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Mysteries Of The Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, And The Forging Of History Paperback – December 25, 2003

by Kenneth Lapatin (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 15 ratings
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Not only is one of the most famous pieces of ancient Greek art-the celebrated gold and ivory statuette of the Snake Goddess-almost certainly modern, but Minoan civilization as it has been popularly imagined is largely an invention of the early twentieth century. This is Kenneth Lapatin's startling conclusion in Mysteries of the Snake Goddess-a brilliant investigation into the true origins of the celebrated Bronze Age artifact, and into the fascinating world of archaeologists, adventurers, and artisans that converged in Crete at the turn of the twentieth century. Including characters from Sir Arthur Evans, legendary excavator of the Palace of Minos at Knossos, who was driven to discover a sophisticated early European civilization to rival that of the Orient, to his principal restorer Swiss painter Emil Gillieron, who out of handfuls of fragments fashioned a picture of Minoan life that conformed to contemporary taste, this is a riveting tale of archeological discovery.
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  1. Print length
    288 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    December 25, 2003
  4. Dimensions
    8.23 x 5.54 x 0.77 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    0306813289
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0306813283
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"An archaeological detective story and, on a far deeper level, an inquiry into the uses of the past. "Mysteries of the Snake Goddess is, indeed a mystery.... Suffice to say, as [Lapatin] does at the end, that 'she has provided a canvas on which archaeologists and curators, looters and smugglers, dealers and forgers, art patrons and museum goers, feminists and spiritualists, have painted their preconceptions, desires and preoccupations for an idealized past.'"

About the Author

Kenneth Lapatin is Assistant Curator of Antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Da Capo Press; Reprint edition (December 25, 2003)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0306813289
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0306813283
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.23 x 5.54 x 0.77 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 15 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
15 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Diane Hinckley
5.0 out of 5 stars The Book That Broke My Heart
Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2024
Verified Purchase
This book exposed the beloved "snake goddess" statuette at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as (probably) an early-twentieth-century forgery. When I saw that statuette on a grade school class trip, I suddenly saw all the wild possibilities in the world. And who among us has not been charmed by the sinuous grace of Minoan art? Alas, people, it's time to grow up. All is not what it seems. It turns out that, even looking into the remote past, we (and the "experts") often see only what we want to see.

The writing is a little dry, even when making blockbuster revelations, but I'm still giving it five stars because it does such a service in making us wiser and less credulous and bringing reality into better focus.
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Amy J. Parr
5.0 out of 5 stars A worthwhile read.
Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2023
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I can't add much to what others have already written here, other than that I was intrigued, enthralled, and somewhat wistfully saddened by this book. My view of the Minoans was mostly formed in junior high (many, many years ago!) By my reading of then-current archeology and Mary Renault's "The King Must Die". Alas, all wrong. However, I now have that much more to learn as it becomes available, so heigh-ho, and away we go!
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VanEzzania
4.0 out of 5 stars A forgery?
Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2015
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This particular study of the Minoan Snake Goddess is one that does not solely rely on the original or new archaeological data. Lapatin actually goes into details about Arthur Evans, his influences on what made him believe the famous snake woman statue is a goddess, and the other archaeologists around him. However, what makes Lapatin's research different is that not only does he tackle the debate of whether or not the Snake Goddess is an actual goddess or not, but that the famous Boston statuette is actually more modern than ancient in its construction.

