arthur evans - the_palace_of_minos

153 THE PALACE OF MINOS, ETC.
Domestic
A '
Casa
Santa'.
A Votive
Station.
and owing,
it would appear, to the work of native treasure hunters, a large
hollow had been excavated in the floor of the entrance room and into the
sacral deposits beneath this. Much of the structure itself has no doubt
also found its
way down the neighbouring steep
to the West. For these
reasons it was difficult to follow its outlines in detail, but the restored Plan,
so far as it was possible to recover it, is indicated in the sketch, Fig. 114.
It supplies an interesting parallel
to the later shrine at Petsofa.
The entrance chamber B i was flanked on its Eastern side by what
seems to have been a magazine (B and 2), fragments of plaster facing were
found still attached to its inner walls. An inner room C was entered by
a doorway of which some traces were still visible, and in this area were
considerable remains of a white-faced cement pavement.
Thus in Late Minoan days, to which these constructions belonged, the
central feature of the upper sanctuary seems to have reproduced the arrangement
of a small house of the early Cretan and '
Aegean but and ben '
type,
about 1 6 x 10 metres in its exterior dimensions. The inner shrine had thus
a purely domestic aspect. It was a little house of shelter and refection for
'
the Goddess on her mountain top, a Casa Santa ',
like that miraculously
transported from Bethlehem to Loreto.
There must clearly have been some means of access along the West
flank of the building from the entrance passage A to what seems to have
been an outer yard or temenos of more or less triangular form, which was
supported by rough terrace walls on the immediately adjoining rocky slope
to North and East. This would have been the hypaethral part of the
Sanctuary, well adapted for the exposure of a pillar form of the divinity.
seems probable, moreover, that this small temenos may have been entered
on the North-West by a portal of its own. The existence of such an annexe
to the shrine itself is, indeed, clearly indicated by an interesting glyptic
representation to be described below.
The reddish deposit of burnt earth that lay about the foundations of the
shrine contained sherds of the M.M. Ill Period, and below this, reaching
to the bare surface of the rock, was the grey ash stratum already mentioned.
'
This great ash altar ',
answering to that of Petsofa, contained similar votive
relics, including male and female human figures of clay, together with those
of animals, such as oxen and goats, and also separate limbs l both human
and animal, part of a vessel with wild goats in relief like one from the
It
1
An arm showed a perforation, apparently numerous. Some M.M. I pottery
of the 'barfor
suspension. In one case two human legs botine ' class here occurred,
were joined together. Clay horns of oxen were