ABSTRACT
The artistic remains of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages in most of Europe present a startling contrast to the Palaeolithic caves with their haunting animal pictures. While female figurines and animal images are no less prominent among the earliest finds from peasant settlements in Western Asia, the continuity with the older hunters’ imagery is more marked in the case of the mother-figures. Thus both in Egypt and in Western Asia important elements of the old hunters’ cult survived in forms adapted to the needs not only of peasant cultures but even of urban civilizations. The surviving Egyptian monuments of the Old and Middle Kingdoms are mostly confined to royal funerary temples or the private tombs of great dignitaries of the realm. The proto-literate phase of Mesopotamian archaeology is known as the Uruk period from remains found on the site of Gilgamesh’s famous city, the biblical Erech and modern Warka.
