Save the Date - 26 July 2024 (Fri)
Event Details:
Title: Conversations with the Minoan “Snake Goddess”, a ‘Many Lives of a Snake Goddess’ project event.
Date: 26 July 2024 (Friday)
Venue: Knossos Research Centre, Villa Ariadne, Knossos.
Further details:
The talk accompanies a small exhibition in the Knossos Research Centre.
Professor Nicoletta Momigliano (University of Bristol) on behalf of the ‘The Many Lives of a Snake Goddess’ project team. (Please note this lecture will take place in Greek)
This talk offers an introduction to the project ‘The Many Lives of a Snake Goddess: Diachronic, Multicultural, and Multisensory Perspectives’ a project spearheaded by Christine Morris (Trinity College Dublin), Nicoletta Momigliano (University of Bristol) and Ellen Adams (King’s College London) that involves doctoral students from various institutions, colleagues from the Ashmolean Museum, and the British School at Athens as well as several artists and writers.
The project focuses on two of the most iconic finds from Minoan Crete: the figurines of the ‘Snake goddess’ and her ‘votary’ discovered by Arthur Evans during he excavations at Knossos in 1903. Ever since, the figurines have beguiled not only archaeologists and other scholars concerned with past worlds, but also modern artists, writers, psychoanalysts, feminists, fashion designers, and followers of modern Paganism, among many others – all of whom have re-imagined these objects for their own purposes. Yet, despite their iconic status, relatively few people realise that the figurines are problematic in many respects. Issues concerning these objects range from what they really looked like in Minoan times to what they signified and how they have been perceived and reimagined beyond archaeology. Our project investigates all these issues and examines the general public’s experience of these figurines and of modern works inspired by them.
The event is organized by the British School at Athens in collaboration with the Knossos Cultural Association.