Evans, Arthur J.: The Palace of Minos: a comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustred by the discoveries at Knossos (Band 3): The great transitional age in the northern and eastern sections of the Palace (London, 1930)

414

BRONZE ATTACHMENTS OF LION

Minia-
ture
Double
Axes:

on signet impressions of her Central Shrine between lion guardians, as
a pre-Hellenic Rhea.1

Attention has been already called to the painted stucco fragments in the
' Miniature' style—two of them found with the ivory relics, in this deposit—

bronze,
gold-
plated,
from
small
shrine.

Fig. 276. Bronze Attachments, perhaps from Figure of Lion, c shows Attached
Fragment of Carbonized Wood (e. \).

depicting part of the entablature of a small shrine of the Double Axes and
the bull-sports held in connexion with it. The worship itself is further
recorded in a more concrete manner by the occur-
rence, each in a different part of the present
deposit, of two bronze Double Axes of miniature
dimensions, with remains of gold plating still
attached to their surface (Fig. 277). Unlike many
votive axes of this kind, they are of solid material,
in this resembling the steatite examples found in
the later Palace shrine.2 We must infer that
these too had had their shafts socketed in a pair
of' Sacral Horns ', and that an actual shrine of the
Goddess had stood within easy range of the Upper Treasury Chamber.

Ivory fragments, as well as some curious steatite objects, show that the
Goddess here was not without her sacred monsters of a more mythological
class.

Fig. 277. Miniature
Double Axe of Bronze with
Remains of Gold Plating.

1 See P. o/M., ii, Pt. II, pp. 808,
Fig. 528.

5, and 2 Ibid., ii, Pt. I, p. 339, Fig. 191, and cf.

p. 338, Fig. 190, Section.