In a tiny windowless room in the heart of the huge and labyrinthine Temple (or Palace) of Knossos, excavators discovered in 1903 two large stone-lined cists hidden beneath a solid slab floor, filled in and covered around 1600BC.

The two cists contained an array of sacred objects, many of them broken and divided between them, which implies that they were broken before they were hidden.

Among the objects were fragments of a total of five or six faience figures, two of which were sufficuently well preserved to be restored. Purely on the grounds of appearance, the two best-preserved figures each seem to possess as much claim to godhead as the other - something of an embarressment of deities.

In Minoan imagery, there seem to exist at least three different female deities: the Snake Goddess, the Mistress of Animals, and the Goddess of Vegetation. Of these, the Snake Goddess was never depicted in seals.

It has been suggested that the two snake-carrying individuals, maybe mother and daughter, could represent the Minoan variants of the later Greek Goddess Demeter and of Kore-Persephone, her daughter by her brother Zeus.

But in truth, nobody knows, and since we only see two out of five figures, any assumption that we face a distinct pair is ill-founded. The Snake Goddess, by the way, has inspired quite a few famous forgeries (e.g. the "Boston Goddess", see Lapatin, Mysteries of the Snake Goddess), so I show here a true Snake Goddess, painted by Francis Bramley Warren, 1889.

Main source: Colin Macdonald, Knossos, 2005 - The best and latest book about Knossos and highly recommendable.