A stock number of poses are repeated over a period of two hundred years or more. Such consistency over a long period of time would suggest that these figures had special trans-temporal significance. All stand bolt upright, their bodies covered from head to toe in finely styled clothing.

       The earliest examples show a woman standing with one hand held palm-in, fingers extended to her chest, looking very much like some American school child ready to pledge allegiance to the flag. As in the American custom, the gesture would appear to carry some ritual significance.

       In later examples, with elbow still held to the side, the open hand is extended out before her. This gesture could be interpreted as her presenting an offering, or perhaps, like the hand-to-the chest, some prayerful attitude. However, the hand could be extended in order to accept an offering.

       The other hand is usually shown at her side, in many cases grasping her skirts and pulling them slightly up, as if she were about to mount a stair . Artistically the gesture does interesting visual things with the drapery creating linear patterns and cascading folds. The gesture, though, one feels was not merely some aesthetic motif but had some other, more serious meaning.

       Who are these women whose similar poses and gestures link them together? The word kore, or maiden, used to identify these women means virgin, although one should bear in mind that virgin in ancient Greece seems to have meant unmarried rather than denoting an intact maidenhead.

       The words 'virgin' and 'maiden' tend to conjure up in the modern male imagination the image of an unsullied, nubile, young woman, delightfully innocent of the ways of sex. A maiden's body is the stuff of male fantasy. Maidenly innocence also connotes a certain empty-headedness, a vapid intellectuality. This might predispose one to view these women as little more than as some well-dressed early Greek type of sex object.

       This is belied, however, by the faces of these women which reveal not gentle innocence but a singular self-awareness, confidence, and pride of a kind that one would not expect of women in ancient Greek society, and in fact is quickly lost, as we shall see, after 500 BCE when male-centred "democracy" effectively eliminates women from positions of power.

        The faces and postures of the Kore figures strongly suggest women who recognize their own power , or perhaps recognize themselves as representatives of a female power which, in the Archaic period, Greek society still acknowledged. The power they feel or embody may be that of some ancient female Mother goddess.

       These women stand as the final visual embodiment of ancient female forces. Hereafter, it will be conceived in male terms and female power will be understood to reside only in woman's sexuality, or in her lack thereof in the form of a virgin.