>>15191476

(Please read from the start)

If the reader is not convinced, all he has to do is have a visual comparison with the iconography of Astarte = naked, holding her breasts (from page 1 688) with the iconography of Dea Gravida, fully clothed = covered and very much pregnant…and there is nothing sexual or sexy about pregnancy. Pregnancy projects new life, it doesn’t project lust, desire and sex.

“Votive figures

The votive figures typically show a pregnant female goddesses or woman either seated or standing, often with a hand resting on her abdomen. These figures were made exclusively from terracotta and are typically small. Figures were often depicted as veiled with braided coiled hair pinned to either side of the head, which has led to misleading descriptions as the figures having a "cobra-hood" or "horns". A variant was found in Tripoli, showing the figure holding a cake offering.”

>> It’s time for the old man to give his take on the description of Dea Gravida:

It’s true these figurines are all done from terracotta and they are the right size to be easily carried in one hand. By the way, they are not heavy to carry at all. As I’ve said already many times, these are not votive figures but cult statuettes put inside the house to protect the family whom prays for the divine couple or to Dea Gravida = it’s a household cult, just like it was the situation of Hathor cult = you would find her in almost every household in Ancient Egypt; just like you would find a Bible or a Cross in every Christian household nowadays and a Koran in every Muslim household.

There are a few variants about the Dea Gravida. I mean there is a standard design for her but it varies a bit in the details and I think this variation came along as time passed by. By studying this, we can reconstruct the “evolution” phases of the design. It’s true she is sometimes represented seated and sometimes standing. She is also represented pregnant most of the time with a variant of her not being pregnant, but holding a new born child which is ALIVE – no child sacrifice here. How do I know the child is alive? Because sometimes the child is depicted with one of his arms held upward. I’m attaching pictures of all that I’m talking about here. As you can see from the pictures, despite being a bit different with variants, the design is mostly stereotyped as if there was a mass production for these statues, regardless of what the variant is.

This is a caring mother we are looking at. We can easily understand this by the way she is putting her hands around her belly = showing love, care and protection towards her unborn baby. While in the iconography of her holding her child, you can also see by the way she is holding it that she cares. She holds the child with both hands and cuddles him close to her body, while the head of the child rests either on her chest or on her upper arm = giving support to the baby’s head. Every parent knows that they need to “support” = hold from the back the head of the new born baby because the baby’s neck isn’t strong enough yet to support the weight of the head. The infants need to grow a few months before they can hold their head straight by themselves. Only a loving and caring mother would worry about supporting the head of her new born. If there are parents reading this, they know exactly what I’m talking about here.

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>>15197059

(Please read from the start)

Dea Gravida is fully clothed = covered from head to toe = no nudity here. And she also wears a veil on her head. This is the traditional = native = local image which was spread all over Phoenicia and Canaan. When the cult of the Evil Lady infiltrated = trickled in and merged with the cult of the Dea Gravida = Neith, we started to see Astarte and all of her other aspects and forms stop being represented nude and she started to be represented fully clothed with a veil covering her. This is how we managed to find out till which geographic location the cult of Dea Gravida spread in the Middle East and where it was infiltrated by the cult of the Evil Lady and we understood then that the younger generation confused them, thought they were one and the same deity. The cult of Dea Gravida is the native local form of a female deity which was present, which was worshiped in all of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine before the cult of the Evil Lady wiggled its way in and merged with her cult. From there on, the locals had each a new form for a female deity called Ishtar or Astarte with all the characteristic of the Evil Lady, but mixed with those of Neith = like attributing the power of divination to Astarte when she never had it. Or like representing her covered with a veil, while Ishtar’s original iconography is being represented NUDE, not fully clothed. There are hundreds of variants of how the iconography merged and mutated and I’ve already given to anons one example of how Atargatis (starting page 1 310) clothing transformed and was misunderstood to later become a corset with many breasts. The merger of the queens and the clothing of the Evil Lady was one of the hardest bumps we had to overcome and it took us decades to sort things up. And when we try to explain it to others, they look at us as if our hair turned green magically all of a sudden. They are unable to understand how the mergeroccurred one place at a time, creating hundreds of different variants.

Now let’s talk about the details of Dea Gravida’s clothes and hairdo. I want to remind anons that I’ve only put a few examples = samples of the Dea Gravida statuettes and not put all the collection here. There are variants. So when I talk about something that I didn’t put the picture of is because I couldn’t find it online but I’ve seen it either “live” or in catalogues. Anons might ask where I got my information from. You are forgetting I’m an archaeologist, not a historian. I get my information from the artifacts themselves = I dig them up, clean them, restore them and study/ analyze them. My SOURCES of information are the artifacts themselves and the details they contain. I rely on the artifacts as my SOURCE of information = keep that in mind all the time while reading this thread as I’ve requested anons to do several times already.

Some of the statuettes have faint colorful paint on them (of course depending on the artifact) like the 4th picture of page 1 703. We can see the color of her dress painted in a reddish tone. Such statuette indicated that they were painted and decorated with details which are now lost to us. In other examples like first and second pictures of page 1 707, we can see her hair very clearly in the Ancient Egyptian hairdo or should I say the standard Ancient Egyptian hair style. It’s very obvious to the naked eye. I guess the Ancient Egyptian hairdo is what they are calling in this paragraph as being mistaken for snakes = her Egyptian style braids were mistaken for snakes. Yeah, right! Ancient Egyptian hairdo picture attached with this page for comparison.

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