Prestige, Protection, and the Power of Ambiguity: Female Ivory Terminals in the Egyptian Levant

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

This carved ivory tusk terminal with a female head that I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago from Stratum VIIA at Megiddo (Late Bronze IIB, ca. 1300–1200 BCE) belongs to a broader corpus of Levantine luxury ivories associated with palatial environments operating under Egyptian imperial administration. Produced from imported elephant ivory and integrated into handles, staffs, or furniture fittings, such objects functioned as elite prestige goods within the interconnected “international style” of the Late Bronze eastern Mediterranean.

Carved tusk with female head dated to the Late Bronze IIB Age (1300-1200 BCE) found in Stratum VIIA at Megiddo. Photographed by Mary Harrsch at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (formerly the Oriental Institute) at the University of Chicago.

My research revealed despite the common shorthand “ivory,” these tusks were almost certainly carved from elephant ivory rather than hippopotamus. By the Late Bronze Age, Levantine ivory overwhelmingly derived from Asian or Syrian elephants (Elephas maximus and related populations, now extinct), whose range extended into northern Syria and the upper Euphrates, as well as from African elephant ivory imported indirectly via Egypt. Hippopotamus ivory, while used earlier and more commonly in Egyptian contexts, is denser and structurally distinct; the curvature, scale, and hollowed preparation of this example are consistent with elephant tusk sections intentionally prepared for carving.

Female heads overwhelmingly dominate anthropomorphic ivory terminals in the Levant. Male heads are known but are far less common and tend to appear in more restricted contexts. When present, male terminals are typically bearded or helmeted and associated with martial or authoritative attributes, evoking kingship, guardianship, or heroic masculinity. Unlike female heads, male terminals often carry more specific iconographic signals of identity and power, which may have limited their adaptability within the cosmopolitan elite assemblages characteristic of sites such as Megiddo.

Animal-headed terminals are also well attested, particularly in ivories associated with furniture and ceremonial equipment. Lions symbolized power and protection; sphinxes and hybrid creatures served explicitly apotropaic roles; and caprids or bovids were commonly associated with vitality and abundance. These animal terminals were especially effective when placed at liminal points—bed corners, chair arms, or staff ends—where symbolic protection was both visually and conceptually reinforced.

For much of the twentieth century, scholarship routinely identified female ivory heads with specific goddesses—most often Ishtar/Inanna or her West Semitic counterparts Astarte and Ashtart. These interpretations emerged from culture-historical and diffusionist models that sought to align archaeological imagery with known textual pantheons and assumed a close correspondence between iconography and cult practice. In this framework, formal resemblance often outweighed archaeological context, even when such objects were recovered from palatial or administrative settings rather than temples or votive deposits.

From the late twentieth century onward, however, this interpretive certainty began to erode. Influenced by developments in art history, semiotics, and Near Eastern studies, scholars increasingly questioned whether the absence of diagnostic attributes should be treated as a problem of identification or understood as an intentional visual strategy. Post-iconographic approaches reframed female ivory heads not as portraits of named deities but as generalized feminine types whose meanings were activated by context, audience, and use.

This shift is especially significant in Egyptian-administered centers such as Megiddo, where elite material culture circulated within a politically plural and theologically heterogeneous environment. Visual symbols needed to be intelligible—and acceptable—to Egyptian officials, local Levantine elites, and foreign emissaries alike. A tightly specified divine identity would have constrained an object’s semiotic range. By contrast, an abstracted female head could function simultaneously as Hathoric, Astarte-like, or broadly “goddess-associated,” depending on the viewer, without committing to a single cult tradition.

More recent agency- and materiality-based scholarship has further reframed these objects by emphasizing what they did rather than whom they depicted. Carved from exotic elephant ivory and embedded in high-status furnishings or ceremonial equipment, female terminals are now understood as mediators of power, protection, and legitimacy within elite spaces. Their effectiveness lay precisely in their indeterminacy by evoking an Egyptianized elite feminine persona rather than a named deity so they could operate across cultural boundaries and imperial hierarchies. This calibrated ambiguity is further reinforced by selective Egyptianizing features, such as the rigid, sharply vertical fitted headdress, which signals proximity to Egyptian authority and courtly status without asserting divine or royal identity. It is somewhat reminiscent of the crown of Nefertiti.

