved bone, or ivory strips, such as plaques, inlays, combs and containers are more common, but the craft of carving ivory into rounded figurines seems to have been pretty much restricted to the Minoan Neopalatial period (roughly 17th -15th centuries BCE). The ivory figurines that do survive are not often well-preserved. Most of the finds are single components of a figure – ivory heads, arms or feet – since many Minoan figurines were made up of several ivory parts joined with sections made of other material that no longer survive, such as wood. 

Acrobats from the Ivory Deposit at Knossos, Evans Palace of Minos vol. 3 (1930)

‘Acrobats’ from the Ivory Deposit at Knossos, around 1600-1500 BCE, now in Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete
Image: A. Evans, Palace of Minos volume 3 (1930) figures 296 & 297, plate 36

In 1902 the first of these ivory figurines were discovered in Evans’ excavations at Knossos. In the ‘Domestic Quarter’, east of the Central Court, he uncovered what may have been the carbonized remains of a wooden box, which he believed had fallen from the ‘Temple Treasury’ on the floor above. The contents of the box, which Evans named the ‘Ivory Deposit’, included ivory parts from several male figures. These separate limbs included legs and feet, arms with the veins and muscles and even bracelets carefully defined, and heads, with carved features and holes for fixing separate locks of gilded bronze hair. The one figure that was complete enough to be reconstructed was a male acrobat leaping through the air with head tilted back and arms and legs outstretched, almost 30cm tall. The surface of this figurine is badly preserved, but it was made of separately carved ivory head, arms, legs and torso, connected by a missing section of waist, now restored, but perhaps originally made of wood. The ivory head has holes for locks of hair.  In the same deposit was also part of the head of a faience bull, which suggested to Evans that this was once a miniature model of a bull-leaping performance, complete with ivory bull-leapers.

Several other fragments of ivory figurines were found in later excavations in another area of Knossos. In 1956-1962 the ‘Royal Road’ to the north of the Palace was explored in excavations conducted by Sinclair Hood for the British School at Athens. Pieces of ivory male figurines, as well as the possible remains of an ivory-carving workshop were discovered there. The ivory fragments of arms, hands and feet show the same attention to detail of muscles and veins as those discovered in 1902, but they belong to larger figures – originally over 40cm tall – one dressed in a short kilt and another in sandals carved in ivory.

Ivory Figurines from Palaikastro (Roussolakkos), East Crete

For over a century archaeologists from the British School at Athens have excavated at the site of the large Minoan town of Roussolakkos (here on a map), near the modern town of Palaikastro in eastern Crete, and at the nearby Bronze Age mountain-top sanctuary of Petsophas.  The excavations have been well-published, and further records are kept in the archives of the British School at Athens.

The Palaikastro Kouros, (c) The British School at Athens

The ‘Palaikastro Kouros’, around 1525-1450 BCE, now in the Archaeological Museum, Sitea, Crete
Photograph: reproduced with the permission BSA Excavations Records-PLK 420-PhA 454 © the British School at Athens

 

This spectacular figurine came to light only recently, discovered over several seasons between 1987 and 1990 in and around Building 5 to the north of the excavated area at Roussolakkos, during excavations directed by J.A. MacGillivray and L.H. Sackett. It was found in many pieces, some of them badly burnt. When it was reconstructed it proved to be a figure of a youth, around 50cm tall, and made up of eight ivory sections joined together with boxwood and ornamented with precious materials, such as dark serpentine hair, rock crystal eyeballs, and gold-foil clothes (sandals, and a kilt). Unlike the other Minoan figurines (both archaeologically excavated and ‘suspect’) which were made of elephant ivory, this statuette is hippopotamus ivory–from the lower canine tusks. This is the largest and most elaborate of the ivory figurines known from Crete.

The excavators identified Building 5 as a town shrine, and the ivory youth as a cult statue of a god, perhaps a youthful Diktaean Zeus himself, who, according to legend, was born in this area of Crete, and had a sanctuary nearby from the 8th century BCE.  They believed that the Building 5 shrine was vandalized and the figurine was intentionally broken and scattered before the whole building was finally destroyed around 1450 BCE.

Ivory boys from Palaikastro, Evans Palace of Minos vol. 3 (1930)

 

The ivory boys from Palaikastro, around 1600-1500 BCE
Image: A. Evans, Palace of Minos volume 3 (1930) figure 310

 

It was during the first excavation seasons at Roussolakkos, directed by R.C. Bosanquet and R.M. Dawkins, that another pair of small ivory figurines was found in a Minoan house to the south of the excavation area (block Sigma) in 1904. Coincidentally, C.T. Currelly, who would later be the ROM’s first director, took part in that excavation season. These were two ivory figurines of young boys with shaved heads, one seated and one standing. The seated boy, about 5cm tall, was carved from a single piece of ivory, while the standing boy, who is 10.5cm tall, seems, from photographs, to have separately carved arms attached at the shoulder.  When these pieces were excavated, they were believed to be imported Egyptian objects, but they are now accepted as being made by Minoan craftsmen.

Most of the evidence for Minoan ivory figurines comes from these two Cretan sites, but there are examples of fragments which are not so expertly carved, and that suggest that there were several ancient Cretan workshops producing different styles.  Finds made in 1980-1982 of small-scale heads and limbs from the Minoan palatial buildings at Turkogeitonia, at Archanes, near Knossos, are more crudely carved.  There are also some examples of Mycenean ivory figurines from mainland Greece from approximately the same date that look rather different stylistically.  Perhaps the best example is the trio of figures, carved from a single piece of ivory, found at Mycenae and now in the Athens National Archaeological Museum.

One of the most important issues these two posts have raised is how crucial it is to understand, preserve and record the archaeological context and findspot of any antiquities through careful excavation. When we lose the information about where an ancient object was found, either because it was not carefully excavated, or because proper records were not kept, valuable information is lost forever. We don’t know where the object was found, and what else was found with it, and, as my entire investigation into the ROM Goddess shows, we even have difficulty proving that the ‘antiquity’ is genuinely old. There are many current discussions about the damage caused by the looting of archaeological sites and the trade in antiquities.  Two good websites that explain some of the issues are Looting Matters (a blog by Professor David Gill) and Trafficking Culture (the website of a research project at the University of Glasgow).

This, and my previous post–The Suspect Sisters (and brothers) – has introduced the objects that most closely parallel the ROM's 'Minoan' goddess. It is through comparisons with these figurines that the ROM goddess has been judged to be a modern fake in recent years, but is this fair? 

Further Reading

C.L. Cooper (Kate Cooper), 'Biography of the Bull-Leaper: A 'Minoan' Ivory Figurine and Collecting Antiquity', in Cooper C.L. (ed) New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World (Leiden: Brill, MGR 27, 2021)

S. Hemmingway, ‘Art of the Aegean Bronze Age’ The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin v. 69 no. 4 (Spring 2012)

K. Lapatin, Mysteries of the Snake Goddess. Art, desire, and the forging of history. (Boston & New York, 2002)

N. Dimopoulou-Rethemiotaki The Archaeological Museum of Heraklion (Latsis Foundation, 2005)

J.A. MacGillivray, J.M. Driessen & L.H. Sackett (eds.) The Palaikastro Kouros, A Minoan Chryselephantine Statuette And its Aegean Bronze Age Context (British School at Athens Studies 6, 2000).

A. Evans, Palace of Minos: A Comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustrated by the discoveries at Knossos (Macmillan London, 1921-1935)
Faience ‘Snake goddesses’ from the Temple Repositories: Volume 1 (1921) pp. 495 ff
Ivory ‘acrobats’ from the Ivory Deposit: Volume 3 (1930) p.428 ff
Ivory boys from Palaikastro: Volume 3 (1930) p. 446 & Plate XXXVII

The Evans Connection Part 2: The Minoans Created

Posted by ROM on December 31, 2013

Here I continue the story of an icon of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection: the ivory and gold female figurine–ROM 931.21.1. For further information see the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess Research Project.

I follow up on Part1: The Minoans Discovered to show how the British archeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, made his own particular interpretation of the ancient Minoan civilization so popular, and what consequences this popularity was to have.

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Evans ‘Creates’ the Minoans

As I discussed, Evans’ intellectual background, and the academic and political climate in which he lived, shaped his desire to discover a particular type of Aegean prehistory. The archaeological remains that he uncovered matched his own ideas about the Minoans so well, partly because they were interpreted and reconstructed in the light of his preconceptions.

The impact of Evans’ vision can be seen at its most concrete (literally) at the site of Knossos, where the temporary structures which sheltered the crumbling remains were transformed into a large-scale reconstruction of elements of the ‘palace’ made in reinforced concrete. Evans called these his “reconstitutions” and stressed that they were all based on archaeological evidence–the upper storeys were extrapolated from surviving archaeological traces, while the decoration and style was based on that seen in the Minoan frescoes. This approach to restoration was controversial, both when it was first completed and today, because it went beyond the archaeological evidence and was so visually intrusive. Visitors to Knossos often remark on the surprisingly modern, Art Nouveau, style of Minoan architecture which is, at least to some extent, a product of Evans and his team working within their contemporary style.

The Palace of Knossos. The portico of the North Entrance Corridor restored in 1930 with Bull fresco. (photo B. Akrigg, 2011)

The reconstructed ruins of the Minoan ‘palace’ of Knossos showing the portico of the North Entrance Corridor restored in 1930 with a Bull fresco. | photo: B. Akrigg, 2011

Reconstitution created a vision of the Bronze Age past which remains one of the best known images of the ancient Minoans. Although it has been much criticized, it also captured the public imagination, and visitors to the excavations included academics, artists, and soldiers of many nationalities. The famous dancer Isadore Duncan was inspired to perform as soon as she saw the remains at Knossos in 1910 (to the disapproval of Duncan Mackenzie). 

As well as the reconstitution of the architecture, Evans wanted the objects he found to be restored to best effect. He employed a father and son team of Swiss artists and archaeological illustrators, Émile (père) and Émile (fils) Gilliéron. They were to work at Knossos for 30 years, recreating the art of the Minoans, often from little physical evidence. The frescoes of Knossos, probably the best known images of the Minoan art today, were very much the creation of the Gilliérons, pieced together from scattered scraps of ancient fresco, sometimes from different areas of the palace, to create a heavily restored whole. Several of these restorations are now considered inaccurate, as was discussed in the 2011-2012 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Historic images of the Greek Bronze Age, The reproductions of E. Gilliéron and Son.

Not only did Evans work to bring the physical remains of Knossos to life, he was also tireless in presenting his discoveries to a wide audience, both specialist and the general public, through lectures, exhibitions, and articles. In 1903 he first put on an exhibition of his Minoan finds, illustrations, and casts at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. A second exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1936 called British Archaeological Discoveries in Greece and Crete 1886-1936, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the British School at Athens, featured a room of Minoan material including an illustration of the ROM Goddess (described on page 17 of the exhibition catalogue). While these lectures and exhibitions made his discoveries accessible to everyone, his huge multi-volumed academic publication The Palace of Minos would ensure his pre-eminence in the academic world.   

It is hard to find specific examples of how much Evans’ discoveries seduced and fascinated the popular imagination. Some believe that the art of the period, particularly the early work of the Surrealists, was influenced by the Minoan past. But this was more a debt to the ideas of the mythological past and ancient societies, than to the physical remains. However, it is true that a generic Greek Bronze Age began to feature in art and in fashion, inspired by the popularity of the discoveries of both Schliemann and Evans. In 1906, the Spanish designer Mario Fortuny created the ‘Knossos’ scarf, a signature piece based on ancient vase decoration motifs and presumably motivated in part by the discoveries on Crete (this Google Arts & Culture virtual exhibition by Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, examines the Fortuny creation). In the academic world, a young Michael Ventris was so enthused by hearing Evans lecture on the Minoans that it decided his future career. Ventris would eventually decipher the Bronze Age Linear B script that had first attracted Evans to the site of Knossos.

From Replicas to Fakes

The Gilliérons, father and son, were doing more than simply restoring the Knossos frescoes and small finds. They, and other archaeological restorers, also produced replicas of the material for those eager to own their own piece of the Minoan past. This practice was approved by Evans, since it offered a way of sharing the antiquities which could not leave Crete, and it was not intended to deceive. The Gilliérons’ reproductions of both the Minoan material discovered by Evans and the Mycenaean objects discovered by Schliemann were bought by many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York, to enhance their collection. Evans himself displayed replicas in the 1936 Royal Academy of Art exhibition, including a reproduction of a faience snake goddess created by Halvor Bagge, a Danish artist who had restored the original artifact.

As well as official replicas, by the 1920s there was also a thriving industry in manufacturing fake Minoan artefacts. Cretan ‘factories’ which produced forgeries were apparently known to the police, to museum authorities, such as the director of the Heraklion museum, and even to other European academics. The craftsmen making these forgeries were the same workmen whom Evans employed as excavators and restorers at Knossos. These men were ideally placed to create fakes based on the genuine Minoan artefacts they were finding in the excavations. Indeed, some have suggested that the Gilliérons themselves were organizing and directing the production of the forgeries. In memoirs and anecdotes, several archaeologists visiting or working in Crete record eyewitness accounts of these forgers at work, but the stories can be frustratingly vague and in their details.   

In Crete in the early years of this century I was stopping with Arthur Evans…and one day he got a message from the police at Candia [modern Heraklion] asking him to come to the police station, so we went together – he, Duncan Mackenzie…and myself…

Evans had for many years employed two Greeks to restore the antiquities which he had found.  They were extraordinarily clever men – and old man and a young one – and he had trained them, and they had worked under the artist whom he employed there, and they had done wonderful restorations for him. Then the old man got ill and at last the doctor told him he was going to die…

“Right,” he said “Send for the police”...He insisted, and they sent for the police…

“Now I can tell you,” said the sick man “I’m going to die, so I’m all right, but for years I’ve been in partnership with George Antoniou, the young fellow who works with me for Evans, and we have been forging antiquities…we’ve sold a statuette of gold and ivory which was supposed to be a Cretan one to the Candia Government Museum, and that’s a criminal offense. George is a scoundrel and I hate the fellow, and I’ve been waiting for this moment to give him away. Go straight to his house and you’ll find all the forgeries and all our manufacturing plant there.”

