Description

This fired pottery figurine represents a woman, the body fairly abstract but with emphasis given towards her wide eyes, cupped breasts and large pubic area. This style of votive dedication - often referred to as a "fertility figurine" - is believed to have been given as a dedication to a maternal goddess either in hopes of (or thanks for) a successful pregnancy or birth. It is part of the free Ashmolean Museum display "Fashioning Bodies in the Ancient World", curated by Kyle Lewis Jordan (Curating for Change Fellow, Ashmolean Museum and Pitt Rivers Museum), running from 10th November 2023 - 8th May 2024.

While early interpretations of fertility figurines hypothesized that these figurines were perhaps made (or commissioned) by men for their wives, more recent studies suggest that the nature of their composition correlates to a first-person perspective, meaning that the woman may have made it herself. Pregnancy and birth has always been a very anxious and dangerous time for women, the experience often leaving it's mark on both body and mind. Religious dedications like these were a means of potentially alleviating some of those anxieties.

Community curation: In early Mesopotamian creation myths, one belief on the origin of humans is that we were created from a mixture of clay and divine blood, spilled during the war between the gods of Order and the primordial forces of Chaos. This meant that human bodies were in their own way chaotic, and unplanned; the Gods of Order thus tasked humankind to steward the Earth as it was created, attaining perfection through devotion. This suggests a complex attitude towards impairments: recognising them as part of the human experience, but anxious about the underlying "chaos" they represented. - Kyle Lewis Jordan, Curating for Change Fellow, Ashmolean Museum and Pitt Rivers Museum