Although the Amarna period predates Late Bronze IIB Megiddo by roughly a century, the visual memory of Amarna court aesthetics persisted in Egyptian-controlled regions of the Levant. Egyptian administrative centers continued to deploy selective courtly motifs long after Akhenaten’s reign, particularly those that communicated intimacy with Egyptian authority, cultural sophistication, and participation in imperial visual language.

Female ivory terminals thus exemplify how Late Bronze Age elites negotiated religion, power, and diplomacy through imagery that was potent precisely because it remained ambiguous. The historiographic shift from deity identification to contextual and functional analysis reflects a broader reassessment of ancient visual culture—one that recognizes ambiguity not as interpretive failure, but as a deliberate and meaningful artistic choice.

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Egyptianized International Fashion, Solar Theology, and Elite Identity in Third Intermediate Period Egypt

Mary Harrsch © 2026

This Third Intermediate Period stela (Dynasty 22, ca. 946–735 BCE), found in the Ramesseum at Thebes that I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago, depicts an elite deceased woman interacting directly with the hawk-headed solar god Re-Horakhty. At first glance, the most striking feature is her dress—particularly the long, sweeping looped sleeves, rendered as nearly transparent.

Funerary stela of an elite woman, Third Intermediate Period, Dynasty 22 (ca. 946–735 BCE), from the Ramesseum, Thebes. The deceased is shown offering to the solar god Re-Horakhty (“Re, Horus of the Two Horizons”), a deity associated with cosmic transition and daily renewal. Her long, sweeping looped sleeves reflect Egyptianized international fashion of the early Iron Age: a Near Eastern garment silhouette translated into ultra-fine linen appropriate for Theban temple and funerary contexts, rather than the heavy wool sleeves worn by elites in the Levant and Mesopotamia. The hieroglyphic text addresses Re-Horakhty directly on behalf of the woman’s ka and affirms her status as “justified”. Photograph by Mary Harrsch, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago.

These sleeves are not merely decorative. Their form reflects eastern Mediterranean fashion currents circulating in the early Iron Age. In the Levant, northern Syria, and Mesopotamia (ca. 1100–700 BCE), elite men and women are frequently shown wearing long, pendant sleeves constructed of wool—heavy, opaque, and structural garments visible in Neo-Hittite, Aramaean, and Neo-Assyrian reliefs. There, sleeve length and bulk functioned as markers of rank, wealth, and authority.

Egyptian artists of the Third Intermediate Period selectively adopted this silhouette while rejecting the material logic. In a Theban temple and funerary context, wool was inappropriate, particularly for individuals associated with ritual purity. Instead, the sleeves here are rendered as ultra-fine linen, indicated visually through translucency and the visibility of the arm beneath the cloth. The result is a deliberate cultural translation: an internationally fashionable form recast in Egypt’s most prestigious and ritually acceptable textile.

The deity before whom the woman stands is equally significant. The museum identifies him correctly as Re-Horakhty (“Re, Horus of the Two Horizons”), a composite solar god who embodies the sun’s daily movement between horizon, sky, and underworld. Unlike Horus as a god of kingship and political legitimacy, Re-Horakhty is a deity of transition, renewal, and cosmic passage, making him especially appropriate for non-royal funerary monuments in this period.

Re-Horakhty first emerges prominently in the Old Kingdom as a distinctly royal and solar deity. Depicted as a falcon-headed man crowned with a solar disk, he embodies the rising sun and serves as a symbol of the king’s divine authority. In this period, his worship was largely centered on the pharaoh and the elite, appearing in royal mortuary temples and the tombs of high officials, where he reinforced cosmic order (maat) and legitimized the king’s intermediary role between gods and humanity. Non-royal Egyptians were largely excluded from direct devotion to Re-Horakhty, encountering him primarily through elite funerary iconography and solar symbolism integrated into broader cult practices.

By the Third Intermediate Period, however, Re-Horakhty’s cult had evolved in both scope and accessibility. Political fragmentation and the growing prominence of local priesthoods, especially in Upper Egypt, allowed commoners and regional elites alike to participate in solar worship, often through temple festivals, votive offerings, funerary inscriptions, and personal amulets invoking his regenerative power. Some individuals began adopting solar epithets in personal names (e.g., “Ra-em-herakhty”), showing reverence for the deity in private life.

His identity increasingly merged with that of Amun-Ra, linking the solar cycle to broader cosmic and moral order while maintaining his protective and regenerative associations. Over time, Re-Horakhty transitioned from a symbol of exclusive royal authority to a divinity whose solar power and promises of rebirth were approachable by both elite and common Egyptians, reflecting the democratization of certain aspects of religion during periods of political decentralization.

