Standing female figure wearing a strap and a necklace

This sculpture is one of a group of statues associated with the Bronze Age of Southwestern Arabia, present-day Yemen. It comes at the beginning of a figural tradition characterized by simplification of human forms into smooth and solid geometric shapes. The statue represents a standing female figure, with a deep groove emphasizing the belly and a clearly indicated pubic triangle. Her legs at first appear truncated but she is complete: her toes, like her hands and fingers, are indicated by incisions. Her face is represented schematically, with simplified eyes, nose, and chin. She wears a strap across her body and a necklace.

Both the subject of a nude female figure with visible rolls of fat and the emphasis placed on the body by shortening and schematizing the limbs are shared with older, Neolithic and even Paleolithic, sculptures found across West Asia and Europe. However, other elements have more in common with later South Arabian art: the frontal, profile, and back planes of the sculpture are separated and there is a tendency, visible especially in the head and shoulders, toward more cuboid shapes, emphasizing abstraction and containment within a blocklike form—features that continued to characterize much figural art of the region more than two thousand years later in the last centuries BCE and early centuries CE.

Similar statues have been found near western highland settlements and in the inner Hadramawt area, in one case at the base of a monument together with secondary human burials. In a new interpretation, it has been proposed that this figure may have functioned as a pestle for the mortar associated with it, in which case the shape of the figure would also have served a functional purpose (L.2023.22.2).