Material Religion

The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief

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female figurines in early christian egypt:

reconstructing lost practices and meanings

David Frankfurter

To cite this article: David Frankfurter (2015) female figurines in early christian egypt:
reconstructing lost practices and meanings, Material Religion, 11:2, 190-223, DOI:
10.1080/17432200.2015.1059129

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 female igurines in
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early christian egypt:

reconstructing
lost practices and
meanings
david frankfurter

boston university
 ABSTRACT
This paper addresses the great diversity of female igurines
produced during the Christian period (IV–VII CE) in Egypt, from
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Aswan to Karanis to the Abu Mina pilgrimage city. While

not documented in any texts, by their sheer number the
igurines offer important evidence of local religious practices
performed under the aegis of Christianity (e.g., at saints’
shrines) yet without any ostensible connection to Chris-
tian liturgy or mythology. Their usage seems to have been
predominantly votive, signifying a desired procreative body
to deposit in hope, while the diversity of igurines points to
an autochthonous, rather than imported or imposed, ritual
tradition. The paper, part of a larger project on the local sites
of Christianization, uses these igurines and their forms to
reconstruct the iconographic strategies of the workshop,
the ritual procedures of the client or ritual subject (at shrine
or tomb), and the nature of domestic altars as stages for
images.

Keywords: Early Christian art, female igurine, Abu Mina,

Karanis, pilgrimage, Egypt, workshop, votive

David Frankfurter is Professor of Religion at

Boston University (USA) and the author of Elijah
in Upper Egypt: The Apocalypse of Elijah and
Early Egyptian Christianity (Minneapolis 1993),
Religion in Roman Egypt: Assiimilation and
Resistance (Princeton 1998), Evil Incarnate:
Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic
Abuse in History (Princeton 2006), and many
articles on popular religion, magic, religious
violence, and the dynamics of Christianization in
Egypt and the ancient Mediterranean World. His
work on Roman and Christian Egypt has been
aided with fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute
for Advanced Study and the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation. This paper is part of
a larger project, remodeling the Christianization Material Religion volume 11, issue 2, pp. 190–223
of Egypt through close study of religious agents DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2015.1059129
and their social worlds. © Taylor & Francis 2014
 Introduction
The fourth through seventh centuries span the period
when Christianity established itself in Egypt, partly through
coercion, partly through the sheer organization of church
and monasteries, and partly through such novel charismatic
landmarks as holy men and saints’ shrines (Frankfurter
2003, 2007a). Before the fourth century we see the eco-
nomic decline of temple cults; afterwards we see the

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

eficient spread of Islam. Thus during these centuries we

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:

can speak of “Christian Egypt,” with the sense that the main
religious institution and authority in the culture was a hierar-
chical, if perpetually schismatic, Christianity, and that people
on the ground (as it were) framed their everyday lives to
various extents in terms of a Christian pantheon, landscape,
mythology, textuality, and hierarchy.
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The processes by which Egyptian culture assimilated

David Frankfurter
Christianity emerge not only in texts – biblical
commentaries, apocrypha, monastic sermons – but also
through the artifacts of devotion. Such artifacts range from
the architecture, textiles, mosaics, and wall paintings that
constituted the sensory world of late antique Egyptian
Christianity (e.g. Davis 2001; Lazaridou 2011; Evans
and Ratliff 2012), to the amulets, lamps, medallions, relic
containers, and ampullae – stamped clay vials for holy
substances – that sustained pilgrims’ economies (Caseau
2007; Vikan 2010). In action, in performance, as part of the
lived world of late antique Egyptian people, these materials
lent Christianity a texture, an indigenous familiarity, a
sensory richness, and a visuality, whether in the spectacular
scale of a basilica or the miniature scale of a pilgrim’s token.

