Images of Woman and Child from the Bronze Age Reconsidering Fertility, Maternity, and Gender in the Ancient World

This book is a study of the woman-and-child motif - known as the kourotrophos - as it appeared in the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean. Stephanie Lynn Budin argues that, contrary to many current beliefs, the image was not a universal symbol of maternity or a depiction of a mother goddess. In most of the ancient world, kourotrophic iconography was relatively rare in comparison to other images of women and served a number of different symbolic functions, ranging from honoring the king of Egypt to adding strength to magical spells to depicting scenes of daily life. This work provides an in-depth examination of ancient kourotrophoi and engages with a variety of debates that they have spawned, including their role in the rise of patriarchy and what they say about ancient constructions of gender.

1. Introduction; 2. Egypt; 3. The Levant and Anatolia; 4. Mesopotamia and Iran; 5. Cyprus; 6. Aegean; 7. Conclusions.

Stephanie Lynn Budin teaches at Rutgers University, Camden. She is the author of The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2008) and numerous articles on ancient religion and iconography.