Word: goddesses
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...Great Mother. In the last days of the six weeks of excavation, Mellaart's team of 40 Turkish workmen uncovered what he considers the expedition's most "revolutionary" find: a group of 40 female clay statuettes, all of the Asian Great Mother goddess, but naturalistically carved in a variety of poses. They show the deity as a young girl and mature woman, lying down, squatting asleep with a child on her lap and seated on a leopard throne. Some of the figurines have grotesquely exaggerated pendulous breasts and normally proportioned thighs and buttocks; others reverse the goddess...
Steppingstone Towers. The Sumerians introduced writing, and under their rule the arts flourished. Their temples-dedicated to such gods as to Innin, the goddess of fertility, or to Dumuzi, a kind of Sumerian Adonis-were huge edifices of mud brick made splendid by intricate mosaics of colored earth. The temples rose in staged towers much as did the Tower of Babel, and each formed a kind of artificial mountain-a steppingstone by which the gods could commute to earth. But above all, the Sumerians were a kingdom of sculptors who, in seesawing between realism and abstraction, seem almost modern...
...married for a drunken joke at a harvest festival." For young classicists who outgrow such simplicity, the author forehandedly has prepared two thoroughly adult volumes: his unsurpassed dictionary, The Greek Myths, and his fascinating and much argued-over book of theorizing about the origins of myths, The White Goddess...
Different Faces. The Far East has nearly as many different faces as it has gods. Some tourists try to capture its flavor by slipping into Japanese kimonos and sleeping on the tatami floors of Kyoto inns, where Kannon, the goddess of mercy, dreams among the maple trees. They go as pilgrims to the Great Buddha of Nakamura or, if they get as far as Southeast Asia, stand in awed silence at Angkor, whose 40 square miles of ruins in the Cambodian jungle are about all that remain of the ancient 8th to 11th century Khmer civilization...
...Museums and Archaeological Excavations, started digging in a pit near a wall of the medieval church of St. Homobonus, patron saint of tailors. Penetrating 20 ft. down, they came to a layer of rubbly soil which they recognized as the earth-fill foundation of Roman temples of Mater Mututa, goddess of childbirth, and Fortuna, protectress of women who have been married only once. In this hallowed ground they found twelve fragments of dark brown pottery decorated with incised dots and geometrical figures...