Nabataean Goddess Pendant, 1st Century AD
This disc pendant, made of gold with garnet and glass inlays, depicts Atargatis, the chief goddess of northern Syria and surrounding areas in Classical Antiquity. Primarily she was a goddess of fertility, but, as the baalat (“mistress”) of her city and people, she was also responsible for their protection and well-being.
Nabataeans were an ancient Arab people who inhabited northern Arabia and the Southern Levant. Their settlements in the 1st century AD, gave the name of Nabatene to the borderland between Arabia and Syria, from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. Their loosely controlled trading network, which centered on strings of oases that they controlled had no securely defined boundaries in the surrounding desert. Trajan conquered the Nabataean kingdom, annexing it to the Roman Empire, where their individual culture, easily identified by their characteristic finely potted painted ceramics, became dispersed in the general Greco-Roman culture and was eventually lost.
0 comments:
Postar um comentário