The police went, they raided, and they found exactly what he said, and they asked Evans to come and look, and I never saw so magnificent a collection of forgeries as those fellows had put together.

There were things in every stage of manufacture. For instance, people had been recently astounded at getting what they call chryselephantine statuettes from Crete; statuettes of ivory decked out with gold – there is one in the Boston Museum and one at Cambridge, and one in the Cretan Museum at Candia.  These men were determined to do that sort of thing, and they had got everything, from plain ivory tusk and then the figure rudely carved out, then beautifully finished, then picked out with gold. And then the whole thing was put into acid, which ate away the soft parts of the ivory giving it the effect of having been buried for centuries. And I didn’t see anyone could tell the difference!

Sir Leonard Woolley in As I seem to Remember (London, 1962) p. 21-23

While this account shows that fake Minoan ivory figurines were being produced, it is inaccurate in several details. The ‘Minoan’ statuette in Cambridge is made from stone, not ivory, while the only ivory figurines in Candia museum (modern Heraklion museum) were all properly excavated, and so should be genuine. Only Boston Museum possesses an ivory figurine that is a suspected fake, and there were already other stories circulating about this piece. In a letter in the ROM archives, Lacey Caskey, curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, recounts an anecdote told to him by Doro Levi, excavator of the Minoan ‘palace’ at Phaistos on Crete. 

He accompanied Marinatos to the bedside (deathbed?) of ‘Manolaki’. Marinatos had photographs of sundry doubtful Minoan statuettes, some or all of which Manolaki “recognised” as his work. He included our statuette [the MFA Boston Snake Goddess] and said that he had made it from a design furnished by Gilliéron the elder out of ancient pieces of ivory obtained from Evans’s excavations at Knossos. Manolaki also said that he used his own daughter’s face as a model for the face of the snake goddess…

letter from Lacey Caskey (Curator of Boston, MFA) to Homer Thompson (ROM curator), 22nd May, 1940 

The story of the Boston Snake Goddess is told in detail by Kenneth Lapatin in his 2002 book Mysteries of the Snake Goddess. Lapatin also lists more than ten other goddess figurines that he believes to be fakes, including the ROM ‘Minoan’ figurine. One of the reasons these figurines are suspect is that there is no evidence that they were excavated in controlled archaeological excavations, such as those at Knossos. Yet Evans still believed many of them to be genuine. Ironically, it is probably precisely because of Evans’ vision of the Minoans that some of the fakes were designed and created, and it is possible that sometimes the people making the fakes had a very good idea of whom they were targeting–Evans himself.

Only during the years of war 1915-1918 did ivory statuettes richly embellished with gold “from Crete” first come to light. These skillfully produced works always had to fit excellently with the results of Evans’ research regarding Minoan religion. And he had no doubts as to their genuineness, because – as he wrote to me once – nobody yet had knowledge of the still unpublished results. That men to whom he must, after all, have indicated some of those results would repay his benevolence over many years in such a malevolent way was to a man of his character wholly incomprehensible…

Georg Karo (director of the German Archaeological Institute, Athens) 'Greifen am Thron' (Baden-Baden 1959) p. 41-42. (translated from the German by K. Lapatin)

The ‘Taureador’ Fresco, from Knossos in a watercolour reproduction by Piet de Jong, based on reconstruction by Emile Gilliéron (père) (ROM image)

The Bull-Leaping (‘Taureador’) Fresco. A Minoan wall-painting from the ‘palace’ of Knossos, reconstructed by Émile Gilliéron (père). This is a watercolour reproduction by Piet de Jong (ROM 938.66.1)   
Photo: © ROM

This brings us back to the ROM ‘Minoan’ Goddess. Lapatin has made an ingenious suggestion as to why the ROM goddess looks the way she does. In Evans’ vision of Minoan society, unlike in his own society, gender roles were inverted and women played important roles. Evans was particularly taken with the idea that women as well as men took part in the ritual sport of bull-leaping, and he identified women in several of the depictions. The best example is the Bull-Leaping fresco (the ‘Taureador’ fresco) from Knossos, in which he believed the white-skinned acrobatic figures to be female (although flat-chested), in keeping with the ancient Egyptian artistic convention of depicting women with white skin. This interpretation has been questioned, since several male figures with white skin have been identified in Cretan frescoes. However, according to Lapatin’s theory, forgers decided to make an object that would appeal to Evans and confirm his beliefs about female bull-leapers. First, they made a figurine which was flat-chested and had upraised arms that matched the posture of the Knossos Bull-Leaping fresco depictions. But Evans identified this figurine (now in the Seattle Art Museum no. 57.56) as a Boy-God and suggested it was once paired with the Boston Snake goddess. On a second attempt, the forgers made sure there was no room for misidentification – this time the figurine wore the costume of a bull-leaper and was unmistakeably female–the ROM goddess!

There are difficulties with this hypothesis, particularly with identification of the Seattle ‘boy-god’ as an acrobat, given the unusual but prominent headdress. I discuss all the ivory figurines, genuine and suspect, in more detail in the Suspect Sister (and brothers) and The Minoan Relations. However, it is still fair to say that Evans probably knew those responsible for creating Minoan fakes, and the publicity he generated around his discoveries did much to create a demand for replicas, and indeed for fakes. 

Minoan Lines Ferries use the Priest-King, a fresco from Knossos, as their logo, seen here on the chimney. (c) FreeFoto.com

Minoan Lines Ferries use the Priest-King, a fresco from Knossos, as their logo, seen here on the chimney
Photo: supplied by FreeFoto.com) 

Legacy of the Minoans

Evans was not alone in using the Minoan remains to uphold a particular perspective on the past. Ever since their discovery, the ‘story’ of the Minoans has been continually re-imagined and re-invented, whether through Evans’ interpretation, through ancient myths, or the artefacts themselves. Versions of the Minoans have entered the fields of psychoanalysis, art, feminism, modernist literature, and neo-paganism. Archaeological excavations throughout Crete continue to expand and refine our knowledge of the Aegean Bronze Age. Today, the archaeological site of Knossos is a major Greek tourist attraction, with visitor numbers rivaling the Athenian Acropolis. Cretan companies ranging from builders to cruise ships use the name and the symbols of the Minoans. In the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics (captured on many YouTube videos and blogs) a living tableau of Minoan artefacts was at the head of the procession of ancient Greek artistic achievements–a controversial claim to continuity which might have troubled Evans (and many modern academics).    

Further Reading

C.L. Cooper (Kate Cooper), 'Biography of the Bull-Leaper: A 'Minoan' Ivory Figurine and Collecting Antiquity', in Cooper C.L. (ed) New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World (Leiden: Brill, MGR 27, 2021). doi:10.1163/9789004440753_005

A.L.D’Agata, ‘The many lives of a ruin: History and Metahistory of the Palace of Minos’ in Olga Kryszkowska (ed.) Cretan Offerings: studies in honour of Peter Warren (London, British School at Athens Studies 18, 2010), p. 57-69

Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago: 2009)

Nicoletta Momigliano & Yannis Hamilakis (eds), Archaeology and European Modernity: producing and consuming “the Minoans” (Creta Antica 7, Padua: 2006)

John Papadopoulos, ‘Inventing the Minoans: Archaeology, Modernity and the Quest for European Identity’ in Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 18 (2005) p. 87-149. doi:10.1558/jmea.2005.18.1.87

Kenneth Lapatin, Mysteries of the Snake Goddess. Art, Desire and the Forging of History (Boston, New York: 2002)

The Evans Connection Part 1: The Minoans Discovered

Posted by ROM on December 30, 2013

Here I continue the story of an icon of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection: the ivory and gold female figurine–ROM 931.21.1. For further information see the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess Research Project.

I discuss why the Museum, or indeed anyone, believed that the figurine was genuine. In essence, this was based on the opinion of one man, Sir Arthur Evans (as I explain in an earlier article [6591]), but to understand why, I must consider the bigger picture of the discovery and, to some extent, the ‘creation’ of the ancient Minoans at the beginning of the 20th century.

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It would be a bold man, or a very silly one, who would challenge Sir Arthur’s opinion.

letter from C. T. Currelly (ROM Director) to L.J. Simpson, Ontario Minister of Education, 6th November, 1935

As Currelly’s words suggest, Sir Arthur Evans was the single most influential person to have shaped modern understanding of the Minoan civilisation. A wealthy English archaeologist, it was Evans who excavated the ‘palace’ at Knossos on Crete, and who coined the term ‘Minoan’ to describe the Bronze Age people who had lived there and elsewhere on Crete. Evans was considered the expert, with experience of the material and a good eye for detail. 

I suppose over 90 per cent of all objects found in Crete have been in his hands for examination, and the then director of the National Museum of France said to me years ago, “When Evans says a thing, I accept it without question.”

letter from C.T. Currelly to L.J. Simpson 6th November, 1935

Archaeology is not an exact science. Material remains might be objective evidence about an ancient civilisation, but this evidence must be interpreted, and this cannot be a neutral and objective activity. All interpretation of archaeological evidence is coloured by preconceptions and contemporary experience. In recent years more self-reflexive examinations of Sir Arthur Evans have shown that he was very much a product of his time, influenced by his family background and his own personal, academic, and political experiences. I will explore some of these here.      

Background & Influences

The Evans family had been interested in archaeology for generations. Arthur Evans’ grandfather ran a school for boys and was a keen collector of books, coins, and fossils found at local sites with his sons. John Evans, father of Arthur Evans, had no university degree, but was so ambitious and intelligent that soon after Arthur was born in 1851 he owned a successful paper mill business, as well as being a well-respected scholar specializing in numismatics and the archaeology of early Britain. John’s approach to the new ‘science’ of archaeology owed much to his interest in geology. Geologists were acknowledging for the first time just how ancient the earth truly was, and recognizing the significance of geological stratigraphy in determining the different phases of development. This new approach had implications for both the history of the earth, and of early man, proving that there was a prehistoric period of evolution, in contrast to the commonly-accepted biblical explanation of the creation of the earth. It was to tie into the world of natural sciences when Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution The Origin of the Species in 1859.

Portrait of Sir Arthur Evans set up at Knossos (photo K. Cooper, 2011)

Portrait of Sir Arthur Evans set up at Knossos, Crete | Photo: Kate Cooper, 2011

Arthur Evans himself enjoyed a privileged childhood in this wealthy and intellectual family, although it was marred by his mother’s death when he was just six. Evans was well-educated, first at Harrow then at Oxford where he studied Modern History, but he was always seen as being intellectually rebellious and arrogant–this independence of thought, as well as the income from the family business, would later allow him to devote so much energy, time, and money to his archaeological work. Since his undergraduate years Evans had travelled in the Balkans, an area deeply divided by war as nationalists rebelled against the weakening Ottoman rule. The horrors of these struggles made a great impression on him, and he sought to publicise the Balkan political situation, supporting independence. He settled for a while in Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) and became a foreign correspondent on the Balkans for the Manchester Guardian, before being forced to leave after being arrested as a suspected spy. Back in England, in 1884 he was made Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where he slowly revolutionized the long-neglected museum and eagerly promoted the importance of the prehistoric Mediterranean in the face of the traditional interests of the academic establishment. At this time, British academics focused on the literary texts and artistic remains of Classical Greece and particularly those of democratic Athens of the 5th century BCE. The marble sculptures of the Parthenon, brought to England by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century, were admired as the best of Greek artistic achievement. This narrow focus on Classical Greece did not interest Evans, who wanted instead to discover earlier phases of the people of the Aegean.

During much of the 19th century Greece had not been an area of archaeological exploration, since it was under Ottoman rule and relatively inaccessible to foreign travelers. Instead, archaeological work had concentrated on the Middle East. In Egypt, following the explorations by Napolean Bonaparte’s teams of scholars in the late 18th century, the royal pyramids of the Valley of the Kings at Luxor were ‘excavated’ (more treasure hunt than excavation) from the early 19th century, and in 1884 W.M. Flinders Petrie began controlled excavations at Tanis. Similar discoveries were taking place in the ancient Near East, where the Mesopotamian centres of Nimrud and Ninevah were first excavated in the middle of the 19th century.

It was only with the discoveries of an ‘amateur archaeologist’ of almost legendary status that the prehistoric Aegean began to take centre-stage. Heinrich Schliemann was a German businessman who used his self-made fortune to search for the archaeological truth behind the tales of Homer. Guided by Homer’s Iliad (and building on discoveries made by others), in 1871 Schliemann began uncovering ancient Troy, site of the Trojan war, near modern Çannakule in Turkey. In 1876 he turned his attention to mainland Greece and discovered the citadel of Mycenae, legendary home of Agamemnon who, according to myth, led the Greeks against the Trojans. Schliemann lavishly published his discoveries and gave many lectures.  He was particularly popular in England, where the Trojan treasures were exhibited in 1877 at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum). In 1883 Evans toured Greece, visiting the excavations at Mycenae and meeting Schliemann himself. In many ways Evans was to follow in the footsteps of Schliemann.

Schliemann’s fabulous and much-publicized prehistoric remains revealed his early Greeks, named the Mycenaeans after the city of Mycenae, to be a warlike, male-dominated society. It was against this background that Evans was to uncover and interpret the finds from his own early ‘Greek’ culture. Unlike the Mycenaean civilization, Evans stressed that his Minoan civilization was one of peace. According to him, the Minoans did not need fortifications for their great palace centres, despite living on a small island. This is just one example of how Evans was conveniently selective with the archaeological evidence, since he had himself discovered traces of fortifications while exploring the Cretan countryside in 1895 before beginning his excavations at Knossos. 

