Collections Spotlight: Tell Halaf Mother Goddess
March 24, 2022
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By: Hannah Maxwell
2005.11.028 – Tell Halaf Mother Goddess
Tall Ḥalaf, also spelled Tell Halaf, is an archeological site in modern-day Syria, near the Turkish border. However, it represents much more than an educational excavation. Imagine a town in the sweltering heat near the River Khabur, with families completing their daily tasks. Some people farm in the nearby fields that are small enough to feed in necessity. Others create clothing or other material goods. However, the ones that would be remembered far after their village was abandoned were those near the river, working the clay special to their region to create bowls and figurines. As they placed their creations in the sunlight to dry, the Tall Ḥalafians may only have considered their figurines as simple trading goods or perhaps religiously significant objects, rather they were contributing to the ceramics the world would use to rediscover what these people lived through.
What could a figurine mean? This is the question many historians are still trying to answer. Most historians agree that earthen ware such as ceramics was remarkably good in the region. The painting techniques (no longer easily visible on many figurines, but still present in bowls) were carefully geometric, and the sturdiness of the rare clay used by the Ḥalafians was superb. Despite this, these figurines didn’t circulate in trade outside of the Aegean Sea near Greece. Perhaps the figurines were religiously significant, or politically significant, and thus only had a small target audience. Maybe other things took greater importance when trading with other countries. Either way, it appears that this culture was largely producing these figurines for itself.
What are the figurines of? Some say it depicts a goddess, which would tie in with other evidence of religious significance. Others say it is a self-portrait. These scholars maintain that the distortion of the body of the figurine could be evidence in itself that women were using themselves as their own muses. By looking down at their body, women would see a distorted version of themselves: thicker middles and thighs, arms that get smaller farther out. Instead of an overly distorted body, it is instead a glimpse of how women saw themselves thousands of years ago.
As these women painted on their traditional clothing, or their own stretch marks, they detailed what they saw around themselves. Chubby thighs, nice round middles, and stretch marks like our figurine in this museum. The fact that these figurines exist tells us that Ḥalafian women most likely did not see these as blemishes, but instead the most accurate, and perhaps enviable, body there was. And how beautiful that we now revere it as the possible body of a goddess?
Citations
Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “The Halaf Period (6500–5500 B.C.).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/half/hd_half.htm (October 2003)
