Of such shrines
the palace was found to have more than one. Those shrines were
found to be in a very private part of the house, and usually to
have no thoroughfare through them.'
[Footnote *: _Annual of the British School at Athens_, vol. xiv.,
p. 366.]
What these shrines were like we may to some extent judge from the
fragmentary fresco found at Knossos, representing one of the
pillar-shrines where the Great Goddess was worshipped in her emblems
of the sacred pillars. The structure consists of a taller central
chamber, with a lower wing on either side of it. The material of
which it is built is apparently wood, faced and decorated in certain
parts with chequer-work in black-and-white plaster. The whole building
rests upon large blocks of stone, immediately above which in the
central chamber comes a solid piece of building, adorned first
with the chequer-work, and then, above this, with two half-rosettes
bordered with _kuanos_. Over this rises the open chamber of the
shrine, which contains nothing but two pillars of the familiar
Minoan-Mycenaean type, tapering downwards from the capitals. These
rise from between the sacred horns, which occur in practically
every religious scene as emblems of consecration (_cf._ the 'horns
of the altar' in the Hebrew temple worship). The lower chambers
on either side contain each a single pillar, again rising from
between the horns of consecration.
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