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Hathor’s healing talismans
A series of elegant female figurines, the subject of ongoing research, had been wrongly identified in the past as ‘brides of the dead’. W Benson Harer Jr proposes a new theory to explain their purpose.
During the Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period, a particular type of figurine representing a naked female began to appear. Modelled in the round and truncated at the knee, they are typically about 15cm long, and are adorned with jewellery and body decorations or tattoos. Their bodies are voluptuously sexual, with small breasts, high waists, flat abdomens, full hips and thighs, rounded buttocks, and often prominently demarcated pubic triangles, which sometimes show the vulvar cleft. Cowrie girdles (particularly related to the human female by their resemblance to the vulva) are often worn. The cowrie persisted as a protective amulet for females from Predynastic times through all of p
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