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The Snake Goddess Dethroned: Deconstructing The Work And Legacy Of Sir Arthur Evans, Lindsay Taylor Apr 2019

The Snake Goddess Dethroned: Deconstructing The Work And Legacy Of Sir Arthur Evans, Lindsay Taylor

Honors College

While the Minoan Snake Goddess is one of the most reproduced and familiar images in the art historical canon, her function—and indeed, her very essence—continues to be shaped by the man who coined the term Minoan and discovered the site in which she and her sisters lay for generations undisturbed. When Sir Arthur Evans concluded that these statuettes were evidence of Minoan worship of a single great Mother Goddess in 1903, he finally fulfilled his aim discover a prehistoric European civilization to rival that of the ancient Near East. However, Evans did not simply discover these statuettes (and on a …