Plaque Figurine of a Naked Woman Holding Her Breasts (AO 29631)
Unknown · Achaemenid period, sixth to fourth century BC
The tallest of the three plaque figurines in this case, ten and a half centimetres high, shows a naked woman standing and supporting her breasts. She wears a round headdress with a headband, a pectoral, two ornaments at the waist and bracelets on each arm. Look at her face, where the features are strongly accentuated, and at the body: the legs are straight and the hips barely marked, giving the figure a columnar, almost architectural stiffness. The museum's record notes traces of polychromy, so the figure was once painted in colour.
The figurine was purchased by the Louvre in nineteen eighty-nine and attributed by style to the region of Aleppo. It is dated to the Achaemenid period, between the Persian conquest of Syria in the sixth century and the arrival of Alexander in the fourth, later than its two neighbours, and the comparison is instructive: the same gesture and the same jewellery persist over centuries while the treatment of the body changes. Under Persian rule northern Syria was a province of a vast empire, but the household religion of its villages went on much as before, with the naked goddess of plenty moulded in clay and kept close to hand.
Did You Know? Made under Persian rule, this figurine repeats a gesture that Syrian craftsmen had been moulding in clay for well over a thousand years.
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