DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1118#0071
'NAKED-GODDESS' RELATED TO PRIMITIVE IDOLS 427
already connected with the Cult of the Dove. (See Fig. 353 at end of
Section.) With its two side-locks—which are in fact a Hathoric remi-
niscence—it most resembles a form belonging to the ' Syro-Hittite' class
found in Cyprus.
The 'Naked Goddess' in its Relation to the Primitive Aegean
and Anatolian Idols.
The history of this- type helps to strengthen the presumption, already
advanced with reference to the cult of the Sacred Dove, that there had
been a reaction on early Semitic Religion of elements belonging to a
primitive stock that may be traced through Western Asia to the further
Aegean shores. It affords, indeed, a sidelight on the process by which
the later Semitic profile took its Armenoid shape.
On Babylonian cylinders of Hammurabi's time this idol-like figure
makes its sudden appearance 'crude and nude', unexplained by any earlier
model of Chaldaean inheritance, and there is a strong presumption that it
was taken over through contact with the Amurru of the ' Western Land '.It
stands apart from the sacred scenes amidst which it is often introduced on
a much inferior scale—rising like a separate image on a small pedestal.
This effigy, vaguely identified with the consorts of Marduk and A dad,
and afterwards lost in a general conception of Ishtar, has with great proba-
bility been traced back by M. Salomon Reinach ' to a widespread family of
small images of a naked female figure, executed both in clay and stone, which
seem to have stood in some talismanic relation to the idea of motherhood,
the characteristic physical signs of which are at times well marked.
These images were in fact anticipated by the stone and ivory figurines
like those of Willersdorf or Brassempouy, belonging to an older World.
They find a wide distribution in a continuous geographical area that extends
from the Aegean basin and the Middle Danube, throughout Asia Minor
and to the Caucasian regions, and finds an Eastern offshoot on the shores
of the Caspian, and at Serrin on to the Middle Euphrates. Attention to
this remarkable primitive group has already been called in the First Volume
of this Work.2
In Crete the evolution of the stone figurines that play the principal
part in this can be easily traced to clay prototypes of squatting female
1 Chroniques A'Orient, II seiie (1910), " See P. of M., i, p. 43 seqq, and p. 48,
p- 566 seqq. Dr. G. Contenau, in his mono- Fig. 13 [Primitive Clay Images ami their
graph La De'esse lViie de Babylonie (rcjio); Stone Derivatives).
confirms Reinach's conclusions.
already connected with the Cult of the Dove. (See Fig. 353 at end of
Section.) With its two side-locks—which are in fact a Hathoric remi-
niscence—it most resembles a form belonging to the ' Syro-Hittite' class
found in Cyprus.
The 'Naked Goddess' in its Relation to the Primitive Aegean
and Anatolian Idols.
The history of this- type helps to strengthen the presumption, already
advanced with reference to the cult of the Sacred Dove, that there had
been a reaction on early Semitic Religion of elements belonging to a
primitive stock that may be traced through Western Asia to the further
Aegean shores. It affords, indeed, a sidelight on the process by which
the later Semitic profile took its Armenoid shape.
On Babylonian cylinders of Hammurabi's time this idol-like figure
makes its sudden appearance 'crude and nude', unexplained by any earlier
model of Chaldaean inheritance, and there is a strong presumption that it
was taken over through contact with the Amurru of the ' Western Land '.It
stands apart from the sacred scenes amidst which it is often introduced on
a much inferior scale—rising like a separate image on a small pedestal.
This effigy, vaguely identified with the consorts of Marduk and A dad,
and afterwards lost in a general conception of Ishtar, has with great proba-
bility been traced back by M. Salomon Reinach ' to a widespread family of
small images of a naked female figure, executed both in clay and stone, which
seem to have stood in some talismanic relation to the idea of motherhood,
the characteristic physical signs of which are at times well marked.
These images were in fact anticipated by the stone and ivory figurines
like those of Willersdorf or Brassempouy, belonging to an older World.
They find a wide distribution in a continuous geographical area that extends
from the Aegean basin and the Middle Danube, throughout Asia Minor
and to the Caucasian regions, and finds an Eastern offshoot on the shores
of the Caspian, and at Serrin on to the Middle Euphrates. Attention to
this remarkable primitive group has already been called in the First Volume
of this Work.2
In Crete the evolution of the stone figurines that play the principal
part in this can be easily traced to clay prototypes of squatting female
1 Chroniques A'Orient, II seiie (1910), " See P. of M., i, p. 43 seqq, and p. 48,
p- 566 seqq. Dr. G. Contenau, in his mono- Fig. 13 [Primitive Clay Images ami their
graph La De'esse lViie de Babylonie (rcjio); Stone Derivatives).
confirms Reinach's conclusions.