The picture that Evans was to paint of the Minoans as a peaceful civilization which flourished for centuries, was also extremely attractive to his war-weary contemporaries. At the beginning of the 20th century Europe had only recently recovered from the effects of the Napoleonic wars, and the Mediterranean and Balkans were still ravaged by conflict between the weakening Ottoman Empire and their subject nations struggling to gain independence. The disintegration of the Ottoman empire and the shifting balance of power eventually led to the events that sparked World War I in 1914. Evans had already experienced first-hand the terrible ethnically- and religiously-driven conflict in the Balkans, and again on Crete, and idealistically he hoped his excavation at Knossos could be a place of peace and unity. He employed both Muslim and Christian workmen on his excavation and had them celebrate joint holidays together with games and dances.

Evans’ vision of the Minoan past drew on myths as well as the archaeological remains. Although Crete’s prehistoric past remained forgotten until the 20th century (it is unlikely that even the Classical Greeks knew about the reality of the Bronze Age), several ancient Greek myths survived which were set on the island – those of King Minos and Pasiphae, the Minotaur in his labyrinth, Theseus and Ariadne. To Evans, influenced by contemporary developments in the study of anthropology and mythology, these were evidence of cultural ‘memories’ which preserved remnants of actual events. He believed that Knossos was the palace of Minos, although he rationalized the myth by deciding that ‘Minos’ was the hereditary title for every Minoan ruler. By describing different artefacts in terms of personalities from myth, such as the ‘bath of Ariadne’ and the ‘throne of Minos’, he brought the archaeological remains to life. 

The ‘throne of Minos’ in the Throne-room at Knossos (photo K. Cooper, 2011)

The ‘throne of Minos’ in the Throne-room at the ‘palace’ of Knossos | Photo: Kate Cooper, 2011

Evans was particularly interested in the importance of Ariadne, mythical daughter of Minos. She appeared throughout his interpretation of the archaeological evidence either as Queen Ariadne, or as the Great Mother Goddess, who was the central figure in his view of Minoan religion. Evans imagined the Minoans as an extraordinarily matriarchal society, in contrast to the more male-dominated Mycenaeans (or Victorians and Edwardians of his own time). Some scholars have attributed Evans’ almost obsessive focus on the Great Mother to a reaction to the death of his own mother while he was young, but the idea of a matriarchal society that flourished in the very earliest period of civilisation was also in keeping with theories current in the social sciences in the early 20th century about motherhood and the development of society from an early matriarchal stage of cultural evolution to patriarchal dominance.

The Discovery of Knossos

Evans became interested in the island of Crete when Cretan seal-stones were given to the Ashmolean museum. He realized that the images engraved on some of these tiny stones depicted an early pictographic writing system, previously unrecognized, and he believed they were evidence of a prehistoric civilization. In 1894 he first visited Crete looking for more prehistoric writing and he soon settled on the site of Knossos (then a hill known as Kephala) for further exploration. Here a local archaeologist, Minos Kalokairinos, had already made several stunning discoveries which had attracted archaeological interest. Many people, including Schliemann, had tried to acquire the rights to the site without success, until Evans, who was a supporter of the Cretans against the Ottoman rule, was eventually allowed to buy the land in 1899 after Crete declared independence. Excavations, funded and overseen by Evans, began at Knossos in 1900. 

Knossos had captured Evans’ attention because of scattered clay tablets inscribed with the undeciphered script later known as Linear B (ironically, when this was finally translated after his death it disproved some of his theories). However, wanting to excavate the whole site scientifically, he took advice from colleagues at the British School of Archaeology at Athens and hired as his assistant Duncan Mackenzie, who had already worked on the excavation of prehistoric Phylakopi on the Cycladic island of Melos. What they uncovered over the following years was a huge building complex more than 2km2, which Evans named the ‘Palace of Minos’. It is now recognized that this was probably not the home of a royal family, but was instead an organizational, administrative and religious centre. The several phases of the Minoan ‘palace’ lasted from around the 20th to the mid-14th century BCE, when it suffered destruction. At its peak, the ‘palace’ was architecturally complex and lavishly designed and decorated, while the excavated artefacts demonstrated that the Minoans had a wide network of foreign contacts and were skillful craftsmen. 

Palace of Knossos. View from the Central Court of the Stepped Portico and Throne Room Complex restored to three storeys between 1922 and 1930 (photo K. Cooper, 2011)

The ‘palace’ of Knossos showing a view from the Central Court of the Stepped Portico and Throne Room Complex which was restored to three storeys between 1922 and 1930  | Photo: Kate Cooper, 2011

The scale of the archaeological remains uncovered was amazing, as can be seen in a plan of the site published in 1902 by Theodore Fyfe, the first project architect. It was clear that they needed protection, and after unsuccessful temporary measures, Evans focused his resources on a more permanent solution. Between 1905 and 1930 areas of the palace were partially rebuilt in reinforced concrete, under the supervision of the project architects Christian Doll, then Piet de Jong. This was one of the first large-scale uses of reinforced concrete, which had only been invented in the 1860s, and it allowed some palace building to be restored to several storeys. The huge visual impact of the reconstruction was extremely influential but was also highly controversial and much criticized, as I discuss in my next installment Part 2 The Minoans Created.

Evans promoted his discoveries through lectures and short publications, but did not fully publish his work until the 1920s and 1930s. The four volumes of The Palace of Minos A comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustrated by the discoveries at Knossos combined description of the excavations and finds from Crete with his own vision of the Minoan civilization, and told a detailed and beguiling story. This huge publication became a cornerstone of the academic study of the Minoans, although details of Evans’ theory were modified. However, it too has been criticized. Recent re-examinations of the original excavation notebooks kept by Duncan Mackenzie have shown that Evans was often guided by his pre-conceptions, rather than by the archaeological evidence.  It is often hard to see where the evidence ends and Evans’ over-confident interpretation begins.

Frontispiece of volume 4.1 of ‘The Palace of Minos’ by Sir Arthur Evans (1935)

Frontispiece of volume 4.1 of The Palace of Minos by Sir Arthur Evans (1935)

It was the publication of the ROM ‘Minoan’ goddess in volume 4 of The Palace of Minos that convinced even those with doubts that she was indeed genuine:

…as a matter of fact I said just the opposite from what the newspapers quoted me as saying.  I said that I suspected the ivory and gold Cretan statue in Toronto but that Sir Arthur Evans in his large new volume says it is genuine.

letter from D.M. Robinson (Professor of Archaeology, Johns Hopkins University) to H.A. Thompson (ROM Keeper of the Classical Collections) 11th November, 1935

For more on this exchange see my earlier article.

In tomorrow's article–Part 2: The Minoans Created – I will consider the way that Evans promoted his vision of the Minoans, which resulted in a thriving industry in replicas and fakes.

Further Reading

C.L. Cooper (Kate Cooper), 'Biography of the Bull-Leaper: A 'Minoan' Ivory Figurine and Collecting Antiquity', in Cooper C.L. (ed) New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World (Leiden: Brill, MGR 27, 2021). doi:10.1163/9789004440753_005

Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago, 2009)

J. Alexander MacGillivray, Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the archaeology of the Minoan myth (London, 2000)

J. Lesley Fitton, The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age (London, 1995)

A. J. Evans, Palace of Minos: A Comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustrated by the discoveries at Knossos (London, 1921-1935)

The 'Goddess' and the Museum: The Early Years

Posted by ROM on August 6, 2013
The front pages of The Palace of Minos volume 4, published by Sir Arthur Evans in 1935

The front pages of The Palace of Minos volume 4.1, published by Sir Arthur Evans in 1935

This is the first of a series of articles that I will be writing as part of the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess Research Project about an icon of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection: the ivory and gold female figurine–ROM 931.21.1.

In these first three instalments I have been combing the museum records and archives to unravel the complicated history of the figurine in the Museum over the last 80 years, from the moment it was acquired to the present. This also reveals the rollercoaster ride its reputation suffered, from star attraction to an object of dubious authenticity consigned to the storeroom. Part of the fun of this type of research has been reading old letters and reports to piece together the story from different sources, but there are obviously many records scattered throughout the ROM and I haven’t yet found them all yet.  If you know of any I’ve missed, do let me know by leaving a comment!

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The Early Years

The figurine was bought by the Museum in 1931 from Charles T. Seltman, a specialist in ancient art, Lecturer at Cambridge University, and a dealer in antiquities, who had already provided ROM with several objects. It was then believed to be an unusually well-preserved and finely-carved ivory figure of the Middle Minoan III period, made on the island of Crete around 1500-1600 BCE, and authenticated, and indeed admired, by Sir Arthur Evans, the best authority on Minoan Crete. The unusual costume, made of sheet gold, identified her as a female bull-leaper. She wore the wide belt and codpiece or ‘Libyan sheath’, like those worn by athletes in Minoan wall-paintings, together with a corset that bared her breasts, which was usually combined with a long flounced skirt in images of Minoan women.

The first tantalising mention of the object was in a letter from Seltman to J. H. Iliffe (Keeper of ROM’s Classical Collection 1927-1931):

“I have a Cretan piece…which puts even the Boston snake-goddess in the shade, and which Evans regards as the finest Cretan work-of-art extant…”

(letter from C.T. Seltman to J.H. Iliffe, 16th November, 1930

Seltman was a good salesman and after allowing the anticipation to build, he sent details and photographs of the figure in January 1931.  He stressed the remarkable state of preservation with very little restoration, as well as comparing it again to the ivory ‘Minoan’ snake goddess [6371] already in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, a long-established American museum.  He was charging the exorbitant sum of £2,750. The newly-founded ROM didn’t have that sort of money available, during the Great Depression and just when it was planning a large extension to the museum building, but it agreed to pay in instalments. Charles Trick Currelly, director of the Museum, and himself an archaeologist, supported the purchase because of the significance of the piece, and because it would establish ROM’s international reputation as a serious archaeological museum able to compete with older-established institutions. 

“I must add on behalf of Currelly, the Museum, and myself that we are very grateful to you for letting us have the first offer of such an important and magnificent piece …her acquisition by Toronto would do as much as anything could to make people realize that Canada was taking a hand in matters archaeological.”

letter from J.H. Iliffe to C.T. Seltman, 17th January, 1931

The figurine arrived at the Museum in February 1931 and by March she was on display in the Greek Room on the second floor, which was then just the west wing of today's Museum running beside Philosopher’s Walk (for a bit more detail about the history of the Museum building see this article).

“The bull-leaping dolly is now in position and has been much admired”

letter from J.H. Iliffe to C.T. Seltman, 16th March, 1931

But although she was admired in Toronto, to establish the reputation of ROM internationally the figurine had to appear to the world, and that meant she had to be published. The figurine made her international debut in July 1931 when she was published in the Illustrated London News by none other than Sir Arthur Evans. 

The ROM figurine's public debut in the Illustrated London News, July 1931

The ROM figurine's public debut in the Illustrated London News July, 1931

Evans had been planning the publication ever since he had first seen the figurine in 1930, and Currelly recognised this as the best publicity possible. Evans was the acknowledged expert on Minoan Crete. Essentially, he discovered the Minoan civilisation through his excavations of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, which began in the early 20th century (read more in these articles about Evans’ excavation of Knossos and his creative reconstruction of the Minoan civilisation). Evans lent his expert authority to the new acquisition, declaring that the figurine, which he named “Our Lady of the Sports”, was the Minoan patron goddess of bull-leapers.

“You will see that I regard the image not as that of a performer in the games – as I think had been the impression of Seltman and others – but as the goddess herself in the quality of patroness of the Arena – “Our Lady of Sports” – I hope that this idea which I think adds to the interest of the figurine may commend itself to you.”

letter from A.J. Evans to C.T. Currelly, 25th July, 1931

The following year the goddess was published by Charles R. Wason (the new ROM Keeper of the Classical Collection 1931-1933) in the Bulletin of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology (March 1932).

These early publications briefly described the figurine, but were more concerned with putting her into the context of the Minoan civilisation. They focussed on recreating the Minoan bull-leaping ritual, through studying other Minoan evidence, and drawing parallels with contemporary Spanish bull-fights. They also showed how new archaeological discoveries had uncovered proof of the Greek myths, the stories of King Minos and the Minotaur, Theseus and Ariadne.

“whereas to the Greeks, Crete was merely a dim memory…for us the triumph of the spade has made the palace of Minos a reality known not from legends but from the objects themselves...”

C.R. Wason 'Cretan Statuette in Gold and Ivory' Bulletin of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology, March 1932, p.12

But it was in 1935 that the goddess became firmly established as one of the star remains of the Minoan civilisation when Evans published her in the 4th volume of his multi-volumed work The Palace of Minos. Her colour illustration featured as the frontispiece and he devoted over 20 pages to description and discussion.

Clippings from Toronto newspapers, November 1935

Press Clippings from Toronto newspapers in November 1935: The Globe, The Mail and Empire, Toronto Star, and Toronto Evening Telegram

It wasn’t long before international recognition also brought bad publicity. In 1935, a remark made in a lecture by David M. Robinson (Professor of Archaeology at Johns Hopkins University and a Greek vase specialist) exploded into Canadian newspapers with sensational reports of fake antiquities in museum collections. ROM was accused of having fakes in the Cretan collection – specifically the goddess figurine. The claims were calmly refuted by Homer A. Thompson (ROM Keeper of the Classical Collections 1933-1947), and amusingly, but less tactfully, dismissed by Currelly. It turned out that the press had misunderstood Robinson’s remarks, which were actually referring to Etruscan fakes from the collection of a notorious dealer, none of which were in ROM collections.

"I am sorry to say that a chance remark of mine…has been grossly exaggerated and has been spread all over the United States and Canada…as a matter of fact I said just the opposite from what the newspapers quoted me as saying."

letter from D.M. Robinson to H.A. Thompson, 11th November, 1935

The ROM goddess was given a reprieve, but this episode was a sign of things to come…

In my next instalment, The Goddess and the Museum: Museum Attitudes, I’ll be looking at the more recent history of the goddess.

