AN ANATOLIAN STONE MOTHER GODDESS NEOLITHIC PERIOD, CIRCA 6TH MILLENNIUM B.C.

拍品描述

AN ANATOLIAN STONE MOTHER GODDESS, NEOLITHIC PERIOD, CIRCA 6TH MILLENNIUM B.C. Carved from a warm honey-brown stone with darker inclusions and a smoothly polished surface, the figure is modelled as a seated female with pendulous breasts, a swelling abdomen, and heavy thighs folded beneath the body. The head is reduced to a rounded projection without articulated features, rising from broad shoulders that taper into the arms held close against the torso, one crossing beneath the breasts. The lower body is rendered as a single bulbous mass, the buttocks and thighs merging into a stable seated base. The reflective polish of the stone reveals the sculptor's attention to the transitions between volumes, the anatomy simplified to essentials and held within a compact, monolithic silhouette. The figure belongs to the well-established tradition of steatopygous female images produced across Anatolia and the wider Near East during the Neolithic. The emphasis on the maternal body, the breasts, the fecund abdomen, the generative hips, over facial or narrative detail identifies the subject not as an individual but as an embodiment of generative and nurturing forces. Whether such figures were understood as deities in the later sense, as ancestral markers, or as ritual objects tied to household, burial, or agricultural cycles, remains debated among specialists, but their persistent form across sites from Çatalhöyük and Hacılar westward argues for a shared symbolic vocabulary of fertility and increase. The choice of stone is significant. Whereas many contemporary Anatolian female figures were modelled in unfired or lightly baked clay, examples worked in hardstone required considerably greater labour, ground and polished with abrasives over long periods. A carved and polished stone figure of this scale therefore represents a more durable and prestigious form of the type, intended to survive beyond the immediate ritual moment for which a clay figurine might have been made. The rich colour and lustre of the polished surface would have carried its own visual weight in a period when polished stone was among the most valued of worked materials. This figure exemplifies the reductive, volumetric approach that defines the Neolithic mother-goddess tradition of Anatolia, in which anatomical emphasis on the generative body is distilled into a compact and self-contained sculptural form. Its survival in hardstone, rather than the more common fired clay, places it among the more substantial expressions of a figural type central to the ritual life of the earliest settled communities of the region. Dimensions: Height: 6.6cm

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