After the fall of Knossos in the fourteenth century b. c.e. (see chapter 4), Crete went into a slow but steady decline. The palace culture that marked the Bronze Age civilizations of Crete ceased to exist, and with it the religious structures that had served the Minoans for centuries. In the place of the peak and cave sanctuaries came a new religious structure with a new focus of veneration: The Goddess With Upraised Arms shrines. The Goddess With Upraised Arms, first appearing in Crete in the Late Minoan IIIB period, is a wheel-made ceramic figurine with a hollow "hoop" skirt. In contrast to the simple lower bodies on the figurines, the goddesses have individuated upper bodies, including a variety of hairstyles and headdresses. The consistent feature that gives these images their name is the arms, raised up on either side of the head in a posture of benediction (to judge from Near Eastern parallels) (see Image 8.5). The greatest individuality occurs in the headgear; some wear horns of consecration upon their brows, others poppies, birds, or discs. This variety in iconography, once again to judge from Near Eastern parallels, indicates that different goddesses are implied by the different figurines. That is to say, the Goddess With Upraised Arms (GWUA) icon portrays different goddesses, not one individual goddess.
8.5 Goddess with Upraised Arms Figurine from Gazi, Crete (Courtesy of Paul Butler)
These GWUA figures have come to light in shrines throughout Crete: Gazi, Gournia, Kan-nia, Karphi, Kavousi, Prinias, Haghia Triadha, the region of Rethymnon, and Knossos (Peat-field 1996, 29-30). Almost always found in contexts with them are snake tubes: cylindrical ceramic tubes with snake-like adfixes on either side. These tubes served as bases for offering bowls, which were also discovered in the GWUA shrines. These finds indicate that a new cult setting emerged in Late Minoan IIIB and IIIC Crete, in which the Cretan population could perform offerings (libations, perhaps) to images of their goddesses. Peatfield has argued that these new, local, and popular shrines replaced the more centralized cults originally associated with the palaces and helped the Cretans in the establishment of new political identities (Peatfield 1996, 35-36). The fact that the GWUA became a cornerstone of later Minoan ideology is evident in the image's "emigration" to Cyprus in the eleventh century b. c.e. The Minoan settlers brought this icon with them when colonizing Cyprus, where the image remained firmly entrenched well into the Classical period.
World History