Volume 11
This is the materiality of devotion addressed in this paper,

Issue 2
a perspective on religious life as experienced irst and
foremost through ritual acts conducted in the context of
things, places, and images.
Among the most theoretically challenging artifacts of
the Christianization of Egypt is a large and diverse corpus
of terracotta female igurines (Figures 1–7) that lack any
mention in literary or documentary sources and that seem,
192 on the one hand, to continue ancient Egyptian traditions of
goddess or fecundity igurines as a kind of “survival,” and
yet, on the other hand, to serve (at least in some regions)
as expressions of Christianity. These kinds of artifacts, so
well represented in archaeological collections that they must
have been a signiicant part of religious life, challenge us to
consider them as aspects of Christian materiality, not simple
David Frankfurter

holdovers from a “pagan” era. Studies of the acculturation

Material Religion

of religions, whether Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism,

are moving away from a model in which pure and novel
teachings mixed haphazardly with the vestiges of some
monolithic religious past, producing erroneous mixtures and
 FIG 1
Female igurines found at Abu
Mina site. Molded terracotta,
V-VII CE. From Kaufmann, Die
Menasstadt, taf. 73. Public
domain.
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primitive survivals. New concepts of syncretism address

the regular negotiation between familiar and authoritative
religious discourses, generally in the context of material
media and traditional geography, carried out by everyone
193 in a culture. Thus, even if female igurines of different
types were used for millennia in Egypt, how can we still
understand the particular types of the Christian period as
integral to the experience of Egyptian Christianity? And how,
conversely, can we understand Egyptian Christianity as
embedded in such materials, as bound inevitably to such
iconic objects?
But most challengingly, given the silence of literary
sources towards the igurines, how can we use the
forms themselves, as well as their sparsely documented
provenances (shrine, home, and grave) and even
comparative materials to reconstruct their use and meaning?
 FIG 2
Standing woman in long dress, holding
child in arms. Molded terracotta with
traces of paint, woolen cloth, and remains
of bronze earring. Antaiopolis, from
cemetery, V-VII CE. H: 18.1 cm. British
Museum PE 1924.10-06.42. Photograph
provided by British Museum.

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:
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David Frankfurter
Volume 11
The Corpus of Female Figurines from Late Antique

Issue 2
Egypt
Deriving from workshops all over Egypt, associated with
saints’ shrines like Abu Mina (see map), and in suficient
numbers to suggest an important and basic element of
devotional practice from the ifth through at least the eighth
centuries, the igurines demand to be incorporated some-
how into the history of Christianity in Egypt. And yet there
194 are no literary or documentary witnesses to their use or
range of uses – no polemics in sermons, no church invento-
ries, no instructions in magical texts, no allusions in miracle
stories. Often these textual sources provide allusions to
popular religious practices, especially when these practices
suggest a reprehensible “heathenism” to their authors or
when a practice has become an important local tradition,
David Frankfurter

like incubation for dreams of saints. But myriad local prac-

Material Religion

tices in late antiquity escaped all documentary or narrative

witness, and the use of igurines in late antique Egyptian
Christianity seems to be one such ritual tradition: most likely
overlooked rather than deliberately silenced. We are left,
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195

Map of Egypt in late antiquity. Sites in boldface are discussed in the essay. Map by
Ross M. Twele, Ancient World Mapping Center, Chapel Hill NC.
 FIG 3
Female igurine in orans posture.
Terracotta with painted details. From
grave, Antaiopolis (Upper Egypt),
VI-VII CE. H: 15 cm. British Museum
1982.05-26.219. Photograph
provided by the British Museum.

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:
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David Frankfurter
Volume 11
Issue 2

196

FIG 4
Female igurine. Terracotta with
painted eyes, necklace. From
Karanis, IV-V CE. H: 14.6 cm; W:
David Frankfurter
Material Religion

