Another article on this find:
An international team of archaeologists has unearthed what might be the earliest representation of childbirth in western art, they announced today. Consisting of two images of a woman giving birth to a child, the intimate scene was found on a small fragment from a ceramic vessel that is more than 2,600 years old.
The image show the head and shoulders of a baby emerging from a mother. Portrayed with her face in profile and a long ponytail running down her back, the woman has her knees and one arm raised.
A fun loving and eclectic people who among other things taught the French how to make wine, the Romans how to build roads, and introduced the art of writing into Europe, the Etruscans began to flourish around 900 B.C., and dominated much of Italy for five centuries.
Since their puzzling, non-Indo-European language was virtually extinguished (they left no literature to document their society),the Etruscans have long been considered one of antiquity’s great enigmas. Indeed, much of what we know about them comes from their cemeteries: only the richly decorated tombs they left behind have provided clues to fully reconstruct their history.
Poggio Colla is one of the few sites offering insight of the Etruscan life in a non-funerary context. It spans most of Etruscan history, being occupied from the seventh to the second century B.C.
Centering on the acropolis, a roughly rectangular plateau, the site was also home to a sanctuary: numerous votive deposits indicate that for some part of its history, it was a sacred spot to a divinity or divinities.
The abundance of weaving tools and a stunning deposit of gold jewelry discovered in previous excavations, have suggested that the patron divinity may have been female.
In this view, the ancient depiction of childbirth becomes even more interesting, according to Greg Warden, professor and associate dean for academic affairs at the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU and a director of the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project.
"Might it have some connection to the cult, to the kind of worship that went on at the hilltop sanctuary?," Warden wondered.
Perkins speculated that the woman giving birth could be a representation of an Etruscan goddess, suggesting that Poggio Colla was the location of a cult-site for an Etruscan fertility goddess.
"She would represent a new Etruscan myth, as we know of no Etruscan goddess who gives birth in Etruscan mythology," Perkins said.
The finding, which will be detailed at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Philadelphia in January, is “a most exciting discovery” according to Larissa Bonfante, a world-renowned expert on the Etruscan civilization. “She could be a goddess, probably apotropaic [protective],” Bonfante told Discovery News.
Thanks to coldrum for the link to news.discovery.comhttp://news.discovery.com/history/etruscan-mother-birth-art-111019.html">news.discovery.com>.
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