Sacred prostitute figure in iron age: Origins, iconography and distribution

To our modern minds, the words "sacred" and "prostitute" seem to be notions in contradiction. While "sacred" suggests dedication to a divine spirit; "prostitute" assumes the defilement of the human body. Throughout history, the divine mother lived within the various myths of different societies, with the names Inanna in Sumer, Ishtar in Akkad, Astarte in Phoenicia, Aphrodite in Greece and Venus in Rome. The goddess created by the Sumerians found her place and survived in many of the succeeding pantheons. Different communities attributed and idealised goddess with their ideal qualities; worshiped and immortalised her by numerous poetical relics. She has always been the symbol for beauty, attraction, passion, ambition, fight, leadership, canniness and more importantly, the fecundity and fertility. Through her sex and love, she has inspired the humankind and the nature to reproduce, and most esteemed women of different societies emulated to make sex instead of the goddess, in the temples dedicated to her. The subject of this study is the "Sacred Prostitute Figure", encountered as a reflection of the "Astarte-Aphrodite Cult" on the pottery, spread throughout Levant and Western Mediterranean, between Anatolia and Cyprus. Preceding the Iron Age, the cults in relation to the goddesses, where the Sacred Prostitution Figure originated from, were analysed with the help of the written an archaeological data. The iconography on the archaeological material from the analysed cultures were used to determine the possible transition zones. The relation between the "Lotus" and the "Sacred Prostitute" is tried to be revealed in the light of the archaeological material. Key Words: Iron Age, Sacred Prostitute Figure, Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite.