The Mother of us all,
The oldest of all,
Hard,
Splendid as rock
Whatever there is that is of the land
it is she
who nourishes it,
it is the Earth
that I sing
Whoever you are,
howsoever you come
across her sacred ground
you of the sea you that fly,
it is she
who nourishes you
she,
out of her treasures
Beautiful children
beautiful harvests
are achieved from you
The giving of life itself,
the taking of it back
to or from
any man
are yours …
Homeric Hymn to the Earth (Ge)1
One of the earliest pieces of figurative sculpture that we have from Sparta is of a woman. She is quite possibly some kind of a Mother Goddess, carved out of stone by a society that had barely discovered how to make pots, or how to work metal. The explicit social, political and cultural muscle of women in this distant past is almost impossible to gauge. But archaeological finds like this – sturdy, glowering, curvy life-givers – surely indicate how powerful early societies thought women to be.
Female figures and figurines turn up throughout the pre-historic levels of the Aegean. Many have been buried in domestic rubbish pits, others are found in graves, sometimes singly, sometimes a dozen or so clustered together. Some have been deliberately violated – often the neck has been neatly snapped and then the figure buried. An act of aggression and disrespect? Possibly not. Breaking a man-made object, particularly an anthropomorphic figure, in pre-history may well have been a recognition of its power, or a way of marking its journey on to another world: an act not of vandalism, but of devotion. Some of the female figurines have been taken to places of great religious significance – sanctuaries, the peaks of mountains, the bowels of caves – to be offered up as gifts to long-forgotten divinities.
There are thousands and thousands of these female figurines, of all shapes and sizes. Some are gloriously fat with elephantine thighs, some attenuated, angular and stringy. They start appearing around 29,000 BC (although some experts are more conservative, and put the date at 25,000 BC). They are most prolific in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean from 8000 to 3500 BC. Whether curvaceous or cubist, whether designed to stand up or lie down, only a tiny fraction of the neolithic figures are distinctly male.2 In the Cyclades, up until 2500 BC, huge numbers of female figurines continue to be produced.3 Ultraviolet analysis of the stone surface shows that many of these were decorated with cinnabar and azurite – the red and blue tracing hair, jewellery, facial features, slashed or spotted tattoos, and in one startling instance single eyes pricked all over the effigy’s face and thigh.4
Most of these little women who would watch with silent eyes the daily lives of their makers are (particularly those from the Cycladic islands) overtly sexualised. In a number the predominant incised decoration is a stark, pubic triangle and two simple breasts. These all-important marks of gender have simply been gouged out of the stone or terracotta. One woman is from Skoura in Lakonia, Helen’s locale. She is about the size and shape of an average loaf of bread, a rather lumpen, amorphous clay creature, inanimate apart from the fingers of one hand which are spread wide, pointing directly down to her sex organs.5
For a number of years these female figurines, these ‘mother-goddesses’, were side-lined. Early collectors described them as ‘barbaric’ and ‘repulsively ugly’. The simple, primitive forms could not compete with highly finished ‘classical’ Greek art and in the 19th century AD were typically thought suit-able for academic rather than public interest. Today in the museums of Serbia, Croatia and Romania the odd lonely figurine can still be found on display in a back room with a ragbag of other pre-historic artefacts. No clue as to its provenance, no label hazarding a guess as to what it might be; here such figurines are still second-class citizens. Many more languish in storerooms, unstudied and half-forgotten.
It is little surprise though that in some quarters these elegant Henry Moore prototypes have become rather fashionable. When I go to Athens, I always make a bee-line for the Goulandris and Benaki Museums in a modish, up-market district, the Kolonaki. The Benaki in particular has an elegant mish-mash of artefacts spanning the period from pre-history to the Greek War of Independence. Emanuel Benakis made his money in the Nile cotton trade, appropriate credentials for a collection that itself would have started off life as a trade-commodity, travelling back and forth across the Eastern Mediterranean.
One comes into the museums out of the glare and urgency of the heart-stoppingly busy highway, the Vasilissis Sofias. The figurines are displayed in a respectful half-light. Children stop chattering; tourists stare long and hard at the stone women, trying to make some sense of them. Of course the purpose of these sexually blunt female figures has had scholars scratching their heads for decades. The problem is that where archaeological context is relatively sparse, the evidence can be manipulated to fit almost any theory. These charismatic effigies are no exception. Because the figures represent women – from a time when we cannot hear people’s voices and rarely find their bones – they tempt one into an emotional reaction, into the hope that these mute creatures, tenderly shaped out of stone or clay or bone or ivory, offer us direct contact with a distant past.
But in fact there are as many different ways to interpret these figurines as they themselves have different body shapes. Although the mistake has been made in the past, it would be over-simplistic to assume that they have a constant, uniform meaning. There are thousands upon thousands of these viragos and one has to take into consideration the different contexts in which they were found and how they span the millennia. Talk to a roomful of archaeologists and the ideas come thick and fast; perhaps they were used for business as contractual tokens, as birth aids or educational tools, symbols of a rite of passage that mirrored the most extreme passage of all, birth. Were they perhaps pre-historic portraits, images of longed-for babies, toys to satisfy the sexual and ludic appetites of the dead, or simply visual art representing a population that was apparently inhabited not just by men and women, but also by hermaphrodites and humans of no sex; were they, some even posit, treasured, pornographic playthings?6
Archaeologists rarely agree, but, over time, a consensus of sorts has emerged. Whatever their function, these forms have authority. They are fecund, uberous creations whose power rests primarily in their sex. The figurines represent, in its purest visual form, individual self-awareness. Each is trying to articulate something about the identity of the human race. With these human images comes, for the first time, hard evidence of how populations were using their creative imaginations to make sense of the world around them. And they seem to be making sense of that world primarily in female terms.7 Whatever their precise purpose, these figurines tell us that Helen’s direct and distant ancestors thought, for some reason, that women were the more noteworthy sex, and that it was essential to create images in their honour.