Wall Appliqué with a Nude Goddess with Hathoric Curls
Unknown · Mid third century BC, circa 260 to 240 BC
A fragment of a terracotta wall plaque, fourteen centimetres high, with the figure of a nude goddess modelled and applied to its surface. Her hair falls in two thick locks that curl upward at the ends, the coiffure the museum calls Hathoric after the Egyptian goddess Hathor, whose curled wig was copied across the Levant for centuries. Look at her eyes: they are shaped like coffee beans, a simple oval with a slit, a trick of modelling that gives the face a lively, almost startled expression. The clay was tempered with plant fibres, visible as small hollows in the surface.
The appliqué was found in nineteen thirty-eight in the western excavation area at Ras Shamra, but it is far younger than most of the objects in this room. The museum dates it to the middle of the third century BC, when a modest settlement occupied the ruins of Ugarit under the Seleucid kings. It was given to the Louvre in nineteen seventy-four. The goddess with Hathoric curls is a very old Levantine type, and its persistence here, a thousand years after the city's fall, shows how deeply the image was rooted in the religious life of the Syrian coast.
Did You Know? Made a thousand years after Ugarit's destruction, this plaque shows the same curly-haired goddess type still being worshipped on the site in Hellenistic times.
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