6.8 cm; D: 2.1 cm. University

of Michigan, Kelsey Museum of
Archaeology 3432. Photograph
provided by Kelsey Museum.
 FIG 5
Standing nude and bejewelled mater
lactans in aedicula. Molded terracotta
with paint accentuating pubis and sides
of body. Provenance unknown, V-VII CE. H:
14.4 cm; W: 5.9 cm; D: 3.5 cm. Musée de
Beaux-Arts, Lyon, Inv. G 175. Photograph
provided by the Musée de Beaux-Arts.
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therefore, with the igurines themselves, trying to recon-

struct their meaning and the nature of their widespread use.
Of the hundreds of late antique igurines in museums,1
most are unprovenanced, having entered the antiquities
market from casual or local collecting (e.g. Török 1993:
30–31, on the Budapest museum’s extensive holdings). A
197 representative number of igurines were excavated from
domestic sites (e.g. Karanis: Allen 1985: 90–102), graves
and tombs (e.g. Antaeopolis: Bailey 2008: 3391, 3401),
and quite possibly a monastic context (Sohag: Bailey
2008: 3387), so that we can presume some likely “ritual
zones” in which the igurines served as traditional devices.
But a particularly important corpus of these igurines was
excavated from the extensive late antique pilgrimage
complex of Abu Mina, some forty kilometers southwest of
Alexandria. These igurines have distinctive forms (Figure 1)
and were found in conjunction with molds and even pottery
workshops, the same workshops that produced the famous
 FIG 6
Seated mater lactans. Hand-
modelled terracotta with traces of
paint. Provenance unknown, V-VI CE.
H: 16 cm; W: 8.5 cm; D: 3.5 cm.
Budapest, SzépmüvészetiMúzeum
84.16.A. Photograph provided by
Szépmüvészeti Múzeum.

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:
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David Frankfurter
FIG 7

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Figurine of reclining woman wearing

Issue 2
crown. Painted terracotta. From
Antinoë (North Necropolis); V-VII
ce. Florence, Istituto Papirologico
“Vitelli”, IPV Coll. Arch. inv. 954.

198
David Frankfurter
Material Religion

ampullae for St. Menas’s oil (Figure 10), which pilgrims

carried throughout the Mediterranean world (Kaufmann
1910; Grossmann 1998: 298–300; Bangert 2010). (A good
number of the female igurines from St. Menas also seem
 (a) (b) (c)

(d)
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FIG 8
Female igurines from domestic sites at Hibis/Ain el-Turba, Kharga Oasis, IV-VI CE, New York,
Metropolitan Museum of Art. a) Hand-modelled with robe and outstretched arms (accEssion number
25.10.20.48; 24.4 × 718.3 × 79.7 cm). b) Hand-modelled with knot for kerchief by neck, incisions
in torso to hold cloth garment (?), and puncture-marks in breast (accession number 25.10.24.30;
10.9 × 7.2 × 3.7 cm). c) Nude igurine in orans position, half-molded with added details of coiffure at
neck and anklets (accession number 25.10.24.33; 13.5 × 78.9 × 74 cm). d) Heads of female igurines
in distinctive “bird’s head” form typical of Kharga oasis. Photographs (a–c) by Tom Vinton, (d) by the
author.

to have been carried away, at least as far as Alexandria,

see Martens 1975). Along with a few other groups of
igurines that show some association with Christian saints’
cults (Syene: Ballet and Mahmoud 1987; MacCoull 1990;
199 Antinoë: Antinoe 1998: 109–11; Arsinoë: Kaufmann 1913:
106–7; see below on Phib igurines), the Menas corpus
demonstrates that female igurines were not simply a local
folk or family practice in Egypt but had been drawn into
the material and ritual culture of Christianity – that their use
was regarded as acceptable tradition in the spectrum of
Christian practices here. Any reconstruction of the function
and meaning of the igurines must therefore reckon with
their integration into Christian practice as well as their vitality
in local religious cultures. This paper seeks to capture
precisely this multidimensionality of functions and religious
meanings.
 FIG 9
Standing female nude igure, holding
castanets above head. Molded
terracotta, with remains of paint.
Karanis, Egypt.
III CE. H: 14.5 cm; W: 8.6 cm; D: 5.25
cm. University of Michigan, Kelsey
Museum of Archaeology 6483.
Photograph provided by Kelsey
Museum.