Further Reading

C.L. Cooper (Kate Cooper), 'Biography of the Bull-Leaper: A 'Minoan' Ivory Figurine and Collecting Antiquity', in Cooper C.L. (ed) New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World (Leiden: Brill, MGR 27, 2021). doi:10.1163/9789004440753_005

Why Modern?

What is the evidence that this is a fake made in the early 20th century?

Since the 1970s the ROM “Goddess” has often been considered a fake, made by the Cretan workman who were excavating Knossos sometime between 1902, when the first Minoan ivory figures were discovered at Knossos, and 1930, when she first appeared on the art market. There is evidence that Cretan workshops created forgeries, and other “Minoan” ivory figurines, all originally authenticated by Evans and acquired by museums between 1914 and the 1930s, are also suspect because they have no certain archaeological findspot and are suspiciously well-preserved.

The evidence is inconclusive, but if the ROM figurine is a fake, she is actually around the same age as the ROM itself. She could also offer an insight into the reasons for creating such a forgery at that particular time.

The suspect ivory “Boy God” in Seattle Art Museum (SAM 57.56). Photo: Evans 1930, Palace of Minos, volume 3, fig. 309.

The suspect ivory “Snake Goddess” in Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA 14.863). Photo: Evans 1930, Palace of Minos, volume 3, fig. 305.

Swipe down for more

Explore the Stories

The ROM ‘Minoan’ Goddess: the Suspect Sisters (and brothers)

Posted by ROM on April 7, 2014
Detail of the head of the ROM 'Minoan' Goddess

Here I continue the story of an icon of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection: the ivory and gold female figurine–ROM 931.21.1. For further information see the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess Research Project.

The ROM Goddess is just one of the ‘Minoan’ figurines in several museums sometimes thought to be fake. This article introduces you to some of the suspected (although not definitively proven) fake figurines, and it is followed by an article about the genuine Minoan objects that may have inspired them.

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I start with the suspected Minoan forgeries, which have often been compared to the ROM Goddess. These are discussed in detail by Kenneth Lapatin in Mysteries of the Snake Goddess (2002). It is very hard to certainly prove that any of these are in fact forgeries made in the early 20th century, but they share characteristics which, taken together, suggest that the figurines were not genuine Minoan objects. They all have a vague acquisition story and no known archaeological findspot, although several of them are linked to particular areas of Crete as their stories were retold over the decades after they were acquired. This sort of imprecise archaeological provenience is not in itself particularly surprising, since, if genuine, these pieces were smuggled out of Crete without permission from the authorities. However, many of the figurines have a suspiciously similar collection pattern, travelling through the hands of the same people.  They are also similar in aspects of their stylistic and technical details – resembling the archaeologically excavated Minoan artefacts, but different in certain key respects. As I discuss in an earlier article, there is evidence that fake Minoan artefacts were being made and then artificially aged in Crete by the people who worked with Arthur Evans excavating the genuine Minoan remains at Knossos.  

The Boston Snake Goddess

Chryselephantine statutette of a Snake Goddess, (c) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Statuette of a snake goddess in gold and ivory, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
no. 14.863, Gift of Mrs W. Scott Fitz
Photograph with permission, © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 

The first of the figurines to appear outside Crete was this chryselephantine (ivory & gold) goddess which was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1914. There are several versions of the story about how this object travelled from Crete to the US, explained by Lapatin, whose 2002 book concentrated on this figurine.

It arrived at the museum as many fragments of ivory and gold in a small tin, which were then restored using wax and plaster to replace the missing right arm and pieces of skirt. The figure had originally been carved from several pieces of ivory joined together – the two arms were separate, as was the lower skirt. The gold decoration on the dress was attached with gold pins, and pins were also used on the breasts as nipples. The crown of the goddess is all that remains of a larger headdress, and the row of holes around the forehead may once have held the pins securing a gold diadem or metal locks of hair.

The restored figurine represents a Snake Goddess who holds two gold snakes, very similar to two faience figurines excavated by Evans at Knossos in 1903 (see my next article). Evans declared it to be a genuine Minoan goddess and published it in Palace of Minos. However, it was questioned by other scholars, and Lapatin’s work has convincingly shown that it was probably a carving of the early 20th century. Lapatin gives many reasons, but the most convincing (to me) are the details of technique. He shows that the surviving ivory arm was joined to the body using dovetail-slot joins, a technique which didn’t appear in Cretan ivories (although it was used for Egyptian objects). He also points out that the carving of the face (which had always intrigued because of its ‘modern’ features) must have happened after the ivory had been aged, since it is complete and centred on the surviving ivory, despite some of the ivory on one side of the face being lost. 

What Lapatin was not able to do was prove the case scientifically. Radiocarbon dating (C14 testing) of some fragments of ivory that weren’t used in the reconstruction (but which were thought to be part of the figurine) showed that the ivory dated to either AD 1420-1535 or AD 1545-1635. This test can only determine the age of the ivory (when the elephant died) not the date of the carving, but it is still an unexpected result – about 3,000 years too late to be genuine, but more than 300 years too early to be a fake created from fresh ivory following Evans’ Minoan discoveries in the early 1900s. There are several alternatives that could explain this result. Either the fragments did not belong to the figurine after all, or they were contaminated by restoration and conservation treatments. Alternatively, the figurine was made reusing ivory that dated to the Renaissance period, an early 20th-century fake carved from older ivory.

The Boston goddess is no longer on display, and the online collection information reflects the doubts about the date saying that it is either Minoan (1600-1500 BCE), or modern of the early 20th century. It is this figurine that has been most often studied, and many of the other suspect figurines, including the ROM goddess, are condemned as fake because of their association with this figure.

The Baltimore Snake Goddess

Chryselephantine figurine of a Snake Goddess, (c) Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Statuette of a snake goddess in gold and ivory, now in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
no. 71.1090
Photograph with permission ©The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

 

Very similar in appearance, although less well preserved, is a second chryselephantine Snake Goddess in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. It was bought by Henry Walters in the 1920s from the Parisian art dealers, Feuardent Frères, but did not enter the museum collection until after his death in 1931, when it was discovered in a desk drawer together with an undated certificate from the dealer declaring it to be genuine and to have come from Knossos.

The figurine was discovered in pieces in a box bound together by the gold foil and wire of the clothing, and was restored using metal rods and gelatin adhesives. Once again, this is a Snake Goddess made of several pieces of ivory, with the remains of a gold snake around one arm. The two arms and lower skirt are again separate components (although joined to the body in a different manner from the Boston Goddess) but here the head is also separate, slotted into the body with a wedge-shaped tenon. This goddess wears a tall crown on her head and the gold clothes were again attached with pins, as shown by the holes that survive in the gold and ivory.

Although this goddess resembles the Boston goddess in subject, technique and lack of archaeological provenience, there is one key difference. It is so badly preserved that it no longer has a face. The state of the ivory may be the result of using acid to artificially age the material, as has been described in the Cretan fakers’ workshops (see The Minoans Created), but it would make the end result less likely to sell – the appeal of the other figurines is their suspiciously well-preserved facial features. 

The Baltimore goddess is on display in the Walters Art Museum, where the label mentions the doubts about the date of the object.    

The Seattle ‘Boy God’

Seattle Boy God, (c) Seattle Art Museum

Statuette of an ivory Boy-God, now in the Seattle Art Museum 
no. 57.56, Margaret E. Fuller Purchase Fund
Photograph with permission © Seattle Art Museum

 

At some point in the 1920s the Parisian art dealers, Feuardent Frères, also sold another rather different ‘Minoan’ ivory figurine. In 1924 Arthur Evans presented this figure in a Royal Society lecture as a Minoan ‘Boy God’ and it remained a treasured part of his own collection until his death in 1941 (although he offered to sell it to the ROM in 1936). In 1957 it was bought from Jacob Hirsch, the executor of Evans’ estate, by the Seattle Art Museum.   

This figurine was extremely well-preserved and needed only a little restoration of the surface of the thighs. It is hard to tell whether the naked figure was meant to be male or female, since it lacks either genitals or breasts. It stands almost on tiptoe on a wedge-shaped plinth which is unknown elsewhere in Minoan art (except the Ashmolean god discussed below). It has shoulder-length wavy hair and wears a tall crown of a very un-Minoan style. The arms are made separately, but the rest of the figurine was carved of a single piece of ivory. 

In Palace of Minos Evans identified this figurine as a young boy, who would once have worn a gold belt and loincloth (no gold survives but there is a pin hole at the back of the figure). Evans thought it was so similar to the Boston Goddess in style and size that he believed they formed a pair, perhaps made by the same craftsman, and that the boy was in fact a Boy God raising his hand in worship of his divine mother the Snake Goddess. This seems to be an example of Evans fulfilling his own preconceptions about the Minoans. There are images on Minoan gems that may show men worshipping women, but there is no good evidence to identify these as a Boy God and Mother Goddess. We also can’t be certain that this figurine is a boy at all.  Lapatin has suggested that it was actually meant to be a young (pre-pubescent) girl created by forgers to justify another of Evans’ theories – the existence of female Minoan bull leapers – but then misidentified by Evans (as discussed in The Minoans Created). A crucial difficulty with Lapatin’s suggestion is that the tall crown worn by the figure would be impractical for a bull-leaping acrobat, whether male or female.     

The figure has also undergone radiocarbon testing, and the ivory seems to be around 500 years old. As with the Boston goddess, this is an unusual date, which may be explained by the same alternatives. It appears on the museum’s online collection website as being Minoan or early 20th century.

The Ashmolean Boy God

Chryselephantine statuette of a 'Boy God', (c) Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Ivory figurine of a youth ('Boy-God'), now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
no. AE1938.692
Photograph with permission © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

 

As if inspired by Evans’ identification of the Seattle Boy God, another figurine of a Boy God appeared at around the same time. Little is known about this figurine before Evans published it in 1935. He claimed that it had been found in southern Crete, and had been in a “collection across the Atlantic” (North America), before returning to Britain to become part of his own collection. In 1938 Evans donated the figurine to the Ashmolean Museum.

As with the Seattle ‘Boy God’, this figure stands on a wedge-shaped plinth, arms raised, but this ‘God’ wears a gold loin cloth or apron, which hides his carved male genitals. Slight damage to the surface of the legs was restored sometime before 1935. The arms, one now missing, were carved separately and join the body at the biceps (the arms of the other figurines join at the shoulders). The hair is shorter than that of the Seattle figurine, and seems to have a bald patch on top, which Evans believed was a tonsure that was once covered with a gold cap. This hairstyle, not seen elsewhere in Minoan art, suggested to Evans that this youth was older than the Seattle ‘Boy God’ and had dedicated some of his hair as a votive offering when he reached puberty, a tradition that existed later in the Greek world.  

Lapatin argues that a comparison with the Seattle ‘Boy God’, both the similarities of style and the crucial differences, proves that this Ashmolean god is a forgery made after the Seattle figurine. The Cretan forgers, now aware of a demand for Boy Gods, improved on their earlier attempt (the Seattle God) by making the figurine unequivocally male. Certainly, the style of this figurine is unlike that of the archaeologically excavated Minoan figurines, in any respect – either in dress, stance, expression or style of carving. Radiocarbon tests seem to show that the ivory is several centuries old, which is another unexpected scientific result. 

The ‘Boy God’ is exhibited in the Ashmolean Museum’s Aegean Bronze Age Gallery in a display called ‘A World of Myths’, which discusses the modern views and interpretation of the Bronze Age Aegean. In this context it is clear that the museum believes this figurine to be a modern creation based on Arthur Evans’ visions of the Bronze Age past. For more about this topic see my earlier post The Evans Connection Part 2: The Minoans Created.

Of the unprovenienced figurines, these four are the closest to the ROM goddess in terms of material and technique – they are all carved from ivory and have some detachable limbs. But there are several other snake goddess figurines made of ivory or stone that are less skillful.  Many of them have disappeared from the public eye, either lost, destroyed or in private collections, but others are still in museum collections, for example a stone goddess in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (no. GR.1.1926), and a steatite goddess in the Walters, Baltimore (no. 23.196).  

In the next installment I'll look at the certainly genuine Minoan material that resembles the ROM Goddess and was found in excavations on Crete. Many of the objects were excavated in the early decades of the 20th century and so could have inspired the creation of figurines such as the four discussed here, but there are also some more recent archaeological discoveries.  

Further Reading

C.L. Cooper (Kate Cooper), 'Biography of the Bull-Leaper: A 'Minoan' Ivory Figurine and Collecting Antiquity', in Cooper C.L. (ed) New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World (Leiden: Brill, MGR 27, 2021). doi:10.1163/9789004440753_005

K. Lapatin, Mysteries of the Snake Goddess. Art, desire, and the forging of history.  (Boston & New York, 2002)

A Google+ Hangout where I chat with Kenneth Lapatin 

K. Butcher & D. Gill (1993) ‘The Director, the Dealer, the Goddess and Her Champions: The Acquisition of the Fitzwilliam Goddess’ American Journal of Archaeology 97, p.383-401. doi: 10.2307/506362

A. J. Evans, Palace of Minos: A Comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustrated by the discoveries at Knossos (London, 1921-1935)
The Boston Goddess: Volume 3 (1930) p. 438 ff.
The Seattle ‘Boy God’ : Volume 3 (1930) p.443ff
The Ashmolean ‘Boy God’: Volume 4.2 (1935) p. 468 ff

The Evans Connection Part 2: The Minoans Created

Posted by ROM on December 31, 2013

Here I continue the story of an icon of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection: the ivory and gold female figurine–ROM 931.21.1. For further information see the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess Research Project.

I follow up on Part1: The Minoans Discovered to show how the British archeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, made his own particular interpretation of the ancient Minoan civilization so popular, and what consequences this popularity was to have.

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Evans ‘Creates’ the Minoans

As I discussed, Evans’ intellectual background, and the academic and political climate in which he lived, shaped his desire to discover a particular type of Aegean prehistory. The archaeological remains that he uncovered matched his own ideas about the Minoans so well, partly because they were interpreted and reconstructed in the light of his preconceptions.

