Reply To: Myth Becomes History

[Dean Riley]

There are times when taking a little bit of artistic license is needed such as replacing the missing right arm and placing the cat on the head of the Snake Goddess with what they felt like it would have looked like. But Evans was guilty of incorporating his own ideas into his discoveries such as rebuilding parts of the Palace Complex at Knossos with modern materials that detracted from the complex. While Evans didn’t know what the initial palace complex looked like, Schliemann went even further “off the rails” by completely changing a piece of art. Schliemann took the Mask of Agamemnon and completely changed the look of it to make it appear as something that it wasn’t. He “modernized” the mask and in so doing, completely destroyed a piece of history.