Written By Anna Smellie
09/11/2024
Fertility, birth and motherhood have always played a key role in the religion of the ancient Greeks. Artemis was called upon to aid women in childbirth after she helped her mother Leto birth her brother Apollo. Demeter’s role as agricultural goddess is secondary to her role as fertility goddess and mother to Persephone. Aristophanes even describes a female-only festival for Demeter in Athens, the Thesmophoria, as centred around fertility. Her devastation at the loss of her daughter to Hades had the power to change the seasons, so it is no wonder the Greeks placed such a great emphasis on ensuring fertility.
This emphasis on fertility takes us to the Cyclades and their hundreds of Late Neolithic-Early Bronze Age sculptures. These sculptures vary massively in size, some being only a few centimetres tall whilst the largest border on a metre and are predominantly made of marble. Though male examples do exist, there is an overwhelming number of female statues, and these are thus the focus here. Archaeologists are only able to give us one confirmed context for these statues – grave goods. This unfortunately does not give us very much to build on in terms of the meaning of these statues because only 40 per cent were excavated properly and found systematically. This means the function of these statues is uncertain, and the primary debate in current scholarship is whether or not these figures had religious significance.
The consistency of the form of these statues across an almost 3000-year period is perhaps the most overwhelming argument for the function of these as votives/images of a specific deity. The fact that similar statues also come from different islands across the Cyclades shows a wide-spread nature of this art, which again indicates a shared religious or cult belief. Attention to detail of the reproductive anatomy of these statues is one of the main features – the faces tend to lack naturalism, having the basic shape of a nose and no other facial detail. Emphasis is placed on the stomach, genitals and breasts. Many of these women appear to be pregnant or to have recently given birth. There is a lot of consistency in the crossed arm pose of these statues. This is reminiscent of cradling a baby, as well as having practical function in terms of increasing the stability of the figure. This certainly argues a case then for these statues to be representing fertility and motherhood in a divine way – the sheer number can point to little other than votive use. The theory is thus, that the Cycladic peoples worshipped some form of Goddess in relation to fertility and motherhood.
Though the statues are all similar, they are not identical. We can find a lot of diversity in terms of size and context. This again suggests a ritual purpose of the statues – they would need to be different sizes for different elements of ritual. Size is also dependent on the accessibility of resources for the individual making them and their social status. Some of the statues have a more steatopygous figure than others – but this again fits into the notion of more naturalism in the reproductive aspects of a woman as it resulted in a fleshy abdomen representative of pregnancy.
The major downfall in this assumption is the complete lack of written evidence suggesting any form of fertility Goddess in the Cyclades. There is, however, evidence in the Near East of a Goddess named Astarte worshipped as a fertility Goddess as early as the 14th century BCE. There was also the Sumerian Goddess of fertility Inanna worshipped around the same time. There is a vast wealth of evidence that present the Near East as a key point of contact for the Cyclades in the Bronze Age, including eastern motifs and techniques in sculpture and pottery. This implies it is not too absurd to suggest this notion of a fertility Goddess, who was depicted frequently in clay figures, was imported to the Cyclades and embedded within the religious life there. The existence of such a Goddess as a precursor to Aphrodite or Demeter in the later Greek world would again fit the pattern of the Classical Pantheon that adopted traits of earlier deities and added them to their own stories.
The anonymity of the faces and the lack of inscriptions or identifiers suggest however that this may not be a specific deity, or at least not one with an established form that we find later in Archaic and Classical Greece. This then indicates that there may not be one exclusive deity for fertility and/or motherhood, but rather these characteristics were idealised and worshipped. This is reminiscent of the Archaic dedications at sanctuaries of Demeter made by women hoping to conceive or praying for successful delivery. The idea of fertility as something prized and aspirational for women is a constant that would certainly align with the creation of these figures.
The other common argument for the function of these statues is that they were used as grave goods. A key argument here is that the rigid pose and the crossed arms of the statues are not meant to mimic a mother but are in fact representing the pose of a dead body. The fact the only confirmed context for the statues being in burial sites makes this all the more convincing. Even though some statues are too big to fit in typical graves there is nothing suggesting they could not have functioned as grave markers, similar to how kouroi were used in the Archaic period.
The anonymity of the faces seems to work against this hypothesis though; they do not represent an individual and the only virtue they do seem to put emphasis on is the notion of fertility shown through pregnancy or recently having given birth. So, whilst it is very possible that they were used as grave goods, it seems more likely that the grave contexts are explained by the fact the deceased was likely a woman and perhaps a mother – this statue would have an apotropaic purpose, protecting the deceased. The apotropaic value works then to tie together this notion of the statues as having a cult purpose, with the statue as a plea for a deity to protect the deceased and ensure they safely reach the underworld. It could also be interpreted as an alignment.
It is clear these statues, whether they held religious or funerary intention, had huge significance across the Cyclades in the Bronze Age. Though there are a number of interesting arguments that place them as grave goods, the general trend of a religious significance attached to fertility and the clear focus on the anatomy of these female statues make it extremely probable that they do represent a Cycladic primordial deity encompassing motherhood and fertility. The trend of these statues as cult statues of a deity centred around fertility and motherhood, identifiable by her anatomy, fits into the image of worship we see later in the Greek world. These statues are ultimately one of the key indicators of early Cycladic religion and their keen interest in fertility as a divine ideal.
Bibliography:
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Astarte”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 6 Sep. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Astarte-ancient-deity. Accessed 24 October 2024.
Hoffman, G. L. (2002), ‘Painted Ladies: Early Cycladic II Mourning Figures?’, American Journal of Archaeology 106, 525-550.
Iossif, P. et al. (2023), Museum of Cycladic Art, <https://cycladic.gr/en/essay/i-ermineia-ton-kykladikon-eidolion/#:~:text=Marble female figurine (detail) 2700,ancestors%2C and even human sacrifices> [accessed 20 August 2024].
Mertens, J. R. (1998), ‘Some Long Thoughts on Early Cycladic Art’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 33, 7-22.
Sotirakopoulou, P. (1998), ‘The Early Bronze Age Stone Figurines from Akrotiri on Thera and Their Significance for the Early Cycladic Settlement’, The Annual of the British School at Athens 93, 107-165.
Featured Image Credit: Marble Female Figure, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/255417.
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