artefact – Book and Sword

artefact

A Neo-Elamite Bitumen Relief

A bitumen relief of a woman sitting cross-leged on a stool in front of a tripod with a fish. A child in the background fans her — “The spinning woman.” Bitumen relief from Susa, c. 800-600 BCE. Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités orientales, SB 2834 – https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010176914 – https://collections.louvre.fr/CGU

We don’t have many pictures of clothed women from the middle of the first millennium BCE in the Near East. Most of the local peoples did not paint scenes of daily life on their pottery, and their stone-carvings show a man’s world or a heavenly world. The Assyrian palace reliefs show some queens and deported women, and one Achaemenid seal shows a wealthy woman seated on a throne. One other picture of a clothed woman is a Neo-Elamite bitumen relief in the Louvre. Its 9.3 cm high, so five times larger than most of the little seals.