Kore (Greek: κόρη "maiden"; plural korai) is the modern term [1] given to a type of free-standing ancient Greek sculpture of the Archaic period depicting female figures, always of a young age. Kouroi are the youthful male equivalent of kore statues.

Kore, type of freestanding statue of a maiden—the female counterpart of the kouros, or standing youth—that appeared with the beginning of Greek monumental sculpture in about 660 bc and remained to the end of the Archaic period in about 500 bc.

The Peplos Kore is an ancient sculpture from the Acropolis of Athens. It is considered one of the best-known examples of Archaic Greek art . Kore is a type of archaic Greek statue that portrays a young woman with a stiff posture looking straight forward.

Thousands of years later, in 1886, Greek archaeologists excavated one of these pits just northwest of a temple known as the Erechtheion. Within it they found several statues of young women. The most famous of them is today known as the Peplos Kore.

The Phrasikleia Kore is an Archaic Greek funerary statue by the artist Aristion of Paros, created between 550 and 540 BCE. It was found carefully buried in the ancient city of Myrrhinous (modern Merenta) in Attica and excavated in 1972.

The Kore has been named the "Peplos Kore" due to the garment she wears – the peplos. The peplos was fastened in the middle with a belt and on the shoulders with bronze pins which were secured in the small holes that are still preserved.

Kore (κόρη = maiden. Plural: κόραι, korai) refers to statues depicting female figures, always of a young age, which were created during the Ancient Greek Archaic period (600 – 480 BCE) either as votive or commemorative statues.

From 600 to 480 B.C.E., ancient Greek cemeteries and sanctuaries were filled with marble statues of beautiful young men and women. The images of nude young men are today called kouroi (singular: kouros), the ancient Greek word for boy, though we do not know if they were called kouroi in antiquity.

Despite her small stature, this is one of the most impressive Korai from the Acropolis. Her head was found in 1886 east of the Parthenon, and her body in 1888 south of the temple. She has been reassembled out of three pieces but a big part of the statue’s extremities has been lost.

A kore (pl. korai) is a standing Archaic stone statue (typically in marble or limestone) of a draped, unmarried female figure. Usually these statues were life-size. With the development of the korai, Greek sculpture started to become more “monumental” (Whitley 198).