The impact of Evans’ vision can be seen at its most concrete (literally) at the site of Knossos, where the temporary structures which sheltered the crumbling remains were transformed into a large-scale reconstruction of elements of the ‘palace’ made in reinforced concrete. Evans called these his “reconstitutions” and stressed that they were all based on archaeological evidence–the upper storeys were extrapolated from surviving archaeological traces, while the decoration and style was based on that seen in the Minoan frescoes. This approach to restoration was controversial, both when it was first completed and today, because it went beyond the archaeological evidence and was so visually intrusive. Visitors to Knossos often remark on the surprisingly modern, Art Nouveau, style of Minoan architecture which is, at least to some extent, a product of Evans and his team working within their contemporary style.

The Palace of Knossos. The portico of the North Entrance Corridor restored in 1930 with Bull fresco. (photo B. Akrigg, 2011)

The reconstructed ruins of the Minoan ‘palace’ of Knossos showing the portico of the North Entrance Corridor restored in 1930 with a Bull fresco. | photo: B. Akrigg, 2011

Reconstitution created a vision of the Bronze Age past which remains one of the best known images of the ancient Minoans. Although it has been much criticized, it also captured the public imagination, and visitors to the excavations included academics, artists, and soldiers of many nationalities. The famous dancer Isadore Duncan was inspired to perform as soon as she saw the remains at Knossos in 1910 (to the disapproval of Duncan Mackenzie). 

As well as the reconstitution of the architecture, Evans wanted the objects he found to be restored to best effect. He employed a father and son team of Swiss artists and archaeological illustrators, Émile (père) and Émile (fils) Gilliéron. They were to work at Knossos for 30 years, recreating the art of the Minoans, often from little physical evidence. The frescoes of Knossos, probably the best known images of the Minoan art today, were very much the creation of the Gilliérons, pieced together from scattered scraps of ancient fresco, sometimes from different areas of the palace, to create a heavily restored whole. Several of these restorations are now considered inaccurate, as was discussed in the 2011-2012 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Historic images of the Greek Bronze Age, The reproductions of E. Gilliéron and Son.

Not only did Evans work to bring the physical remains of Knossos to life, he was also tireless in presenting his discoveries to a wide audience, both specialist and the general public, through lectures, exhibitions, and articles. In 1903 he first put on an exhibition of his Minoan finds, illustrations, and casts at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. A second exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1936 called British Archaeological Discoveries in Greece and Crete 1886-1936, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the British School at Athens, featured a room of Minoan material including an illustration of the ROM Goddess (described on page 17 of the exhibition catalogue). While these lectures and exhibitions made his discoveries accessible to everyone, his huge multi-volumed academic publication The Palace of Minos would ensure his pre-eminence in the academic world.   

It is hard to find specific examples of how much Evans’ discoveries seduced and fascinated the popular imagination. Some believe that the art of the period, particularly the early work of the Surrealists, was influenced by the Minoan past. But this was more a debt to the ideas of the mythological past and ancient societies, than to the physical remains. However, it is true that a generic Greek Bronze Age began to feature in art and in fashion, inspired by the popularity of the discoveries of both Schliemann and Evans. In 1906, the Spanish designer Mario Fortuny created the ‘Knossos’ scarf, a signature piece based on ancient vase decoration motifs and presumably motivated in part by the discoveries on Crete (this Google Arts & Culture virtual exhibition by Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, examines the Fortuny creation). In the academic world, a young Michael Ventris was so enthused by hearing Evans lecture on the Minoans that it decided his future career. Ventris would eventually decipher the Bronze Age Linear B script that had first attracted Evans to the site of Knossos.

From Replicas to Fakes

The Gilliérons, father and son, were doing more than simply restoring the Knossos frescoes and small finds. They, and other archaeological restorers, also produced replicas of the material for those eager to own their own piece of the Minoan past. This practice was approved by Evans, since it offered a way of sharing the antiquities which could not leave Crete, and it was not intended to deceive. The Gilliérons’ reproductions of both the Minoan material discovered by Evans and the Mycenaean objects discovered by Schliemann were bought by many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York, to enhance their collection. Evans himself displayed replicas in the 1936 Royal Academy of Art exhibition, including a reproduction of a faience snake goddess created by Halvor Bagge, a Danish artist who had restored the original artifact.

As well as official replicas, by the 1920s there was also a thriving industry in manufacturing fake Minoan artefacts. Cretan ‘factories’ which produced forgeries were apparently known to the police, to museum authorities, such as the director of the Heraklion museum, and even to other European academics. The craftsmen making these forgeries were the same workmen whom Evans employed as excavators and restorers at Knossos. These men were ideally placed to create fakes based on the genuine Minoan artefacts they were finding in the excavations. Indeed, some have suggested that the Gilliérons themselves were organizing and directing the production of the forgeries. In memoirs and anecdotes, several archaeologists visiting or working in Crete record eyewitness accounts of these forgers at work, but the stories can be frustratingly vague and in their details.   

In Crete in the early years of this century I was stopping with Arthur Evans…and one day he got a message from the police at Candia [modern Heraklion] asking him to come to the police station, so we went together – he, Duncan Mackenzie…and myself…

Evans had for many years employed two Greeks to restore the antiquities which he had found.  They were extraordinarily clever men – and old man and a young one – and he had trained them, and they had worked under the artist whom he employed there, and they had done wonderful restorations for him. Then the old man got ill and at last the doctor told him he was going to die…

“Right,” he said “Send for the police”...He insisted, and they sent for the police…

“Now I can tell you,” said the sick man “I’m going to die, so I’m all right, but for years I’ve been in partnership with George Antoniou, the young fellow who works with me for Evans, and we have been forging antiquities…we’ve sold a statuette of gold and ivory which was supposed to be a Cretan one to the Candia Government Museum, and that’s a criminal offense. George is a scoundrel and I hate the fellow, and I’ve been waiting for this moment to give him away. Go straight to his house and you’ll find all the forgeries and all our manufacturing plant there.”

The police went, they raided, and they found exactly what he said, and they asked Evans to come and look, and I never saw so magnificent a collection of forgeries as those fellows had put together.

There were things in every stage of manufacture. For instance, people had been recently astounded at getting what they call chryselephantine statuettes from Crete; statuettes of ivory decked out with gold – there is one in the Boston Museum and one at Cambridge, and one in the Cretan Museum at Candia.  These men were determined to do that sort of thing, and they had got everything, from plain ivory tusk and then the figure rudely carved out, then beautifully finished, then picked out with gold. And then the whole thing was put into acid, which ate away the soft parts of the ivory giving it the effect of having been buried for centuries. And I didn’t see anyone could tell the difference!

Sir Leonard Woolley in As I seem to Remember (London, 1962) p. 21-23

While this account shows that fake Minoan ivory figurines were being produced, it is inaccurate in several details. The ‘Minoan’ statuette in Cambridge is made from stone, not ivory, while the only ivory figurines in Candia museum (modern Heraklion museum) were all properly excavated, and so should be genuine. Only Boston Museum possesses an ivory figurine that is a suspected fake, and there were already other stories circulating about this piece. In a letter in the ROM archives, Lacey Caskey, curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, recounts an anecdote told to him by Doro Levi, excavator of the Minoan ‘palace’ at Phaistos on Crete. 

He accompanied Marinatos to the bedside (deathbed?) of ‘Manolaki’. Marinatos had photographs of sundry doubtful Minoan statuettes, some or all of which Manolaki “recognised” as his work. He included our statuette [the MFA Boston Snake Goddess] and said that he had made it from a design furnished by Gilliéron the elder out of ancient pieces of ivory obtained from Evans’s excavations at Knossos. Manolaki also said that he used his own daughter’s face as a model for the face of the snake goddess…

letter from Lacey Caskey (Curator of Boston, MFA) to Homer Thompson (ROM curator), 22nd May, 1940 

The story of the Boston Snake Goddess is told in detail by Kenneth Lapatin in his 2002 book Mysteries of the Snake Goddess. Lapatin also lists more than ten other goddess figurines that he believes to be fakes, including the ROM ‘Minoan’ figurine. One of the reasons these figurines are suspect is that there is no evidence that they were excavated in controlled archaeological excavations, such as those at Knossos. Yet Evans still believed many of them to be genuine. Ironically, it is probably precisely because of Evans’ vision of the Minoans that some of the fakes were designed and created, and it is possible that sometimes the people making the fakes had a very good idea of whom they were targeting–Evans himself.

Only during the years of war 1915-1918 did ivory statuettes richly embellished with gold “from Crete” first come to light. These skillfully produced works always had to fit excellently with the results of Evans’ research regarding Minoan religion. And he had no doubts as to their genuineness, because – as he wrote to me once – nobody yet had knowledge of the still unpublished results. That men to whom he must, after all, have indicated some of those results would repay his benevolence over many years in such a malevolent way was to a man of his character wholly incomprehensible…

Georg Karo (director of the German Archaeological Institute, Athens) 'Greifen am Thron' (Baden-Baden 1959) p. 41-42. (translated from the German by K. Lapatin)

The ‘Taureador’ Fresco, from Knossos in a watercolour reproduction by Piet de Jong, based on reconstruction by Emile Gilliéron (père) (ROM image)

The Bull-Leaping (‘Taureador’) Fresco. A Minoan wall-painting from the ‘palace’ of Knossos, reconstructed by Émile Gilliéron (père). This is a watercolour reproduction by Piet de Jong (ROM 938.66.1)   
Photo: © ROM

This brings us back to the ROM ‘Minoan’ Goddess. Lapatin has made an ingenious suggestion as to why the ROM goddess looks the way she does. In Evans’ vision of Minoan society, unlike in his own society, gender roles were inverted and women played important roles. Evans was particularly taken with the idea that women as well as men took part in the ritual sport of bull-leaping, and he identified women in several of the depictions. The best example is the Bull-Leaping fresco (the ‘Taureador’ fresco) from Knossos, in which he believed the white-skinned acrobatic figures to be female (although flat-chested), in keeping with the ancient Egyptian artistic convention of depicting women with white skin. This interpretation has been questioned, since several male figures with white skin have been identified in Cretan frescoes. However, according to Lapatin’s theory, forgers decided to make an object that would appeal to Evans and confirm his beliefs about female bull-leapers. First, they made a figurine which was flat-chested and had upraised arms that matched the posture of the Knossos Bull-Leaping fresco depictions. But Evans identified this figurine (now in the Seattle Art Museum no. 57.56) as a Boy-God and suggested it was once paired with the Boston Snake goddess. On a second attempt, the forgers made sure there was no room for misidentification – this time the figurine wore the costume of a bull-leaper and was unmistakeably female–the ROM goddess!

There are difficulties with this hypothesis, particularly with identification of the Seattle ‘boy-god’ as an acrobat, given the unusual but prominent headdress. I discuss all the ivory figurines, genuine and suspect, in more detail in the Suspect Sister (and brothers) and The Minoan Relations. However, it is still fair to say that Evans probably knew those responsible for creating Minoan fakes, and the publicity he generated around his discoveries did much to create a demand for replicas, and indeed for fakes. 

Minoan Lines Ferries use the Priest-King, a fresco from Knossos, as their logo, seen here on the chimney. (c) FreeFoto.com

Minoan Lines Ferries use the Priest-King, a fresco from Knossos, as their logo, seen here on the chimney
Photo: supplied by FreeFoto.com) 

Legacy of the Minoans

Evans was not alone in using the Minoan remains to uphold a particular perspective on the past. Ever since their discovery, the ‘story’ of the Minoans has been continually re-imagined and re-invented, whether through Evans’ interpretation, through ancient myths, or the artefacts themselves. Versions of the Minoans have entered the fields of psychoanalysis, art, feminism, modernist literature, and neo-paganism. Archaeological excavations throughout Crete continue to expand and refine our knowledge of the Aegean Bronze Age. Today, the archaeological site of Knossos is a major Greek tourist attraction, with visitor numbers rivaling the Athenian Acropolis. Cretan companies ranging from builders to cruise ships use the name and the symbols of the Minoans. In the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics (captured on many YouTube videos and blogs) a living tableau of Minoan artefacts was at the head of the procession of ancient Greek artistic achievements–a controversial claim to continuity which might have troubled Evans (and many modern academics).    

Further Reading

C.L. Cooper (Kate Cooper), 'Biography of the Bull-Leaper: A 'Minoan' Ivory Figurine and Collecting Antiquity', in Cooper C.L. (ed) New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World (Leiden: Brill, MGR 27, 2021). doi:10.1163/9789004440753_005

A.L.D’Agata, ‘The many lives of a ruin: History and Metahistory of the Palace of Minos’ in Olga Kryszkowska (ed.) Cretan Offerings: studies in honour of Peter Warren (London, British School at Athens Studies 18, 2010), p. 57-69

Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago: 2009)

Nicoletta Momigliano & Yannis Hamilakis (eds), Archaeology and European Modernity: producing and consuming “the Minoans” (Creta Antica 7, Padua: 2006)

John Papadopoulos, ‘Inventing the Minoans: Archaeology, Modernity and the Quest for European Identity’ in Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 18 (2005) p. 87-149. doi:10.1558/jmea.2005.18.1.87

Kenneth Lapatin, Mysteries of the Snake Goddess. Art, Desire and the Forging of History (Boston, New York: 2002)

The 'Goddess' and the Museum: Museum Attitudes

Posted by ROM on August 7, 2013
The ROM ivory and gold figurine on display

An old ROM photograph of the ‘Minoan’ ivory figurine on display in front of the watercolour reproduction by Piet de Jong of the Minoan Bull-Leaper fresco from Knossos
Photo: © ROM

Here I continue the story of an icon of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection: the ivory and gold female figurine–ROM 931.21.1. For further information see the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess Research Project.

In 1931 the Museum had paid a huge sum for an object that would put the newly-established ROM on the map in the eyes of the international academic and museum community and the visiting public. Charles Trick Currelly (ROM Director 1914-1936) had ensured that the figure was authenticated by the foremost expert in Minoan culture, Sir Arthur Evans, and despite the doubts raised by others, he continued to believe the figure was a prized Minoan artefact, still maintaining that it was “one of our most important Classical acquisitions” (p.232) in his autobiography, I Brought the Ages Home, written in 1956.