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:
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David Frankfurter
How to describe these female igurines from the

Volume 11
Christian period in Egypt? They are crudely but attentively

Issue 2
crafted representations of women: sometimes with babies,
sometimes with tambourines, sometimes nude, more often
dressed, and often with some elaborate molded hairstyle
and painted attributes. They range from about twelve to
eighteen centimeters in height and often include holes for
hanging or for adding jewelry.
None bear any speciic identifying signs – as a particular
200 divine or legendary igure – although over the years
archaeologists have variously regarded some igurines as
Mary, Isis, or some other goddess. Indeed, they seem to
resist most indications of mythic identity we might want
to impose on them and demand an interpretive approach
that does not begin with iconographic identity (Lesure
2002; Clark 2009). Their general depiction of aspects
David Frankfurter

of maternity, usually emphasizing pregnancy, breasts,

Material Religion

sexuality, or accompanying infants, suggests that they

were crafted somehow to mediate procreative success,
a basic element of pre-modern women’s experience and
social status cross-culturally (Polaczek-Zdanowicz 1975;
 FIG 10
Menas ampulla, showing
St. Menas between two camels,
used to transport holy oil from
Abu Mina pilgrimage site as the
saint’s “blessing.” From Damanhur
(Hermopolis Parva), IV-VII CE
(dimensions). London, British Museum
EA 38460. Photograph provided by
British Museum.
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Pinch 1983; Török 1993: 30–31; Colin 2006; Waraksa

2009; Frankfurter 2014).
Along with provenances in the context of saints’ shrines
we must note the great diversity of the female igurines.
Some are nude (Figures 5, 8c, 11), some dressed modestly;
some hold babies, others their hands in orans position
(Figure 3) or at the waist (Figure 1); some are free-standing
(Figures 1, 2, and 5), others can be hung or laid down in
some space; some are crudely hand-modelled (Figures
4, 6, 8a–b), others are products of molds (Figures 1, 3, 5,
and 11). This diversity is regional: the Abu Mina selection
(Figure 1) is different from those found in Thebes (Figure 3)
or in the Fayyum (Figures 4, 7 and 9); and all those from
201 the Nile valley differ from the igurines discovered out in
the Kharga and Dakhleh oases (Figure 8a–d). This diversity
suggests that the manufacture and use of the igurines
was stimulated in autochthonous context rather than as
the result of the marketing of a new ritual device, image,
or mold – as one sees (for example) in earlier, Hellenistic
Egypt with images of Isis-Aphrodite or Sarapis, in which
one iconography spreads among workshops and temples
through the inluence of molds and archetypes (Ballet
1999, 2000; Boutantin 2006). Here it seems that each
community, each terracotta workshop, responded to an
ongoing autochthonous need for such igurines, just as it
 did for bowls and pots (Ballet and Vichy 1992: 119–21).
This autochthonous context of their manufacture and use
should be an important element in the reconstruction of the
igurines’ religious meanings (but not, I would argue, license
to reject any generalization across the full corpus of late
antique female igurines).
So far I have proposed two parameters for the
interpretation of the igurines as artifacts of (Christian)
religion in late antique Egypt. First, on the basis of their

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:
widespread manufacture and abundance, and despite the
silence about them on the part of church and monastic
leaders, they were a vital part of the practice of religion in
Christian Egypt, at least before the Muslim conquest. And
second, their regional diversity speaks to autochthonous
motivations – a “native” impulse, as it were: the product of
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individual families or village workshops as much as the large

David Frankfurter
potteries at Abu Mina.
As for the ritual subjects in the choice, occasional
manufacture, and spatial deployment of the igurines,
women were the most likely users. We cannot, of course,
exclude the possibility that men (or even couples together)
may also, occasionally, have chosen and deployed the
igurines for procreative success on behalf of wives. Yet
there is good reason both ethnographically and historically
that women, alone or in groups, would have been the
primary ritual subjects and agents in shrine or tomb visits
for procreative success.2 Roman and late antique Egypt
was a virilocal society, in which brides joined the husband’s
parents’ household at marriage and there fell under
the authority and even regulation of the mother-in-law.