In order to provide evidence for the statues Lapatin does supply results from various chemical tests of the material, particularly gold, that make up the statuette. He also talks about the statuette's actual appearance and how parts of it do not correspond to other authentic statuettes of its time. While I do believe this part of Laptin's argument, the other part of his argument (as reviewer S. Gustafson has pointed out as well) that Evans himself was influenced by the belief that Minoan Crete was a matriarchal goddess-worshiping society has me skeptical. Evans' own research is what influenced that idea and although writers like J. J. Bachofen and Jane Harrison had presented the same ideas before or around the same time as Evans, I'm not entirely convinced that Evans was influenced by such ideas based on Lapatin's writing. While he does detail Evans' early life and the impact of the loss of his mother at a young age which may have caused him to sympathetic to the goddess-matriarchy idea (not unlike Bachofen and the relationship with his mother) there's not much detail about Evans' actual interaction with the idea except that such theories from Bachofen and Harrison had survived into his time.
2 people found this helpful
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Flasher
5.0 out of 5 stars Quick shipping and accurate description
Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2017
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Book arrived quickly and was as described.
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Rob Hardy
5.0 out of 5 stars The Importance of a Forgery
Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2002
For over eighty years, within the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, pride of place has been given to the Snake Goddess, a statue that is sixteen centimeters tall. She is a spectacular sculpture, long regarded as the pinnacle of Minoan art from the sixteenth century BCE. She is of delicately carved ivory decorated with gold, a sensuous figure in a wide skirt of multiple tiers, a narrow, belt-encircled waist, and a bodice cut so low that her ample breasts are visible. She holds snakes in her outstretched arms. She pouts. She is one of the most famous pieces of ancient art in the world, a superb example of Cretan Bronze Age sculpture.
Except she isn't. Kenneth Lapatin, President of the Boston Society of the Archeological Institute of America, has been studying her for a decade, and casting doubts on her authenticity. Now he has published a book-length explanation, _Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History_ (Houghton Mifflin Company) of how the experts of art and archeology have been fooled, and with the book's exhaustive notes and appendices, this account is devastating. It also tells plenty about how archeology is done, what sort of characters do it, how we view the ancient past, and how wishful thinking, perhaps even more than greed, has perpetrated the forgery. The details of the origin of the statue are still unclear, and probably always will be. But Lapatin has dug into as much as can be known of its shadowy past, and has provided an expert's details. He can write, for instance, "Eyes with drilled pupils _and_ canthi have no parallel in Aegean sculpture and do not appear in ancient statuary before the second century A.D." He gives an excellent section on why science can provide only limited evidence in this case (although none of it points to the statue's authenticity).
Lapatin does more than just debunk, for in his fascinating and original book, he shows how the Goddess is still important. She isn't the find Sir John Evans, the excavator of Knossos, and others thought she was. However, "She has provided a canvas on which archeologists and curators, looters and smugglers, dealers and forgers, art patrons and museum-goers, feminists and spiritualists, have painted their preconceptions, desires, and preoccupations for an idealized past." We may have to admit we know less about Minoan culture, but we can always learn more about human nature.
24 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Julian
5.0 out of 5 stars Minoan Detective Thriller
Reviewed in Spain on March 6, 2013
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Lapatin does a masterful job of tracking down the many Minoan forgeries and tracing them back to very persons who were fabricating the now famous Minoan frescoes from Knossos. I long had suspected that the bull-leaping Knossos fresco was problematic, but with Lapatin I now know it is a collage of various frescoes and in fact is based in part on an earlier fresco at Mycenaea "restored" by the same member of Evans' staff who, with his son, was at night churning out fake after fake newly "discovered" Minoan artefacts.

This is a detective story, but it is no thriller. Lapatin does not trumpet his own horn and lets his findings speak for themselves.
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Jane S.
5.0 out of 5 stars Forging ancient artefacts ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 5, 2009
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This book was recommended to me, & from its title I thought it would be a racy "detective"-type paperback, more at home on the fiction shelves. I had to order it from the States, but certainly couldn't put it down once I started reading. This at least it shares with detective novels ... But that is all. Lapatin's book is meticulously researched and referenced, and its cumulative effect is to make one look very carefully at all ancient artefacts, let alone the "Minoan snake goddesses" so lauded by Sir Arthur Evans & his ilk.
Required reading for anyone interested in the art of ancient Knossos, Crete or Greece; it's only a pity it isn't more widely known. It deserves to be.
3 people found this helpful
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