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The Museum took its lead from Currelly. From the moment it arrived in the museum, the ‘Minoan’ goddess held pride of place in the Greek gallery, hailed as one of the most attractive and important objects in the collection, and singled out for a special mention in ROM Gallery Guides:

“The most important pieces are the marble statues of Venus the Mother, and of Venus Genetrix; the gold and ivory statuette of a Cretan female bull-leaper, and the loutrophoros vase by Polygnotos.”

Guide to the Galleries of the Royal Ontario Museum, 1931, p.5

Despite the official Museum attitude, the wider academic community obviously had doubts, not because they had studied the figurine itself, but because there was no record of the object’s archaeological findspot. As Evans wrote in his 1931 article in the Illustrated London News, “All that it has been possible to ascertain about the provenance of the figure is that it had made its way from Crete, where it had been in private possession for a considerable number of years”. The figurine was compared to unprovenanced ‘Minoan’ figures in other museum collections, several of which were already considered fake. However, C. R. Wason (ROM Keeper of the Classical Collections 1931-1933), who published the figurine in the 1932 ROM Bulletin, was convinced that the goddess was authentic and declared that she “came from Knossos”. This claim to a provenance became part of ROM lore, repeated in labels and Museum publications, but it seems to be a fabrication (or misunderstanding). It had not been mentioned when the figurine was bought, nor was it repeated by Evans, excavator of Knossos, in his 1935 publication of the figurine in The Palace of Minos.   

When the new wing of the Museum facing Queen’s Park was completed in 1933, the Greek collection moved into the new suite of galleries on the second floor, and objects from Cyprus and Bronze Age Crete were displayed in Gallery 3. The goddess took centre stage, surrounded by genuine Minoan artefacts and replicas of famous objects from the excavations on Crete. Notes made by the new curator Homer A. Thompson (ROM Keeper of the Classical Collections 1933-1947) show that he thoroughly investigated the figurine, probably because of the questions raised by Canadian newspapers in 1935 (see my previous article). He examined other Minoan artefacts for iconographic parallels and wrote to other museums that owned ‘Minoan’ goddesses, and he seems to have been satisfied that the figurine was authentic. She remained a star of the display, and gradually the Minoan civilisation was brought to life for Museum visitors with the addition of pictures on the walls of the gallery. Watercolour reproductions of some Minoan frescoes from the excavations at the palace of Knossos were bought in 1938 from Piet de Jong, an archaeological illustrator working in Greece. These included a copy of the famous Bull-Leaping Fresco, which was the best parallel for the costume worn by the ROM figurine. They were complemented by an imaginative vision of life inside the Palace at Knossos painted by Sylvia Hahn, ROM illustrator. 

"…the gold and ivory statuette of a goddess in gallery 3, is attributed to the 16th century B.C., when the Island of Crete dominated the Aegean.  It should be studied in conjunction with the reproduction of the mural of the bull-leaping hung on the north wall and with the restoration of a scene in contemporary palace life on the west wall of the same gallery.”

R.O.M. Some Points of Interest, 1942, p. 18

 ‘Palace of Minos, The Queen’s Apartments’, painted by S. Hahn in 1940 for ROM Gallery 3

Palace of Minos, The Queen’s Apartments, painted by Sylvia. Hahn in 1940 for ROM Gallery 3

Few records survive for the time when Walter J Graham took over as Keeper of ROM’s Classical collection (1947-1966), and his attitude towards the ROM figurine is unclear. Graham specialised in Greek architecture and his 1962 book, The Palaces of Crete, devotes a whole chapter to the evidence for locating the Minoan bull-leaping spectacle in the grand central courtyard of palaces, such as that at Knossos. He makes no reference to the ROM figurine dressed as a bull-leaper, suggesting that he didn’t believe she strengthened his argument, but the goddess was still a centrepiece of the ROM gallery display. An unpublished inventory of the gallery from 1949 shows that, by then, the figurine was displayed alone in a purpose-made showcase. 

By the 1960s the ROM’s attitude to the goddess was mixed. While she continued to be displayed as a Minoan artefact, requests to publish the piece in textbooks on Minoan life were refused, on the grounds that her authenticity had been questioned and she was “under study”. However, the figurine was selected for publication in Art Treasures of the Royal Ontario Museum:  

“It is fitting that this section of museum treasures should be introduced with a figure as tiny and exquisite as it is celebrated, the solemn figure of a narrow-waisted woman – whether goddess or mortal is uncertain…She was reputedly found at Knossos and is to some eyes the most beautiful of several related pieces. All of these have been doubted in the past, and the debate continues. Our goddess or priestess remains mute on the subject and meanwhile reigns in serene majesty over the gallery devoted to Minoan and archaic Greek art.”

T.A. Heinrich, Art Treasures of the Royal Ontario Museum, 1963, p. 90

In the early 1970s Neda Leipen (ROM Curator in Charge of the Greek and Roman Department 1967-1986) tried to resolve the question by again asking for expert opinions. She was herself something of an expert on ancient ivory and gold statues, after researching the Classical ivory and gold statue of Athena Parthenos by Pheidias from the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis. She was obviously reluctant to condemn the figurine as a fake, and this opinion seemed to be cautiously supported by two other experts. After examining the goddess at the ROM in 1971, Sinclair Hood (director of British excavations on Crete), who had uncovered some Minoan ivory figurines at Knossos in 1957-1961 excavations at Knossos, said:

“I could not fault the left arm of your figure, and if it appeared in an excavation it would not surprise me. Indeed the ivory in general is difficult to my mind to fault, although the way the hair is cut at the back worries me…”

letter from S. Hood to N. Leipen 31st March, 1971

After studying photographs, Efi Sakellarakis-Sapouna, a Greek archaeologist working with other genuine Minoan ivory figurines from Cretan excavations, concluded:

“The hips are really ‘Minoan’…Other details, like arms, look also very Minoan.  On the contrary the face doesn’t seem very ‘Minoan’ and that is why I am hesitating to characterize it as genuine…of course the future excavation could reveal Minoan ladies with faces like hers.”

letter from E. Sakellarakis to N. Leipen 16th February, 1972

The general scholarly consensus was that the circumstances of acquisition and the general style of the ROM goddess associated her with two other unprovenanced gold and ivory ‘Minoan’ goddess figurines – the ‘Boston goddess' acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in 1914, and the ‘Baltimore goddess' acquired by the Walters Art Museum in 1931.  It is ironic that the very association with the Boston goddess that made the Museum so eager to buy the ROM goddess in 1931 (see my previous), should serve to cast doubt on her decades later.

In 1991 John Bowman, a travel writer about Crete, began a series of articles for a newsletter called Museum Insights, about one of his favourite ancient artefacts, the Boston snake goddess. What he believed would be a story about unethical collecting practices by a major US museum in the early 20th century, turned into an exposé of the Boston goddess as a probable fake, when the story of the acquisition fell apart under examination. He then moved on to consider the other gold and ivory ‘Minoan’ figurines in North America – the Baltimore and ROM goddesses – concluding that they too were dubious, and that their gold costumes were modern additions. 

“I am now prepared to claim that the goldwork on these three statuettes is a modern addition. I remain bothered by the faces, and I would not be at all surprised if a close technical analysis of the ivory revealed that there has been some modern reworking…”

J. Bowman, ‘A North American School of Minoan Art’ Museum Insights 4.2, 1992

This was not due to any new evidence, indeed Bowman had not even seen the ROM goddess in person, but it did give a public voice to the doubts that were picked by the Toronto Globe and Mail (‘The mystery of the bull leaper’ by Kate Taylor, May 14th, 1992). In fact, at just this time there was a growing scholarly interest in all the unprovenanced ‘Minoan’ goddess figures (all those in museums outside Crete). Several academics had contacted the Museum asking about the collection history of the ROM goddess, the ivory itself and the manufacturing techniques. Although the ROM figurine was too delicate to be analyzed by destructive Carbon-14 testing, it was carefully studied while being cleaned in the museum. The conclusion reached was that the weathering of the ivory showed that it was certainly old, and it had been carved while the ivory was still ‘alive’.

K. Lapatin's article in Archaeology magazine, 2001

Kenneth Lapatin's article in Archaeology magazine, 2001

It wasn’t until 2001 that a sensational article by Kenneth Lapatin, a specialist in ancient ivory and gold statues, again raised the subject, condemning the Boston goddess, and all the other unprovenanced goddesses including the ROM figurine, as early 20th-century forgeries manufactured by the very workmen who were excavating with Arthur Evans at Knossos. 

“Fashioned by skilled Cretan workmen of the early twentieth century A.D., rather than the mid-second millennium B.C., they offer valuable testimony to how scholarly interpretations and museum displays can be distorted by the desires of the present.”

K. Lapatin, ‘Snake Goddesses, Fake Goddesses’ Archaeology. January/February 2001, p. 36

This was picked up by the Canadian newspapers and ROM decided, for the first time, to change the labelling of the figurine in response to this accusation. It was an opportunity to highlight the debate which never before been reflected in the gallery presentation. The figurine remained on display, but its old label, reading:

BULL-LEAPER

Dubbed ‘Our Lady of Sports’ by Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of Knossos, Crete. 

Gold and ivory. Minoan (MMIII), about 1600 B.C.

931.21.1

was joined by a copy of Lapatin’s article and an information panel:

In Search of the Truth

The collections of the Royal Ontario Museum are an important resource for researchers both within the museum and outside. Many differing theories result from these studies. As part of our on-going research into the authenticity of our gold-and-ivory statuette, nicknamed Our Lady of Sports, here we present the opinion of Dr. Kenneth Lapatin of Boston University. His article, “Snake Goddesses, Fake Goddesses”, recently appeared in Archaeology (January/February 2001).

Museum visitors were left to draw their own conclusions, and although several Museum staff still believed the goddess was ancient, she became infamous to many as a fake, condemned by association with the other figurines. The “on-going research” yielded no new evidence, and when the current Bronze Age Aegean gallery was created in 2005, the ROM goddess was not included. After more than six decades on display as one of the most iconic objects of ROM’s ancient Mediterranean collection, the goddess was consigned to the storeroom, only appearing occasionally as a famous fake.

In the last instalment of this investigation into the ROM archives, The Goddess and the Museum: “What’s in a name?”, I’ll be considering how the different interpretations of the goddess have helped to give her a lasting appeal.   

Further Reading

C.L. Cooper (Kate Cooper), 'Biography of the Bull-Leaper: A 'Minoan' Ivory Figurine and Collecting Antiquity', in Cooper C.L. (ed) New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World (Leiden: Brill, MGR 27, 2021). doi:10.1163/9789004440753_005

Why Here?

How and why did the figurine arrive at the ROM?

In 1931 the ROM bought this tiny figure for a vast £2,750 from Charles Seltman, a British antiquities dealer and lecturer in Greek art at Cambridge University. Nothing was known about where the figurine came from, but it was authenticated as a rare Minoan antiquity by Arthur Evans, the foremost expert in Minoan archaeology. It was a prize acquisition for the fledgling museum, since at that time only a handful of long-established museums owned such fine “Minoan” objects, and the Minoan civilisation itself was a recent archaeological discovery.

The earliest image of the ROM “Goddess“ taken before the museum acquired it. Photo: c. 1930 in ROM Archives.

The ROM “Goddess” as she looked when she arrived at the museum in 1931. Photo for Illustrated London News, 1931, in ROM Archives.

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Explore the Stories

The 'Goddess' and the Museum: "What's in a name?"

Posted by ROM on August 9, 2013
The ROM Ivory 'Minoan' Goddess, 1991

Here I continue the story of an icon of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection: the ivory and gold female figurine–ROM 931.21.1. For further information see the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess Research Project.

In my last two articles about the ‘Goddess’ in the Museum (The Early Years and Museum Attitudes) I’ve discussed the history of the ROM figurine from the 1930s to the present. Here I want to reflect on the changing meanings that she has come to embody over those years. In the decades since she appeared, the figurine has been labelled in very different ways, which has effectively created several different, sometimes conflicting, identities for her. With each new incarnation she has sparked new interest and attracted a new audience.

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A Piece of the Minoan Past

When the figurine was first bought in 1931 it was believed to be an antiquity that dated to the Middle Minoan III (early Neopalatial) period of the Aegean Bronze Age, around 1600 BCE. At the time objects from this period of antiquity were highly prized, since the Minoan civilisation had only been discovered a few decades earlier, when Arthur Evans began excavating at Knossos in 1900. This figurine was particularly special because it was a rare survival, finely carved out of ivory and unusually well-preserved. It represented a figure that had never before been seen, inspiring a deeper understanding of the Minoan culture. It was the combination of all these aspects that made the figurine a prize acquisition for the Museum.

This is the aspect which first made the figurine famous through publications such as The Palace of Minos, and this is also the aspect that has been so controversial when she was condemned as a 20th-century fake. It should be the easiest aspect to prove or disprove, since this is simply a matter of establishing an empirical date, but as you will have gathered, establishing a date is far from straightforward.

A Female Bull-Leaper

Her unusual costume identified this figurine as a bull-leaping acrobat, and this was how she was described by Charles Seltman (antiquities dealer and Lecturer at Cambridge University), both when he sold her to ROM in 1931, and in his respected book Women in Antiquity (1956), where he illustrated her with the label “Minoan Torera”. The wide belt and codpiece looked the same as those worn by bull-leaping acrobats (usually men) known from several Minoan images on cups, wall-painting and statuettes. The best known of these is the Minoan Bull-Leaping Fresco from the ‘palace’ at Knossos (now in Heraklion museum, Crete).