I was surprised to learn ChatGPT could actually decipher the hieroglyphic text beneath the winged solar disk. It is short but theologically focused. Although portions are worn, the structure is clear and typical of Dynasty 22 Theban stelae:

“Words spoken to Re-Horakhty, Lord of the Sky, Ruler of the Horizon, for the ka of the God’s Servant [name lost], justified.”

This is not a judgment scene and not a conventional offering formula. Instead, it is a statement of alignment. By addressing Re-Horakhty directly and affirming her status as “true of voice”, the deceased woman situates herself within the solar cycle of daily rebirth, rather than relying solely on Osirian resurrection imagery.

Taken together, the costume, the deity, and the text articulate a coherent identity: an elite, temple-connected Theban woman presenting herself as ritually pure, cosmopolitan in taste, and theologically aligned with solar regeneration. The stela thus records not only belief, but how fashion and theology were used together to construct elite female identity in the Third Intermediate Period.

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Marked Flesh and Green Glaze: Parallel Languages of Regeneration in Nubia and Egypt

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

Across Nubia during the C-Group period (ca. 2300–1600 BCE), impressed dot patterns appear consistently on anthropomorphic figurines, particularly female examples such as this one I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago that was recovered from a cemetery context at Adindan.

Female figurine with impressed dot decoration, Nubia, Adindan Cemetery T, Tomb 51, C-Group period, ca. 1750–1600 BCE. Terracotta. This figurine exemplifies a Nubian tradition in which the body surface is deliberately marked with impressed dot patterns, widely interpreted as representations of scarification. The clustered placement of the dots across the neck, chest, abdomen, and torso corresponds closely to bodily marking practices documented ethnographically in Nubia and corroborated archaeologically by the discovery of a scarified Nubian woman buried at Hierakonpolis in Egypt. Similar markings also appear on Egyptian representations of Nubian dancers, underscoring their role as visible markers of identity and ritual potency.

In a funerary context, such marked figurines function not as idealized bodies, but as embodied proxies, encoding regeneration, protection, and continuity through the culturally modified human form. This approach contrasts with contemporary Egyptian figurines of the Middle Kingdom, which communicate regeneration primarily through symbolic materials—most notably green glaze—rather than through marked skin. Photograph by Mary Harrsch, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago.

My research revealed these markings are not randomly applied decoration. Instead, they form deliberate clusters across the neck, shoulders, chest, abdomen, and hips—precisely those areas associated with vitality, fertility, and embodied identity.

Archaeological and comparative evidence strongly supports the interpretation of these impressed dots as representations of scarification, a culturally meaningful practice documented ethnographically in Nubia and neighboring regions. Scarification in Nubia represents a long-standing embodied cultural practice rather than a phenomenon introduced in the Bronze Age. Its origins likely lie in prehistoric and Neolithic Nubia (6th–4th millennia BCE), where rock art and early figurative traditions suggest the importance of bodily display and surface modification as social markers.

By the A-Group period (ca. 3800–3100 BCE), Nubian societies increasingly emphasized corporeal identity within mortuary and symbolic contexts, laying the groundwork for more formalized practices. Scarification becomes archaeologically legible during the C-Group period (ca. 2300–1600 BCE).

Scarification functioned as a visible marker of identity, life-stage, and ritual status, transforming the body itself into a communicative surface. The predominance of female scarification in Nubian figurative and physical evidence is generally understood in relation to fertility, life-cycle transitions, and regenerative potency. In Nubian cultural systems, women’s bodies were closely associated with biological continuity, social reproduction, and ritual mediation. Scarification marked the female body as socially accomplished—a visible record of maturity, fertility, and participation in communal rites.

Male identity, by contrast, appears to have been encoded through other means, such as weaponry, status objects, or roles tied to mobility and exchange. Some scholars have argued that recognition of the male role in conception may have developed gradually, and this could theoretically explain why certain fertility-related practices focused exclusively on women.

This interpretation is critically reinforced by the discovery of a Nubian woman buried at Hierakonpolis whose body bore patterned markings consistent with those depicted on Nubian figurines and on representations of Nubian dancers in Egyptian art. This rare convergence of figurative, artistic, and physical evidence demonstrates that the dotted patterns seen on clay bodies correspond to real practices applied to living ones. Figurines, therefore, act as proxies for culturally marked bodies rather than abstract symbols.

