Image Details
Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum
Waiting eternally for her lover, a woman gazes from her window. Reminiscent of the Egyptian goddess Isis, the “woman in the window,” the most common of the Phoenician ivory motifs, alludes to the cult of Astarte, in which the goddess Astarte lived in a Phoenician palace as a sacred prostitute. From ninth- or eighth-century B.C. Nimrud, the delicate ivory is only four inches tall.