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Stele of the Goddess Allat in the Guise of Athena
Unknown · Roman Imperial, second century AD
A goddess stands frontally in a niche of dark basalt, wearing a crested helmet and carrying a round shield on her left arm; her right hand once held a spear, whose upper part is lost. The stone is a little over half a metre high, broken and repaired, and the carving is deep enough for the figure to stand well clear of the background. A Nabataean inscription on the stele dedicates it, and the name it gives is not Athena but Allat, one of the great goddesses of the Arabs. Look at the heavy, rounded modelling of the folds, typical of the basalt sculpture of the Hauran.
The stele comes from the Hauran, the volcanic plateau around Bosra in southern Syria, in the second century of our era, when Nabataean Arabs lived under Roman rule and expressed their gods in Greek and Roman forms. Allat was equated with Athena because both were armed protectors of cities and warriors. The stone was given to the Louvre in nineteen twenty-eight and formally accepted the following year, a rare image of a deity who would later be named among the false gods of Mecca.
Did You Know? The pre-Islamic Arab goddess Allat, mentioned in the Quran, appears here in full Greek armour as though she had stepped off the Acropolis of Athens.
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