Representations of Nubian dancers in Egypt, particularly during the Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period, further underscore this point. Egyptian artists repeatedly depicted Nubian performers with distinctive body markings, darkened skin, and characteristic hairstyles—elements absent from Egyptian performers. These details functioned as ethnic identifiers, but they also acknowledged the ritual and liminal role of Nubian dancers as bearers of vitality, movement, and transformation.

However, Egyptians did not adopt the practice themselves. Scholarly consensus attributes this to fundamentally different conceptions of the body: Egyptian ideology privileged bodily wholeness, surface perfection, and reversibility, especially in funerary belief. Permanent alteration of the skin conflicted with Egyptian ideals of physical integrity required for rebirth. Instead, Egyptians encoded regeneration through material and chromatic symbolism—most notably green and blue-green pigments and glaze—allowing the body to remain physically intact while symbolically transformed. Thus, scarification was acknowledged as a meaningful Nubian practice but remained culturally incompatible with Egyptian ideals of bodily wholeness.

When viewed alongside contemporary Egyptian green-glazed fertility figurines, an instructive contrast emerges. Egyptian figurines of the same general period often represent female performers but they encode regeneration differently. Rather than marked skin, Egyptian artists relied on material symbolism: green or blue-green glaze evoking vegetation, rebirth, and the regenerative powers of Osiris. Smooth, idealized bodies align with Egyptian aesthetic norms, while color and decoration carry the symbolic load.

In both cultures, however, the underlying logic is strikingly similar. The female performing body—whether dancer, ritual agent, or regenerative intermediary—serves as a model for renewal and continuity. Nubian figurines encode this power through the visibly marked body itself, while Egyptian figurines encode it through color associated with rebirth. These are not borrowings, but parallel systems rooted in distinct cultural understandings of how vitality is made visible.

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The Last Flight of the Ba: Reimagining the Afterlife at the End of Antiquity

 by Mary Harrsch © 2026 

This Nubian ba-bird statue (Ballana Cemetery B, Tomb 245; ca. 225–300 CE) that I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago belongs to the final phase of a mortuary concept whose origins lie more than two thousand years earlier in ancient Egypt. My research revealed its presence in Nubia—and its sudden disappearance shortly thereafter—offers a striking case study in cultural transmission, adaptation, and rupture.

Sandstone Ba-bird statue from Ballana Cemetery B, tomb 245, Meroitic Phase IIIB-IV (225-300 CE) photographed at the Institute of the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago by Mary Harrsch

The ba first emerges in the Old Kingdom (3rd millennium BCE) as one component of the Egyptian conception of personhood. Initially textual and closely associated with royal and divine vitality, the ba represented mobility, individuality, and the capacity to move between the worlds of the living and the dead. By the Middle Kingdom, it acquired its canonical iconographic form as a human-headed bird, a visualization that stabilized during the New Kingdom and became ubiquitous in funerary papyri and tomb decoration. In this context, the ba was shown leaving the tomb by day and returning to reunite with the body, underscoring the continued importance of corporeal preservation.

From the Late Period onward, Egyptian theology increasingly treated the ba as part of a more integrated and abstract soul concept. In Roman-period Egypt, the ba did not disappear, but its visual prominence declined. While it continued to appear in hieroglyphic and Demotic texts, temple reliefs, and small-scale funerary objects such as amulets and shrouds, it was often absent from the dominant imagery of Roman-style coffins and mummy portraits, which emphasized individual likeness and social identity over explicit depictions of afterlife mechanics. The ba remained theologically intact, but visually implicit rather than central.

In Nubia, however, the trajectory diverged. Egyptian mortuary concepts had been selectively adopted since the New Kingdom and Napatan periods, but during the Meroitic and post-Meroitic phases they were reworked within a distinctly Nubian elite ideology. In cemeteries such as Ballana and Qustul (ca. 250–350 CE), the ba was not merely depicted but fully materialized as a three-dimensional stone statue placed within monumental tumulus tombs. These sculptures likely functioned as permanent anchors for the deceased’s spiritual essence, particularly in a funerary tradition that did not replicate Egyptian mummification practices in full. At precisely the moment when Roman Egypt was reducing the visual role of the ba, Nubia was giving it one of its most emphatic and sculptural expressions.