Front cover of 'Explorations' volume 5 (1955) showing Our Lady of the Sports

The Bull-Leaping (‘Taureador’) Fresco. A Minoan wall-painting from the ‘palace’ of Knossos, reconstructed by Émile Gilliéron (père). This is a watercolour reproduction by Piet de Jong (ROM 938.66.1)
Photo: © ROM

This connection with bull-leaping inspired several early scholars to use a combination of Minoan remains and ethnographic parallels with other cultures to consider how the Minoan bull-leaping performance actually worked, what it signified, and where it took place.

But the ROM figurine was more than a simple bull-leaper. She was clearly female and her costume combined the bull-leaping outfit usually worn by men with a corset reminiscent of the bodices worn by women in other Minoan imagery. Arthur Evans had already decided that the white-skinned figures in the Knossos Bull-Leaping fresco were not men (despite their costume), but young girls. Only the figure above the bull with reddish-brown skin was a male acrobat.  Evans believed that the Minoans, following the convention found in ancient Egyptian art (and in later Greek art), represented women with white skin and men with dark and the full-breasted ROM figurine seemed to confirm the existence of female bull-leapers. 

Evans’ identification of girls in the Bull-Leaping Fresco has been questioned – particularly since it was heavily restored by Émile Gilliéron (père). But it has also been widely accepted, and used as evidence to show the female equality in Minoan society. This has proved attractive in feminist debate, and the consideration of conceptions of gender-roles in Bronze Age Crete is an avenue of research that has been explored recently. Another related research-area is that of Minoan costume and dress, and the idea that Minoan girls were cross-dressing, wearing male codpieces, has been particularly popular.

A Minoan Goddess

It was Sir Arthur Evans who first declared the figurine to be a goddess, and named her “Our Lady of the Sports”. He believed that although she was dressed as a bull-leaper, physically she could not have been an athlete, and so must be the “patroness of the bull-leaping arena”. As goddess of the bull-leaping ritual, he believed she was a particular aspect of the Cretan Great Mother Goddess, whom he had already identified from other Cretan artefacts. Perhaps the best known of these representations of the Great Mother Goddess is the Minoan Snake Goddess, known from a faience figurine, now in Heraklion Museum, that Evans discovered in 1903 while excavating the ‘Temple Repositories’ at Knossos.

The importance of the Minoan Mother Goddess has appeared in all standard books on Bronze Age religion, and the ROM ‘goddess’ has also been used to support the theory that Minoan bull-leaping was a religious ritual in honour of the goddess. The Greek myth of the Minotaur has been interpreted as a reference to this religious performance transmitted through the ages. 

However, as well as the Great Mother Goddess, many scholars have seen the existence of a youthful male god in the religion of the Minoans. Evans believed that the Minoan Mother Goddess and youthful Boy God were a precursor of this mother-son pairing in other religious beliefs, including the Christian Virgin Mary and her son Jesus. This perceived influence on Christianity may explain why he chose the title “Our Lady of the Sports”, which has strong Catholic overtones, despite not being a Catholic himself.

As well as being an important part of Minoan religion, “Our Lady of the Sports’ has also been seen as a contemporary pagan Great Mother Goddess, and has attracted a following among New Age spiritualists. 

A Local Heroine

She has even been taken as something of a symbol of Toronto, such as when she appeared on the front cover of the 1955 issue of a University of Toronto journal called Explorations as “Mother Goddess, Our Lady of the Sports and Muse of Unofficial Poetry blessing the arena”.

Front cover of 'Explorations' volume 5 (1955) showing Our Lady of the Sports

A 20th Century Fake

Of course, she has attracted most interest as a modern fake. The enthusiasm to show that museums and experts have been ‘duped’ is one reason for this. As Currelly noted when the media first started the suggestion that the ROM goddess might be fake in 1935:

“I am sorry to say that a certain number of people have been getting themselves into the press by attacking objects in the larger museums…”

letter from C.T. Currelly to Dr L J Simpson, Ontario Minister of Education, 6th November, 1935

Exposing of the figurine itself as a fake has also been attractive because of the detective story that it reveals, and unravelling the story in the academic and public arena has made people’s careers. As well as the journal articles already discussed in my last article, the ROM figurine has appeared in a book by K. Lapatin (Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, desire and forging of history, 2002), and in a television documentary featuring archaeologist Sandy McGillivray (The Secret of the Snake Goddess, 2007). In 2012 she was included in a temporary display of ROM Greek and Roman fakes. Indeed, this whole research project has been based on the idea that, whether or not she is fake, she still has a fascinating story that deserves to be told.

If she is a 20th-century fake, she is a skilful creation that would take a lot of work, and she is valuable as evidence for tastes and fashions in collecting in the early 20th century. Today, creating fake antiquities is a lucrative business, but this figurine shows that even a century ago the demand for owning Minoan antiquities still generated enough money to make faking worthwhile. It is striking that Minoan antiquities, rather than antiquities of other periods, were particularly in demand at this time, due to the work of Sir Arthur Evans and the discoveries made on Crete in the early years of the 20th century. I will highlight the influence that the discovery of the Minoan civilisation had on fashions in early 20th-century art and design in my article The Minoans Created. 

It’s amazing to see how many different ways a tiny artefact, which may not even be genuinely ancient, has inspired generations of people with different ideas. Will this 2013 research project see her being re-incarnated?

Did you see her while she was on display?  What did she mean to you?  Does she have any other ‘personalities’ that I haven’t mentioned here? Let me know by leaving a comment.

Further Reading

C.L. Cooper (Kate Cooper), 'Biography of the Bull-Leaper: A 'Minoan' Ivory Figurine and Collecting Antiquity', in Cooper C.L. (ed) New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World (Leiden: Brill, MGR 27, 2021). doi:10.1163/9789004440753_005

A. Evans, The Palace of Minos: a comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustrated by the discoveries at Knossos. Volume IV: Part I (London: Macmillan and co, 1935). Pages 19-48.

The 'Goddess' and the Museum: Museum Attitudes

Posted by ROM on August 7, 2013
The ROM ivory and gold figurine on display

An old ROM photograph of the ‘Minoan’ ivory figurine on display in front of the watercolour reproduction by Piet de Jong of the Minoan Bull-Leaper fresco from Knossos
Photo: © ROM

Here I continue the story of an icon of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection: the ivory and gold female figurine–ROM 931.21.1. For further information see the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess Research Project.

In 1931 the Museum had paid a huge sum for an object that would put the newly-established ROM on the map in the eyes of the international academic and museum community and the visiting public. Charles Trick Currelly (ROM Director 1914-1936) had ensured that the figure was authenticated by the foremost expert in Minoan culture, Sir Arthur Evans, and despite the doubts raised by others, he continued to believe the figure was a prized Minoan artefact, still maintaining that it was “one of our most important Classical acquisitions” (p.232) in his autobiography, I Brought the Ages Home, written in 1956.

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The Museum took its lead from Currelly. From the moment it arrived in the museum, the ‘Minoan’ goddess held pride of place in the Greek gallery, hailed as one of the most attractive and important objects in the collection, and singled out for a special mention in ROM Gallery Guides:

“The most important pieces are the marble statues of Venus the Mother, and of Venus Genetrix; the gold and ivory statuette of a Cretan female bull-leaper, and the loutrophoros vase by Polygnotos.”

Guide to the Galleries of the Royal Ontario Museum, 1931, p.5

Despite the official Museum attitude, the wider academic community obviously had doubts, not because they had studied the figurine itself, but because there was no record of the object’s archaeological findspot. As Evans wrote in his 1931 article in the Illustrated London News, “All that it has been possible to ascertain about the provenance of the figure is that it had made its way from Crete, where it had been in private possession for a considerable number of years”. The figurine was compared to unprovenanced ‘Minoan’ figures in other museum collections, several of which were already considered fake. However, C. R. Wason (ROM Keeper of the Classical Collections 1931-1933), who published the figurine in the 1932 ROM Bulletin, was convinced that the goddess was authentic and declared that she “came from Knossos”. This claim to a provenance became part of ROM lore, repeated in labels and Museum publications, but it seems to be a fabrication (or misunderstanding). It had not been mentioned when the figurine was bought, nor was it repeated by Evans, excavator of Knossos, in his 1935 publication of the figurine in The Palace of Minos.   

When the new wing of the Museum facing Queen’s Park was completed in 1933, the Greek collection moved into the new suite of galleries on the second floor, and objects from Cyprus and Bronze Age Crete were displayed in Gallery 3. The goddess took centre stage, surrounded by genuine Minoan artefacts and replicas of famous objects from the excavations on Crete. Notes made by the new curator Homer A. Thompson (ROM Keeper of the Classical Collections 1933-1947) show that he thoroughly investigated the figurine, probably because of the questions raised by Canadian newspapers in 1935 (see my previous article). He examined other Minoan artefacts for iconographic parallels and wrote to other museums that owned ‘Minoan’ goddesses, and he seems to have been satisfied that the figurine was authentic. She remained a star of the display, and gradually the Minoan civilisation was brought to life for Museum visitors with the addition of pictures on the walls of the gallery. Watercolour reproductions of some Minoan frescoes from the excavations at the palace of Knossos were bought in 1938 from Piet de Jong, an archaeological illustrator working in Greece. These included a copy of the famous Bull-Leaping Fresco, which was the best parallel for the costume worn by the ROM figurine. They were complemented by an imaginative vision of life inside the Palace at Knossos painted by Sylvia Hahn, ROM illustrator. 

"…the gold and ivory statuette of a goddess in gallery 3, is attributed to the 16th century B.C., when the Island of Crete dominated the Aegean.  It should be studied in conjunction with the reproduction of the mural of the bull-leaping hung on the north wall and with the restoration of a scene in contemporary palace life on the west wall of the same gallery.”

R.O.M. Some Points of Interest, 1942, p. 18

 ‘Palace of Minos, The Queen’s Apartments’, painted by S. Hahn in 1940 for ROM Gallery 3

Palace of Minos, The Queen’s Apartments, painted by Sylvia. Hahn in 1940 for ROM Gallery 3

Few records survive for the time when Walter J Graham took over as Keeper of ROM’s Classical collection (1947-1966), and his attitude towards the ROM figurine is unclear. Graham specialised in Greek architecture and his 1962 book, The Palaces of Crete, devotes a whole chapter to the evidence for locating the Minoan bull-leaping spectacle in the grand central courtyard of palaces, such as that at Knossos. He makes no reference to the ROM figurine dressed as a bull-leaper, suggesting that he didn’t believe she strengthened his argument, but the goddess was still a centrepiece of the ROM gallery display. An unpublished inventory of the gallery from 1949 shows that, by then, the figurine was displayed alone in a purpose-made showcase. 

By the 1960s the ROM’s attitude to the goddess was mixed. While she continued to be displayed as a Minoan artefact, requests to publish the piece in textbooks on Minoan life were refused, on the grounds that her authenticity had been questioned and she was “under study”. However, the figurine was selected for publication in Art Treasures of the Royal Ontario Museum:  

“It is fitting that this section of museum treasures should be introduced with a figure as tiny and exquisite as it is celebrated, the solemn figure of a narrow-waisted woman – whether goddess or mortal is uncertain…She was reputedly found at Knossos and is to some eyes the most beautiful of several related pieces. All of these have been doubted in the past, and the debate continues. Our goddess or priestess remains mute on the subject and meanwhile reigns in serene majesty over the gallery devoted to Minoan and archaic Greek art.”

T.A. Heinrich, Art Treasures of the Royal Ontario Museum, 1963, p. 90

In the early 1970s Neda Leipen (ROM Curator in Charge of the Greek and Roman Department 1967-1986) tried to resolve the question by again asking for expert opinions. She was herself something of an expert on ancient ivory and gold statues, after researching the Classical ivory and gold statue of Athena Parthenos by Pheidias from the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis. She was obviously reluctant to condemn the figurine as a fake, and this opinion seemed to be cautiously supported by two other experts. After examining the goddess at the ROM in 1971, Sinclair Hood (director of British excavations on Crete), who had uncovered some Minoan ivory figurines at Knossos in 1957-1961 excavations at Knossos, said:

“I could not fault the left arm of your figure, and if it appeared in an excavation it would not surprise me. Indeed the ivory in general is difficult to my mind to fault, although the way the hair is cut at the back worries me…”

letter from S. Hood to N. Leipen 31st March, 1971

After studying photographs, Efi Sakellarakis-Sapouna, a Greek archaeologist working with other genuine Minoan ivory figurines from Cretan excavations, concluded:

“The hips are really ‘Minoan’…Other details, like arms, look also very Minoan.  On the contrary the face doesn’t seem very ‘Minoan’ and that is why I am hesitating to characterize it as genuine…of course the future excavation could reveal Minoan ladies with faces like hers.”

letter from E. Sakellarakis to N. Leipen 16th February, 1972

The general scholarly consensus was that the circumstances of acquisition and the general style of the ROM goddess associated her with two other unprovenanced gold and ivory ‘Minoan’ goddess figurines – the ‘Boston goddess' acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in 1914, and the ‘Baltimore goddess' acquired by the Walters Art Museum in 1931.  It is ironic that the very association with the Boston goddess that made the Museum so eager to buy the ROM goddess in 1931 (see my previous), should serve to cast doubt on her decades later.

In 1991 John Bowman, a travel writer about Crete, began a series of articles for a newsletter called Museum Insights, about one of his favourite ancient artefacts, the Boston snake goddess. What he believed would be a story about unethical collecting practices by a major US museum in the early 20th century, turned into an exposé of the Boston goddess as a probable fake, when the story of the acquisition fell apart under examination. He then moved on to consider the other gold and ivory ‘Minoan’ figurines in North America – the Baltimore and ROM goddesses – concluding that they too were dubious, and that their gold costumes were modern additions. 

