Two terracotta Babylonian heads, a male and a female, were two of three objects restituted to the Republic of Iraq on May19, 2025, by The Metropolitan Museum of Art following an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Terracotta figurines with their dimensions, materials, production techniques, and wide geographical distribution, stand out as some of the most significant carriers of social, cultural, and economic memory. Produced over approximately 5,000 years across almost every part of the ancient world, these figurines were not only objects of economic value but also visible representations of societies’ belief systems and cultural practices. Within this broad framework, this study focuses on the figurative terracottas of the ancient Aegean basin. This serves as a cultural and artistic bridge between the Greek mainland and Anatolia. Focusing on this region allows for a coherent analysis of stylistic and technological developments within a shared coroplastic tradition. This focus was chosen for methodological reasons, as the area presents a diverse, yet internally comparable, corpus of figurines that reflects both local and cross-regional artistic interactions. This approach ensures typological consistency and facilitates a clearer understanding of iconographic and production patterns within a defined cultural framework.
The Archaeology News Network, an online open access, pro-community news site that brings together people in archaeological and related fields, has reported the underwater discovery of a terracotta head off the coast of Nora, Sardinia. Press release by the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for Cagliari.
In the Archaic and early Classical periods, representations of seated women are clearly predominant among the thousands of figurative terracotta pieces discovered in the Artemision of Thasos. The majority of these figurines reproduce the banal image, widely circulated throughout the Mediterranean, of a woman seated frontally with her hands on her knees, most often wearing a diadem associated with a veil. Rare are those that are better characterized by the wearing of a particular headdress, the presence of an object held in a hand brought to the chest, or an animal placed on the knees. Based on an analysis of all the elements of composition, which can be considered as markers revealing an identity, a function, or a field of action, we will attempt to understand the meaning of this image in all its variations and explain its presence in such large numbers in the specific context of the Thasian Artemision.
A data set containing the concept of motherhood as found in figurative terracottas from ancient Italy and Sicily. This includes an extensive bibliography and typological lists.