This tradition ended abruptly. By the mid–4th century CE, with the collapse of Meroitic political structures and a rapid transformation in burial customs, ba statues disappear entirely from the Nubian archaeological record. There is no evidence for their survival or reinterpretation in later X-Group, Makurian, or Christian Nubian contexts. Unlike in Egypt, where the ba was absorbed into evolving religious frameworks, in Nubia the concept appears to have been abandoned wholesale once the elite ideology that sustained it collapsed.

The Ballana ba-bird thus represents not a late survival of an Egyptian idea, but the closing chapter of a long and complex history: a concept born in Old Kingdom theology, reshaped through centuries of Egyptian religious thought, monumentalized in Nubia, and then brought to an abrupt end in the political and religious realignments of Late Antiquity.

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From “Concubines of the Dead” to Embodied Regeneration: Reinterpreting Middle Kingdom Fertility Figurines

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

This Middle Kingdom female figurine (late 12th–13th Dynasty, ca. 1900–1700 BCE) that I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago exemplifies a funerary strategy in which regeneration was embodied directly in the human form. Its green surface, invoking Osirian rebirth, and its tattooed dancer iconography, associated with ritual performance and Hathoric vitality, mark the figure as a magically operative body, not a representation of a household woman.

Middle Kingdom female figurine (late 12th–13th Dynasty, ca. 1900–1700 BCE) photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago by Mary Harrsch

Early Egyptological scholarship—shaped by late 19th- and early 20th-century assumptions about sexuality and the afterlife—interpreted such figures as literal sexual companions for the deceased, giving rise to the term “concubines of the dead.” This label reflected a tendency to read Egyptian funerary belief through a modern, literalizing lens, conflating erotic symbolism with sexual service and overlooking the ritual and cosmological dimensions of the imagery.

Over the past several decades, this interpretation has been largely abandoned. Comparative analysis of tomb contexts, iconography, and Middle Kingdom religious developments now situates these figures within a broader system of apotropaic and regenerative objects. The tattooing—closely paralleling that worn by female dancers and musicians in ritual scenes—signals mythic and liminal status, not social identity. Sexuality here is not biographical or relational, but cosmic and functional, operating as a force of renewal essential to rebirth in the Osirian afterlife.

The contrast with the New Kingdom is instructive. New Kingdom female figures—human and divine—are typically rendered in naturalistic yellow or light ochre skin tones, emphasizing social identity, lineage, and narrative presence. Regenerative power does not vanish; instead, it is re-encoded materially and textually. Osirian rebirth is made explicit through funerary texts identifying the deceased by name as Osiris, while regeneration is distributed across faience amulets, scarabs, shabtis, resin-treated mummies, ritual substances colored green, blue, or black, and vegetal "corn mummies.”

“Corn mummies” were small, mummiform figures made of soil mixed with grain (usually barley or emmer) and wrapped like a corpse. As the grain germinated, the figure enacted the Osirian cycle of death and rebirth, transforming decay into new life. These objects made regeneration materially visible and biologically active, reinforcing the identification of the deceased with Osiris as a being who dies, germinates, and is reborn eternally.

Seen in this light, the Middle Kingdom figurines once called “concubines of the dead” represent a fundamentally different metaphysical solution to the same problem later addressed through texts and materials. They are embodied regeneration, not erotic accessories—mythic instruments designed to guarantee renewal in perpetuity.

I was curious, though, if the emphasis on potency, was legislated by the pharaoh as it later was codified legally in Augustan Rome. But my research revealed during the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2055–1650 BCE) there were no decrees, edicts, or legal texts mandating marriage, childbirth, or minimum family size, no tax incentives, land grants, or exemptions explicitly tied to reproduction, and no surviving administrative records framing population growth as a state policy goal. However, fertility was strongly promoted through religious, social, and economic norms, especially after the instability of the First Intermediate Period.

Texts such as royal inscriptions and wisdom literature, such as "The Instruction of Ptahhotep" and "The Instruction for Merikare" frame prosperity and order as dependent on stable families, legitimate heirs and proper transmission of property and cult obligations. Funerary cults required descendants to maintain offerings and the cults of Hathor, Taweret, Bes, and Min placed ritual emphasis on rebirth, regeneration, and sexual potency.

The New Kingdom, however, reorganized the infrastructure of regeneration. Pharaonic divine kingship became ideologically absolute—particularly after Ahmose's expulsion of the Hyksos established the 18th Dynasty pharaoh as cosmic restorer. Imperial administration expanded dramatically, incorporating tribute from Nubia and the Levant, massive temple economies, and professionalized priesthoods. Within this transformed landscape, regenerative power became institutionally mediated: funerary texts required scribal production, proper materials needed temple workshops, correct rituals needed trained priests.

