- chapter 6: Orientalizing Etruria –
Figure 6.21 Seated fi gures of ancestors in basalt from the Royal Tomb of Qatna, during excavation and
after restoration. Manufactured eighteenth century bc, from a context of fi fteenth-fourteenth century.
Damascus, Musée Nationale. After Pfälzner 2008.The funerary cult, earth-bound for libations and sacrifi ces, thus moved onto a terrace to
simultaneously watch the sky. It is as if the ancestors, as will be shown in the acroteria
of Murlo, and statues of deities on the roofs, were projected into the sky. The terrace is
part of a cult in Near Eastern practice that has precedents in the Bronze Age, as in the
case of the sacred area of Ishtar at Ebla, but that is refl ected in the worship of Adonis
in the West in the Classical and Hellenistic periods.^39 The contemporary appeal to
ambivalent – chthonic and celestial female deities, both funerary and fertility – already
present in Orientalizing iconography, seems at least conceivable by analogy. From the
case of the goddess Hathor and sacred representations of nursing, one may trace the
nude female fi gures that already occur in Italic proto-history, isolated or assembled on