“I am now prepared to claim that the goldwork on these three statuettes is a modern addition. I remain bothered by the faces, and I would not be at all surprised if a close technical analysis of the ivory revealed that there has been some modern reworking…”

J. Bowman, ‘A North American School of Minoan Art’ Museum Insights 4.2, 1992

This was not due to any new evidence, indeed Bowman had not even seen the ROM goddess in person, but it did give a public voice to the doubts that were picked by the Toronto Globe and Mail (‘The mystery of the bull leaper’ by Kate Taylor, May 14th, 1992). In fact, at just this time there was a growing scholarly interest in all the unprovenanced ‘Minoan’ goddess figures (all those in museums outside Crete). Several academics had contacted the Museum asking about the collection history of the ROM goddess, the ivory itself and the manufacturing techniques. Although the ROM figurine was too delicate to be analyzed by destructive Carbon-14 testing, it was carefully studied while being cleaned in the museum. The conclusion reached was that the weathering of the ivory showed that it was certainly old, and it had been carved while the ivory was still ‘alive’.

K. Lapatin's article in Archaeology magazine, 2001

Kenneth Lapatin's article in Archaeology magazine, 2001

It wasn’t until 2001 that a sensational article by Kenneth Lapatin, a specialist in ancient ivory and gold statues, again raised the subject, condemning the Boston goddess, and all the other unprovenanced goddesses including the ROM figurine, as early 20th-century forgeries manufactured by the very workmen who were excavating with Arthur Evans at Knossos. 

“Fashioned by skilled Cretan workmen of the early twentieth century A.D., rather than the mid-second millennium B.C., they offer valuable testimony to how scholarly interpretations and museum displays can be distorted by the desires of the present.”

K. Lapatin, ‘Snake Goddesses, Fake Goddesses’ Archaeology. January/February 2001, p. 36

This was picked up by the Canadian newspapers and ROM decided, for the first time, to change the labelling of the figurine in response to this accusation. It was an opportunity to highlight the debate which never before been reflected in the gallery presentation. The figurine remained on display, but its old label, reading:

BULL-LEAPER

Dubbed ‘Our Lady of Sports’ by Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of Knossos, Crete. 

Gold and ivory. Minoan (MMIII), about 1600 B.C.

931.21.1

was joined by a copy of Lapatin’s article and an information panel:

In Search of the Truth

The collections of the Royal Ontario Museum are an important resource for researchers both within the museum and outside. Many differing theories result from these studies. As part of our on-going research into the authenticity of our gold-and-ivory statuette, nicknamed Our Lady of Sports, here we present the opinion of Dr. Kenneth Lapatin of Boston University. His article, “Snake Goddesses, Fake Goddesses”, recently appeared in Archaeology (January/February 2001).

Museum visitors were left to draw their own conclusions, and although several Museum staff still believed the goddess was ancient, she became infamous to many as a fake, condemned by association with the other figurines. The “on-going research” yielded no new evidence, and when the current Bronze Age Aegean gallery was created in 2005, the ROM goddess was not included. After more than six decades on display as one of the most iconic objects of ROM’s ancient Mediterranean collection, the goddess was consigned to the storeroom, only appearing occasionally as a famous fake.

In the last instalment of this investigation into the ROM archives, The Goddess and the Museum: “What’s in a name?”, I’ll be considering how the different interpretations of the goddess have helped to give her a lasting appeal.   

Further Reading

C.L. Cooper (Kate Cooper), 'Biography of the Bull-Leaper: A 'Minoan' Ivory Figurine and Collecting Antiquity', in Cooper C.L. (ed) New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World (Leiden: Brill, MGR 27, 2021). doi:10.1163/9789004440753_005

The 'Goddess' and the Museum: The Early Years

Posted by ROM on August 6, 2013
The front pages of The Palace of Minos volume 4, published by Sir Arthur Evans in 1935

The front pages of The Palace of Minos volume 4.1, published by Sir Arthur Evans in 1935

This is the first of a series of articles that I will be writing as part of the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess Research Project about an icon of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection: the ivory and gold female figurine–ROM 931.21.1.

In these first three instalments I have been combing the museum records and archives to unravel the complicated history of the figurine in the Museum over the last 80 years, from the moment it was acquired to the present. This also reveals the rollercoaster ride its reputation suffered, from star attraction to an object of dubious authenticity consigned to the storeroom. Part of the fun of this type of research has been reading old letters and reports to piece together the story from different sources, but there are obviously many records scattered throughout the ROM and I haven’t yet found them all yet.  If you know of any I’ve missed, do let me know by leaving a comment!

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The Early Years

The figurine was bought by the Museum in 1931 from Charles T. Seltman, a specialist in ancient art, Lecturer at Cambridge University, and a dealer in antiquities, who had already provided ROM with several objects. It was then believed to be an unusually well-preserved and finely-carved ivory figure of the Middle Minoan III period, made on the island of Crete around 1500-1600 BCE, and authenticated, and indeed admired, by Sir Arthur Evans, the best authority on Minoan Crete. The unusual costume, made of sheet gold, identified her as a female bull-leaper. She wore the wide belt and codpiece or ‘Libyan sheath’, like those worn by athletes in Minoan wall-paintings, together with a corset that bared her breasts, which was usually combined with a long flounced skirt in images of Minoan women.

The first tantalising mention of the object was in a letter from Seltman to J. H. Iliffe (Keeper of ROM’s Classical Collection 1927-1931):

“I have a Cretan piece…which puts even the Boston snake-goddess in the shade, and which Evans regards as the finest Cretan work-of-art extant…”

(letter from C.T. Seltman to J.H. Iliffe, 16th November, 1930

Seltman was a good salesman and after allowing the anticipation to build, he sent details and photographs of the figure in January 1931.  He stressed the remarkable state of preservation with very little restoration, as well as comparing it again to the ivory ‘Minoan’ snake goddess [6371] already in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, a long-established American museum.  He was charging the exorbitant sum of £2,750. The newly-founded ROM didn’t have that sort of money available, during the Great Depression and just when it was planning a large extension to the museum building, but it agreed to pay in instalments. Charles Trick Currelly, director of the Museum, and himself an archaeologist, supported the purchase because of the significance of the piece, and because it would establish ROM’s international reputation as a serious archaeological museum able to compete with older-established institutions. 

“I must add on behalf of Currelly, the Museum, and myself that we are very grateful to you for letting us have the first offer of such an important and magnificent piece …her acquisition by Toronto would do as much as anything could to make people realize that Canada was taking a hand in matters archaeological.”

letter from J.H. Iliffe to C.T. Seltman, 17th January, 1931

The figurine arrived at the Museum in February 1931 and by March she was on display in the Greek Room on the second floor, which was then just the west wing of today's Museum running beside Philosopher’s Walk (for a bit more detail about the history of the Museum building see this article).

“The bull-leaping dolly is now in position and has been much admired”

letter from J.H. Iliffe to C.T. Seltman, 16th March, 1931

But although she was admired in Toronto, to establish the reputation of ROM internationally the figurine had to appear to the world, and that meant she had to be published. The figurine made her international debut in July 1931 when she was published in the Illustrated London News by none other than Sir Arthur Evans. 

The ROM figurine's public debut in the Illustrated London News, July 1931

The ROM figurine's public debut in the Illustrated London News July, 1931

Evans had been planning the publication ever since he had first seen the figurine in 1930, and Currelly recognised this as the best publicity possible. Evans was the acknowledged expert on Minoan Crete. Essentially, he discovered the Minoan civilisation through his excavations of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, which began in the early 20th century (read more in these articles about Evans’ excavation of Knossos and his creative reconstruction of the Minoan civilisation). Evans lent his expert authority to the new acquisition, declaring that the figurine, which he named “Our Lady of the Sports”, was the Minoan patron goddess of bull-leapers.

“You will see that I regard the image not as that of a performer in the games – as I think had been the impression of Seltman and others – but as the goddess herself in the quality of patroness of the Arena – “Our Lady of Sports” – I hope that this idea which I think adds to the interest of the figurine may commend itself to you.”

letter from A.J. Evans to C.T. Currelly, 25th July, 1931

The following year the goddess was published by Charles R. Wason (the new ROM Keeper of the Classical Collection 1931-1933) in the Bulletin of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology (March 1932).

These early publications briefly described the figurine, but were more concerned with putting her into the context of the Minoan civilisation. They focussed on recreating the Minoan bull-leaping ritual, through studying other Minoan evidence, and drawing parallels with contemporary Spanish bull-fights. They also showed how new archaeological discoveries had uncovered proof of the Greek myths, the stories of King Minos and the Minotaur, Theseus and Ariadne.

“whereas to the Greeks, Crete was merely a dim memory…for us the triumph of the spade has made the palace of Minos a reality known not from legends but from the objects themselves...”

C.R. Wason 'Cretan Statuette in Gold and Ivory' Bulletin of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology, March 1932, p.12

But it was in 1935 that the goddess became firmly established as one of the star remains of the Minoan civilisation when Evans published her in the 4th volume of his multi-volumed work The Palace of Minos. Her colour illustration featured as the frontispiece and he devoted over 20 pages to description and discussion.

Clippings from Toronto newspapers, November 1935

Press Clippings from Toronto newspapers in November 1935: The Globe, The Mail and Empire, Toronto Star, and Toronto Evening Telegram

It wasn’t long before international recognition also brought bad publicity. In 1935, a remark made in a lecture by David M. Robinson (Professor of Archaeology at Johns Hopkins University and a Greek vase specialist) exploded into Canadian newspapers with sensational reports of fake antiquities in museum collections. ROM was accused of having fakes in the Cretan collection – specifically the goddess figurine. The claims were calmly refuted by Homer A. Thompson (ROM Keeper of the Classical Collections 1933-1947), and amusingly, but less tactfully, dismissed by Currelly. It turned out that the press had misunderstood Robinson’s remarks, which were actually referring to Etruscan fakes from the collection of a notorious dealer, none of which were in ROM collections.

"I am sorry to say that a chance remark of mine…has been grossly exaggerated and has been spread all over the United States and Canada…as a matter of fact I said just the opposite from what the newspapers quoted me as saying."

letter from D.M. Robinson to H.A. Thompson, 11th November, 1935

The ROM goddess was given a reprieve, but this episode was a sign of things to come…

In my next instalment, The Goddess and the Museum: Museum Attitudes, I’ll be looking at the more recent history of the goddess.

Further Reading

C.L. Cooper (Kate Cooper), 'Biography of the Bull-Leaper: A 'Minoan' Ivory Figurine and Collecting Antiquity', in Cooper C.L. (ed) New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World (Leiden: Brill, MGR 27, 2021). doi:10.1163/9789004440753_005

What Now?

What are we working on now to resolve the mystery?

Proving whether this figurine is ancient or modern may seem simple but in this case is far from straightforward. The style of the “Goddess” is generally consistent with that of genuine Minoan antiquities, while scientific analysis of the material is problematic. The condition of the ivory means that it cannot be reliably dated using standard tests, while the weathering may be caused by natural or artificial aging. Dating gold is also notoriously difficult. To come up with answers we have to be creative and the investigation is still unfolding. The links below show you some of the latest news.

An x-ray image of the ROM Goddess showing features of the ivory, gold costume and metalwork used in the restoration. Photo: ROM Conservation, 2013.

The goddess during recent cleaning and investigation. Photo: ROM Photography, 2014)

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Explore the Stories

Exposing the ROM ‘Minoan’ Goddess

Posted by ROM on November 6, 2013
X-ray image of the ROM goddess (still 'fully' dressed)

An X-ray and graphic rendering of the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess
© ROM

Here I continue the story of an icon of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection: the ivory and gold female figurine–ROM 931.21.1. For further information see the ‘Minoan’ Ivory Goddess Research Project.

I’m very excited to announce that a short video about goddess has just gone live! 

The Minoan Goddess Exposed gives everyone a close look at the controversial ivory figurine, focusing on her surface appearance and what is going on underneath her clothes.

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You might notice from what we are wearing that the filming was actually done back in the summer. A lot of time and hard work has gone into turning a 45-minute conversation on camera into the 10-minute finished product. Here are a few photographs taking you behind the scenes while we made the video and showing you the people involved, and I am very grateful to all of them for their help.

Julia Fenn and Kate being filmed by Zak Rogers in the ROM Conservation departmentJulia Fenn and Kate being filmed by Zak Rogers in the ROM Conservation department
Photo: Scott Loane

In the ROM X-ray lab with Heidi Sobol & JuliaIn the X-ray studio in the ROM Conservation department with Heidi Sobol & Julia Fenn
Photo: Kate Cooper

The ROM sound studio where Scott Loane & Zak work their magic in editing the filmThe ROM Sound Studio where Scott Loane & Zak Rogers work their magic in editing the film
Photo: Kate Cooper

What have we learnt?

As well as being a great way to let you see the figurine face-to-face, the surface and x-ray analysis shown on the video has helped us answered some fairly basic questions about the figurine. Here is a summary what we have discovered as a result of the visual analysis.  

  1. First of all, our close examination of the details of the carving has emphasised that the figurine is an exceptionally skillful piece of ivory-work, whenever it was made.
  2. We’ve established that the figure is elephant ivory, and not hippopotamus or even mammoth ivory.  Many Minoan Bronze Age figurines were made of hippopotamus ivory, although elephant ivory was also used.
  3. By taking off some of the clothes, and x-raying the object, we’ve seen for the first time that the torso of the figure is certainly carved from a single piece (although the two arms are detachable).  Stylistically this doesn’t help to date the piece, since the Minoan ivory figurines found in controlled excavations are sometimes carved as a whole, and sometimes carved in pieces, but the pattern of cracks in the ivory show that this was carved from an unusually straight elephant tusk. This could help to identify the species of elephant, which could in turn help with dating the figurine.
  4. The pattern of carving underneath the gold clothing is not consistent in different places on the figurine. While underneath the belt there is carving in the ivory which echoes the pattern of the belt itself, the ivory underneath the gold bodice and codpiece has no carving. This may suggest that the bodice and codpiece were later additions, not part of the original figurine. The same may be true of the diadem now worn by the figurine. This doesn’t seem to fit the carving that appears on the hair on the back of the head, suggesting that the figurine originally wore a different type of headband.

These may seem straightforward points, but they haven’t ever been confirmed before. 

Photos by Kate Cooper & Scott Loane

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