Volume 11
Childbearing, especially of sons, brought the young wife

Issue 2
status in the household and neighborhood, while “the failure
to bear children was ... disastrous for a woman’s standing
in her husband’s home and for her security and well-being
in her later years” (Huebner 2013: 148). At the same time,
husbands tended to work away from the home, so that
ritual agency in the assurance of pregnancy – that is, the
creative initiative in visiting shrines, performing devotions,
202 or improvising ritual acts – lay on the wife and the solidarity
she might have gained with other women in the house
or neighborhood (Huebner 2013: 151; compare Behlmer
2007: 409–12).
How should we proceed in imagining the igurines as
ritual components?3 From their forms and their occasional
ind-spots two broad performative models present
David Frankfurter

themselves: as souvenirs or “blessings” from the shrine

Material Religion

(like the iconic ampullae (Figure 10) in which pilgrims to the

Abu Mina shrine took away holy oil to protect and to heal),
and as votive or communicative media meant to function
in some designated space at the shrine (or elsewhere).
 The irst model can be inferred from the discovery of some
igurines in Alexandria probably crafted at the Abu Mina
shrine (Martens 1975; Parandowski 1990), and also from
the molding of some igurines to be free-standing. (Figures
1–2) In this case the igurines would ultimately grace
domestic shrines or other marked sites in private homes
(Frankfurter 1998: 131–42; Bodel 2008; compare Kumar
1984). The second model is suggested by the discovery of
igurines in locations within the St. Menas basilica. Bought
and deposited at the shrine as part of a private supplication
or vow to the saint for aid in the maternal process, they
would both communicate a desire and accentuate – give
potency to – the act of pilgrimage and devotion (Frevel
2008, esp. 30–31, 42; Budin 2011: 99, 117, 134–35; Pinch
and Waraksa 2009; for Christian Egypt, Antinoe 1998: 101;
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Caseau 2007).

Female Figurines in the Late Egyptian Context and

Comparative Context
I take the position in this paper that ritual artifacts from a
particular period should be interpreted in the broad context
of the predominant religion in its “lived” form (and not, for
example, as manifestations of “pagan survival”). That said, it
is important to recognize that female igurines did not spring
up de novo in Christian Egypt. Female igurines comprise
a widespread phenomenon of European, Mediterranean,
and Near Eastern cultures from the Neolithic period through
Roman antiquity and a topic of perennial interest among
archaeologists (Bahrani 1996; Bailey 1996; McDermott
1996; Lesure 2002; Moorey 2003; Clark 2009; Budin
2011); and Egypt in particular saw a variety of (usually nude)
terracotta igurines placed in tombs or domestic spaces
from Pharaonic antiquity through the Roman period (Allen
1985: 81–90; Pinch 1983, 1993: 198–234; Waraksa 2009;
Teeter 2010 (e.g., Figure 9)). They point to a traditional use
of igurines in local Egyptian religion to signify the female
self in supplication, in desire – perhaps for pregnancy, and
203
perhaps to signify to some supernatural authority, like an
entombed ancestor, a ritual subject’s plight (e.g. Schott
1930).
But these comparanda from earlier Egypt (and the
ancient world) take us only so far in showing that female
igurines of some sort were typical ritual implements that
mediated the symbolism (e.g. of procreative fertility), the
ritual loci (e.g. shrine or tomb), and the real bodies of the
ritual agents. Moreover, the mere fact of the igurines’
precursors do not suficiently make sense of the igurines
in a Christian culture. To move from mere archaeological
description and ritual inference to the interpretation of
religious practice and to a more dynamic theory of their
 iconography we need to throw our net much more widely
than the ancient Mediterranean, to the various domestic
and ritual dolls documented and collected cross-culturally
– quite often in Christian environments (e.g. Ryan 1999:
227–28).
Preparing and dressing dolls for festival occasions,
rocking them or immolating them, hiding them or installing
them on altars for luck, sometimes naming them Jesus or

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

some saint or some local spirit, or sometimes just “doll” –

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:

what these modern examples offer that the ancient artifacts
do not is the intimately material and gestural relationship
that the house-doll or igurine invites from the ritual
practitioner, festival participant, or supplicant (Trexler 2002;
Hughes 2012; compare Morocco, Westermarck 1926, 1:79,
335, 340–43; 2:222–23). These varying doll traditions all
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involve a series of “moments” of co-constitution, between