The Middle Kingdom figurines had operated as autonomous magical technologies, concentrating regenerative power in portable, ritually activated objects. The New Kingdom system distributed that same power across standardized mechanisms embedded within state cult infrastructure. Rebirth remained central, but its material expression shifted from concentrated embodiment to coordinated assemblages of texts, amulets, ritual substances, and temple performance.

The decline of tattooed female figurines was not abandonment of their function but displacement of their method—decentralized, symbolically dense objects gave way to centrally produced, textually coordinated systems. This shift aligned with broader New Kingdom patterns of theological standardization and administrative consolidation, making regeneration legible and controllable within imperial frameworks.

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Selective Naturalism in Neo-Assyrian Relief Sculpture: Familiarity, Function, and Power

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

This detail from the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (ca. 825 BCE) that I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago depicts exotic animals—most plausibly monkeys—presented as tribute to the Assyrian king. Their anthropomorphic facial treatment contrasts sharply with the striking anatomical accuracy seen in Neo-Assyrian representations of horses.

Relief said to depict monkeys or baboons sent to Assyrian King Shalmaneser III (ca. 825 BCE) as tribute portrayed on his Black Obelisk that I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago. The imperial artists were apparently unfamiliar with the anatomy of these exotic creatures so resorted to depicting them with human-like faces.

Natural depiction of a horse and lancer from a wall of the palace of Assyrian King Sargon II that I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago. Horses, a crucial element of Assyrian military power, were depicted as accurately as possibly by court artists.

This contrast is instructive. Assyrian sculptors demonstrated sustained empirical observation when depicting animals central to imperial life. Horses, essential to chariotry, cavalry, and royal display, are rendered with careful attention to musculature, proportion, gait, and behavioral nuance across relief programs at Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Nineveh.

Exotic animals, by contrast, occupied a different epistemological category. Monkeys were rare prestige objects acquired through long-distance exchange and likely encountered only briefly at court. In such cases, artists appear to have relied on conventionalized visual schemas—particularly standardized human facial types—applied to unfamiliar bodies. The goal was not zoological accuracy but legibility within an imperial narrative of reach and domination.

The resulting figures are neither mythological hybrids nor cultic symbols. Rather, they exemplify selective naturalism, in which representational fidelity correlates with cultural familiarity and ideological importance. Chains, posture, and scale communicate submission more effectively than anatomical precision.

Seen in this light, the “human” faces of these animals do not encode symbolism so much as they expose the boundaries of observation within Neo-Assyrian visual culture—revealing how knowledge, power, and artistic convention intersect on the surface of empire.

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Childhood and Sacred Space: A Stark Contrast Between Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

This terracotta wheeled animal, likely representing a ram, which I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago, was found at Tell Asmar (ancient Eshnunna), House XXXI, Room 14, and dates to the Akkadian period (ca. 2330–2150 BCE). Objects like this blur modern distinctions between toy, amulet, and ritual object.

Tell Asmar (House XXXI), Akkadian period: Wheeled ram with differentiated head and facial features, reflecting its role as a domestic toy-amulet used in everyday household religion. Photographed at the Institute of the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago by Mary Harrsch.

Unlike similar wheeled animals recovered from Early Dynastic temple contexts—such as those from Khafajah’s Temple Oval II, where they functioned as votive offerings dedicated to a deity—this example comes from a domestic setting. Its findspot within a private house suggests it belonged to the sphere of household religion, where families actively sought divine protection for their children within the home.

Khafajah (Temple Oval II), Early Dynastic period: Wheeled animal votive with barrel-shaped body and minimally defined head, emphasizing symbolic presence within a formal temple precinct. Photographed at the Institute of the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago by Mary Harrsch.

The choice of a ram is significant. In Mesopotamian symbolism, the ram conveyed strength, vitality, leadership, and divine protection, and was associated with major protective deities such as Enki/Ea and Shamash. As a wheeled object, it was meant to be pulled along the floor—likely by a child—making protection dynamic and continuous, embedded in daily life rather than confined to formal ritual moments.

This object illustrates a broader Mesopotamian pattern: concern for children’s survival and future was addressed both publicly in temples and privately in the home. The same symbolic language—animals, motion, and clay—was adapted to different ritual settings.

