The Bronze Age: Canaan - The Ashmolean Museum

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ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN TERRACOTTAS published from levels XVIII to IV at Megiddo (Loud 1948, pl. 244–6) illustrative of the standard range; but with few illuminating details about their associations and contexts. As in prehistory many quadrupeds are too schematic to allow for close identification, whilst levels of damage at times preclude it even with the more realistic examples. There is enough scattered evidence to suggest that these images, as in the Iron Age, may well have been more common than the plaques depicting women. (e) The Canaanite Legacy This is fully considered in the following section on terracottas of the Southern Levant in the Iron Age, after 1200 B.C. In their wide-ranging summary of the contemporary imagery Keel and Uehlinger (1998, 154) have remarked of the varied use of terracotta, particularly for cult-stands and other related objects in the early Iron Age, that “we see a fundamentally ‘conservative’ approach when terracotta serves as the medium. Various older ways to depict the subject matter are still visible on plaques and cult stands long after such styles went out of fashion for those who used other media... This ‘conservative’ tendency makes sense sociologically, since most of these terracottas are associated with ‘private’ or family piety”. Minimal variation of form and imagery is the most striking aspect of Late Bronze Age Canaanite terracottas in human form, whose iconography was primarily, if not exclusively, of significance to women. In pottery manufacture there tends to be least variation of forms when production is most centralized and vice versa. By this criterion Canaanite anthropomorphic figurine production was highly standardized and centralized, at least in so far as control over its imagery was concerned, extending an official iconography into the households and work places of Canaan and from time to time into the graves of Canaanites. This imagery would appear to have been focussed on one major goddess, primarily of interest to women; but, in considering these images, the much later words of Jeremiah (44: 19) should be held in mind: “The women added, ‘When we offer incense to the “Queen of Heaven” and pour libations in her honour, do you think we make cakes for her with her features on them, and pour libations to her, without our husbands’ knowledge” There is little difference between mouldmade clay plaques and moulded dough images, save that the latter are perishable. The “Queen of Heaven” is not certainly identified, but belongs to the closely related group of major goddesses including Assyro-Babylonian Ishtar and West Semitic Astarte and Asherah (cf. Hadley 2000, 59). -188-
BRONZE AGE: CANNAN – CATALOGUE B. Catalogue (i) Gezer The Ashmolean collection includes only two terracottas from Bronze Age Canaan. Both are from Gezer, which is about eight kilometres south-southeast of Ramleh in modern Israel, where the road from the coastal plain meets the main route from Jerusalem and the Judaean highlands at the approach to the Ayalon valley. It was first excavated between 1902 and 1909 by R.A.S. Macalister for the Palestine Exploration Fund. The two terracottas catalogued here were acquired soon after these excavations from near the excavated area. As Macalister published his small finds by categories rather than by chronological periods, few of his small finds can be related even to his schematic strata and virtually none to specific excavated structures. Subsequent American excavations in 1964–74, in 1984 and in 1990 are still in process of publication. In the mature Late Bronze Age (Macalister’s “Third Semitic Period”), to which no. 300 belongs, Gezer was the site of a flourishing town from the fourteenth into the twelfth century B.C., when the settlement was partially destroyed and then deserted for a period of time. 300. Plaque with nude female in low relief; mouldmade; baked; buff fabric; nude female with curling (“Hathor”) sidelocks of hair, multiple necklace, bracelets and anklets; genitals emphasized with incised lines; both feet facing to the right; long fingered hands clasping the breasts; the figure is flanked by two sets of lotus flowers: that framing her lower body has upright flowers, that framing her upper body has flowers bent over to touch at the top of the centre of the plaque. AN1912.621: “reported found on a private property of Gezer outside limits of Palestine Exploration Fund excavations (by Macalister), and bought by an Armenian dealer in Jerusalem” L: 12cm.; W: 4.9cm. Moorey 1969, pl. 126b; 1987, pl. 43; Pritchard 1943, 13 (for type); cf.: from American excavations at Gezer (Dever et al. 1970, pl. 25A,B; 37:10–11; 1986, pl. 54:2; 55:4; 58:8; cf. Kletter 1996, 270–272: many examples from Macalister’s excavations). This is a good example of the type of terracotta conventionally termed a Qudshu plaque, discussed here in the introductory section. It is an elegant, standardized design in the distinctively Egyptianizing style, which is largely explained by the contemporary Egyptian occupation of Canaan. However, mouldmade nude female plaques presented as offerings by ordinary people to Hathor in Egypt (Pinch 1993, types 4–6, pl. 50–51) have both feet forward and lack the floral attributes, the jewellery and so-called “Hathor curls”. In Egypt such figurines were also made in faience, stone and wood. In Canaan there is still very little detailed information on the archaeological contexts of these plaques (of both main types) and no modern corpus of them comparable to that provided by Leila Badre (1980) for Syria. Some are reported from graves. Keel and Uehlinger (1998, 100) estimate that they appear in about twenty per cent of Late Bronze Age burials; but possibly significant details about the sex of the associated burials is not available in any coherent form. The vast majority of reported examples are from domestic contexts and consequently they are often found damaged when excavated. There is no agreed identification of the identity of the image (cf. especially Keel and Uehlinger 1998, 97–108), as explained above. In Mesopotamia nudity on clay plaques was merely a variation of attire and less indicative of the supernatural character of an image than such bodily features as wings and bird claws or such attributes as a horned crown. When they are absent, as in Canaan, unless it is simply ritual nudity in the presence of a deity, its significance remains unexplained. All the Canaanite images appear as young females; their long flowing hair may have erotic connotations, as in Egypt (cf. Pinch 1993, 214) and in Babylonia. Neither Babylonian nor Egyptian goddesses were normally shown without clothing; when Hathor is, it is when she is identified with Nut, who is always shown nude when personifying the sky. In Egypt the clay female fertility figurines, of various types, offered to Hathor are identified as women and particularly associated with the production and rearing of children rather than simply with sexuality (cf. Pinch 1993, 225). They -189-
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