Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük
The Seated Woman of Çatal Hüyük (also Çatalhöyük) is a baked-clay, nude female form, flanked on either side with a leopard, which is generally conceded[2] to depict a corpulent and fertile Mother Goddess[3] in the process of giving birth while seated on her throne, which has two hand rests in the form of feline (leopard or panther) heads. The statuette, one of several iconographically similar ones found at the site, is associated to other corpulent Neolithic goddess figures,[4] of which the most famous is the Venus of Willendorf. The similarity to later iconography of the Anatolian Mother Goddess Cybele in the first millennium BC is striking.
It is a neolithic sculpture shaped by an unknown artist. Completed sometime about 6000 BC, the carving was unearthed by archeologist James Mellaart in 1961 at Çatal Hüyük, Turkey. When it was found, its head was missing. The current head is a modern replacement.
Notes
- ^ As noted in Hugh Honour and John Fleming, A World History of Art, 2005: illustration, fig. 1.16;
- ^ A typical assessment: "A terracotta statuette of a seated (mother) goddess giving birth with each hand on the head of a leopard or panther from Çatal Höyük (dated around 6000 B.C.E.)" (Sarolta A. Takács, "Cybele and Catullus' Attis", in Eugene N. Lane, Cybele, Attis and related cults: essays in memory of M.J. Vermaseren 1996:376.
- ^ So rendered in popularized accounts, such as The Oxford Companion to World Mythology, 2005: s.v. "Hittite-Hurrian mythology": "...the goddess of Çatal Hüyük, her Anatolian descendants were the great Phrygian goddess Cybele, the mother of the sacrificed Attis, and the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus."
- ^ Noted in Honour and Fleming 2005 "Ch.1: Before History"
References
- Mellaart, James : Çatal Hüyük, A Neolithic Town in Anatolia, London, 1967
- Guide book of "The Anatolian Civilizations Museum"
- Lecture of Dr. R. Tringham, The Neolithic World of Çatalhöyük, at the Univerity of Leuven
External links