By contrast, ancient Egypt followed a different path. Wheeled pull-toys are extremely rare there before the Middle Kingdom and are almost never associated with temples. Egyptian parents instead relied on amulets, figurines (such as Bes or Taweret), and magical texts to protect children.

For the Predynastic period, we have no texts, no depictions, and no securely identified ritual objects that can be tied specifically to children acting as ritual participants. There are no scenes of children in cultic processions, no identifiable “novice” priest figures, no votive objects clearly framed as children’s offerings within cult spaces, and no architecture indicating spaces for child instruction or residence within ritual precincts.

Representations of children in ritual settings do not appear in Egypt until the Middle Kingdom, and more clearly in the New Kingdom. At that point, young musicians and singers appear in temple processions, trainees are attached to priestly households, and child figures associated with gods such as Harpocrates (Horus the Child) enter formal divine iconography.

Crucially, these developments postdate the Predynastic period by over a millennium and coincide with fully institutionalized temples, formal priesthoods, and state-sponsored ritual economies.

This contrasts sharply with Mesopotamia, where children’s objects appear in both temple and domestic religious contexts by the Early Dynastic period.

This modest clay ram also reflects a technological difference: Mesopotamia’s early adoption of the wheel, and its integration into both ritual and play, produced a distinctly different material expression of childhood and belief. It is therefore more than a toy. It is a material expression of parental hope—shaped by hand, rolled across a household floor, and entrusted, day after day, with the protection of a child in an uncertain world.

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From Neolithic to Iron Age: The Ancient Gesture of Fertility in Stone

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

This limestone female figurine from the Amuq Valley, surprisingly dated ca. 900–550 BCE that I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago, is much more stylized when compared to the naturalistic human figures of Neo-Assyrian palace reliefs produced at roughly the same time. My research revealed the difference lies in the function of the object and the visual language in which it operates.

Limestone female fertility figurine from the Amuq Valley, dated ca. 900–550 BCE, represents a sylistic representation introduced in the Neolithic period and handed down millenia to the Iron Age of Anatolia. Photographed at the Institute of the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago, by Mary Harrsch.

Following the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1200 BCE, a series of Neo-Hittite (Syro-Anatolian) kingdoms emerged across southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria, including Carchemish, Malatya, Zincirli (Samʾal), and regions adjacent to the Amuq Valley. These polities preserved Hittite religious concepts while incorporating Syrian, Mesopotamian, and local Anatolian elements. Within this cultural milieu, fertility goddesses were not singular or uniform, but manifestations of a broader maternal divine principle. Rather than being sharply individualized deities, they often functioned as local “Great Mothers”, whose identities could overlap with Syrian goddesses such as Kubaba, as well as older Hittite and Anatolian female divinities.

The gesture of the hands supporting or presenting the breasts is among the most enduring motifs in Near Eastern religious imagery, emphasizing fertility, nourishment, and protective female power. This gesture is attested from the Neolithic onward and remains meaningful across Anatolia and northern Syria for millennia. Its authority derives not from innovation but from continuity: by the Iron Age, this iconography had been meaningful for thousands of years.

Pre-pottery Neolithic B figurine from Fakhariyah dated between 9000-7000 BCE in a similar pose that I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient cultures, University of Chicago.

The choice of limestone for this particular figure, however, is significant. Unlike terracotta, which dominates most small fertility figurines, limestone requires greater labor and conveys durability and permanence. In Neo-Hittite and Syro-Anatolian contexts, limestone was commonly used for cult sculpture and architectural reliefs, signaling ritual seriousness and long-term devotional use. Its presence here suggests that this figure was intended to endure—perhaps as part of a household shrine or local cult—rather than serving as a disposable votive.

The contrast with Assyrian art is instructive rather than evaluative. Neo-Assyrian reliefs were state-sponsored, narrative, and political, created to glorify kings and empire. This figurine belongs to a different sphere: intimate, ritual, and devotional. Its abstraction prioritizes symbolic clarity and continuity over individual likeness.

Visual forms like the mother goddeess persisted for thousands of years. It represents the enduring power of belief, material choice, and iconographic tradition, a continuity that connects Neolithic Anatolia to the Iron Age and, ultimately, to later mother-goddess cults such as Phrygian Cybele. For readers interested in exploring the deep continuity of Anatolian mother-goddess traditions, see M. J. Mellink, “Anatolian Mother Goddess Figurines,” which situates Iron Age figurines within a millennia-long religious and iconographic tradition.

