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Photo by Carleton/Garen/Four Corners Media

A symbol of virility, goats were frequently depicted in ancient amulets and statues. While excavating at the Sumerian city of Ur in the 1920s, British archaeologist Leonard Woolley found two gold and lapis-lazuli statues of goats—often mistakenly called “rams” caught in a thicket—dating to the mid-third millennium B.C.