Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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 to depict a corpulent and fertile Mother Goddess 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, the so-called Venus figurines, 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.
References
- Mellaart, James : Çatal Hüyük, A Neolithic Town in Anatolia, London, 1967
- Guide book of "The Anatolian Civilizations Museum"
See also
