Mother & Child in Devotional Art

Our most ancient art celebrates motherhood and birth, something our future depends upon!

Some of the earliest depictions of mother and child date back almost 10 millennia and survive in numbers that indicate they were produced as celebratory or devotional objects. As I mention in a previous article for Signifier, the earliest representations of the human figure were abundant women with features that emphasised their fertility. Some of the goddess figures at Çatalhöyük are in the moment of birthing. Among the earliest portrayals of a mother nursing a child are those found at Tell al’Ubaid in modern Turkey, the site of ancient Ur.

mother and child figurines found at the Tell al-’Ubaid site dating to Ur culture of c.7,000–4,000 BCE *

These small devotional statuettes, usually modelled in terracotta, have been labelled ‘Lizard-headed Figures’ and are much loved by UFO theorists and enthusiasts of alternative histories in which aliens once lived among us… At first glance, they are puzzling but a number of more credible theories have been put forward to explain their odd features.

We know from grave sites that ancient Mesopotamian cultures practiced a variety of body modification including head binding to elongate the skull, body scarification and ostentatious facial piercings to accommodate labrets. Interestingly, all these practices have strong parallels with the (less) ancient…