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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Before Order Was King: Chaos Expressed through Animal Imagery from Early Mesopotamia to Predynastic Egypt (ca. 3300–2900 BCE)

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

At first glance, this fragment from Khafajah’s Sin Temple IX that I photographed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago reminded me very much of the obverse of Egypt’s Two-Dog Palette that I photographed at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, as they appear to speak the same visual language. Both present densely packed fields of interlocking animals, ambiguous action, and a lack of clear narrative resolution. Humans, when present, are not dominant. These compositions evoke instability, danger, and forces beyond easy control—an early visual strategy shared across regions at the threshold of complex state formation in the Third Millenium BCE.

Khafajah (Diyala Region), Sin Temple IX, Early Dynastic I–II (early 3rd millennium BCE)
Fragmentary relief from a carved vessel depicting densely interwoven animal figures and a human participant, rendered without registers or a dominant focal figure. The continuous, all-over composition emphasizes movement, conflict, and interdependence rather than narrative resolution. In a temple context dedicated to the lunar god Sin (Nanna), such imagery reflects a Mesopotamian cosmology in which humans, animals, and divine forces operate within a perpetually negotiated order maintained through ritual and institutional religion rather than embodied kingship. Photographed at the Institute for the Study of ancient Cultures, University of Chicago by Mary Harrsch.

Egypt, “Two-Dog Palette” (obverse), Late Predynastic–Early Dynastic period (Naqada III–Dynasty 0/1), ca. 3300–3100 BCE
Cosmetic palette carved with a crowded field of overlapping animals engaged in pursuit and confrontation, lacking strict registers, hieratic scale, or a clearly identified ruler figure. The composition preserves an early Egyptian visual strategy for representing liminality and uncontrolled forces prior to the consolidation of divine kingship. Unlike later dynastic monuments, chaos here is neither fully subordinated nor resolved, marking a transitional phase in Egyptian political and religious ideology. Photographed at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford by Mary Harrsch

Yet this shared imagery masks a profound divergence in worldview that would soon follow, according to my research, driven largely by environmentally shaped political realities.

In Egypt, the predictable annual inundation of the Nile created an agricultural system that could be planned, coordinated, and administered over long time horizons. Surplus could be anticipated, labor mobilized in advance, and resources redistributed through centralized authority. This environmental regularity strongly favored early political unification and long-term continuity. Egypt’s geography reinforced this stability: deserts to the east and west, the Mediterranean to the north, and cataracts to the south functioned as natural buffers that reduced persistent external threats. As a result, political authority consolidated early around a single ruler whose role as organizer of labor, ritual, and landscape appeared inseparable from the continued functioning of the world itself.

This combination of environmental predictability and geographic insulation allowed Egypt to develop a worldview in which order (maʿat) was conceived as singular, enduring, and ultimately guaranteed through kingship. Chaotic forces—so vividly expressed on the Two-Dog Palette—came to be understood as transitional or external, something to be mastered and resolved. Within a few generations, Egyptian elite art would abandon dense animal chaos in favor of compositions asserting clarity, hierarchy, and the decisive action of a divinely sanctioned ruler, as seen in the Narmer Palette.

Mesopotamia followed a different path. There, rivers flooded unpredictably and destructively, arable land lay exposed on open plains, and political authority remained fragmented among competing city-states. No single ruler could plausibly claim permanent control over nature or history. In this context, chaos was not a phase to be overcome but a persistent condition of existence. Religious and political authority developed as institutional, negotiated, and contingent upon divine favor rather than embodied in a god-king.

The Khafajah fragment reflects this enduring Mesopotamian worldview. Its interwoven animals and human figure do not announce conquest or resolution; instead, they visualize a cosmos in constant motion, one that must be continually managed through ritual and divine appeasement rather than definitively ordered. The scene belongs comfortably within a temple setting, where maintaining balance—not proclaiming victory—was the central concern.

Seen together, the Two-Dog Palette and the Khafajah fragment capture a shared early moment of visual experimentation before environmental and political realities pushed Egypt and Mesopotamia in sharply different ideological directions. One culture would come to imagine order as stable, centralized, and conquerable; the other would accept instability as permanent and order as something endlessly negotiated.

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