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The Evolution of Heroism, from Archetype to Myth: How Gilgamesh Survived Shifts in Political Theology in Ancient Mesopotamia

 by Mary Harrsch © 2026

This Early Dynastic cup from the Temple of Šara at Tell Agrab (in Iraq) and an Akkadian plaque from the reign of Naram-Sin reveal a remarkably stable heroic visual language with the “Master of Animals” motif spanning centuries of Mesopotamian history. In both objects, a nude, bearded male figure subdues dangerous animals through sheer physical strength. This continuity reflects not a single story, but a deeply embedded heroic archetype that long predates the written Epic of Gilgamesh.

This Early Dynastic–period cup, found in the Temple of Šara at Tell Agrab, predates the written Epic of Gilgamesh yet already presents the visual foundations of Mesopotamian heroism. A powerful male figure restrains two lions with his bare hands as they attack a sheep, embodying strength, control, and the protection of domesticated life. His near nudity emphasizes physical power rather than status, while his stylized beard signals authority and maturity. Lacking divine regalia or narrative specificity, the figure represents not Gilgamesh himself, but a heroic archetype—one that would later coalesce into the legendary king of Uruk. Placed within a temple dedicated to a martial, protective deity, the image underscores how heroic identity was ritualized before it became epic. Photographed at the Institute of the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago, by Mary Harrsch.

The Early Dynastic cup from the Jemdet Nasr period (ca. 3100-2900 BCE) shows a powerful full frontal male figure restraining two lions in a symmetrical presentation as they attack a sheep. He is unnamed, unarmed, and not marked as divine with a horned crown or indications of attendants. His near nudity and exaggerated physicality emphasizes strength rather than rank, while his stylized beard signals authority, maturity and potency. In Mesopotamian art, heroes are often shown bearded even when gods may be clean-shaven or abstracted differently.

During this period, the city-states of Uruk, Ur, Lagash, and Kish rose to prominence and kingship ideology was in the formative stage. Found in the Temple of Šara—a deity associated with warfare and protection—the image functioned apotropaically, expressing the hero’s role as a guardian who stands between chaos and the ordered, domesticated world. At this stage, heroism exists as an ideal, not yet bound to a specific narrative.

By the later Akkadian period (2334-2154 BCE), this same heroic body type becomes more mythically charged. On the plaque from the collections of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussells, Belgium, the hero subdues a bull-like creature, often interpreted either as Gilgamesh defeating the Bull of Heaven or as a figure associated with Lahmu, a primordial deity linked to subterranean waters and frequently paired with the kusarikku (bull-man). These figures overlap iconographically because Mesopotamian art prioritized function over fixed identity. Power, protection, and mastery over chaos could be expressed through the same visual form, even when the underlying being—hero, god, or hybrid guardian—was not identified.

The resemblance between this Akkadian plaque and the earlier Jemdet Nasr cup underscores how Gilgamesh iconography evolved gradually. What begins as a generic heroic protector mastering chaos eventually acquires specific mythic associations, such as the defeat of the Bull of Heaven, without ever abandoning its earliest visual foundations. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor U0045269. Photographed at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussells, Beglium.

Under Naram-Sin (2254-2218 BCE), this visual representation acquired new political meaning. Naram-Sin was the first Mesopotamian ruler to openly declare himself divine, collapsing the traditional boundary between god, hero, and king. In this ideological climate, heroic imagery simultaneously evoked myth, cosmology, and imperial authority. Yet this experiment proved deeply unstable as his reign was rent by numerous rebellions.

After the fall of Akkad, Naram-Sin was not remembered as a triumphant god-king, but as a doomed figure. The Curse of Agade portrays his reign as an act of hubris that led to divine abandonment and catastrophe. The message is unmistakable: kings may rule by divine favor, but they must not claim divine identity.

However, heroic imagery did not disappear—Gilgamesh endured, not as a model for living kings, but as a legendary figure whose story reaffirmed a core Mesopotamian truth: even the greatest hero remains mortal. His myth survived precisely because it respected the boundary that Naram-Sin crossed.

Seen across time, these images trace the evolution of heroism itself—from archetype, to myth, to political theology, and finally back to myth again. Gilgamesh did not invent the heroic image, nor did empire own it. Instead, Mesopotamian culture returned to him as a way to explore power without collapsing the fragile line between human and divine.

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