David Frankfurter
crafting and ultimate disposal, in which the igures are
imbued with social potency and agency; in which that
agency is performed in some public or private setting; and
in which ritual transformations are mediated through the
vehicle and social agency of the igure.4
It is from this standpoint that we should approach the
late antique female igurines: not simply as representations
of particular saints or goddesses but as mutable vehicles
of ritual eficacy that situated rituals spatially and materially
and condensed bodily experience – experiences like that
of prayer and supplication, of pregnancy and lactation, and
of attendance at a shrine or before an ancestor. I will thus
examine the igurines according to three spatial contexts:
the workshop, the saint’s shrine, and the domestic altar,

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Issue 2
with some attention also to devotions at tombs. Each of
these spatial contexts involves a “visual regime” according
to which objects are set up, arranged, noticed, respected,
interpreted, or ignored according to both habitus and spatial
constraints. Each spatial context also involves a “social
world”: a low of men and women, interacting, inhabiting,
or avoiding according to custom or regulation.5 And each
involves a type of “agency” with which the ritual subject
204 imbues the igurine. At the saints’ shrine, the tomb, and the
domestic altar it is the ritual subject who is the motivating
agent, while the workshop involves the creative agency of
craftsmen.

Genesis of the Female Figurine in Egyptian

David Frankfurter
Material Religion

Christian Culture: Workshops and the Production of

Choice
Let us begin with the crafting of the igurines in workshops
(Kaufmann 1910: 197–207; Ballet and Mahmoud 1987;
Ballet and Vichy 1992). What might be intended in the
 production of such an artifact? For one thing, it is not an
image of a woman that the craftsman forms but, irst and
foremost, a ritual medium. Through the public production,
exchange, and use of such igurines throughout late antique
Egypt, the igurines – as ritual media – were supposed to
condense social interaction, travel, and social identity in the
image itself. It might be brought along from home or bought
at the culmination of pilgrimage, and never in an entirely
“private” context. As with contemporary local or regional
pilgrimages, the ritual subject sets off with sister, mother,
friend, or husband, and she adheres to gestures and hab-
itus, whether in hilarity or solemnity, by the market-stalls,
in the shrine itself. It is to this kind of social, even collective
engagement with the shrine that the great range of igurines
– orans, lactans, pregnant – that workshops at a shrine like
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Abu Mina responded.

These, then, are the social dynamics that the igurine is
supposed to crystallize; and the workshop – often itself a
family enterprise – participates fully in this social world. As
part of the culture and world of desires in which the igurines
play an essential role, the workshop perpetuates both the
custom and the habitus, and cultivates creative thought
about its material expression. Even those igurines that
required pressing clay into molds involved more attention
on the part of the craftsman than our modern concepts of
“mass-production” allow. Hand-modelling or illing the mold,
adding detail with stick, knife, or paintbrush, tying on cloth
or threads, afixing earrings; each act conveys a conidence
in what will be attractive to buy and eficacious in situ.
The craftsman becomes the interpreter and revitalizer of
traditions she knew as a girl, that her (or his) mother and
grandmother knew. She may do this work in the context of
telling or recollecting stories of the igurines’ use: who they
represent and how they were used in the past. Indeed, we
should not underestimate the importance of storytelling
to sanction and direct such materials in religious life.
The design and crafting of the igurines thus relects two
capacities on the part of the workshop: familiarity with the
205 various ritual gestures and places in which the igurines
serve as media; and the intention to create eficacy – that
is, to make an object that will work as votive image, mimetic
vehicle, or surrogate appeal.
I want to stress this quest for eficacy (rather than,
say, precision in iconic representation) on the part of the
craftsman, partly because it puts these igurines on a
functional continuum with a great range of ritual images
– icons, statues, paintings, and more – that historians like
Freedberg (1989), Stewart (2003), Elsner (2007), and Bynum
(2011) have been disengaging from an older paradigm of Art
History in order to stress ritual rather than aesthetic power.
 But an attention to eficacy – in mimetic representation,
supernatural communication, ritual handling or placement
– also helps us to conceptualize the sometimes crude
or jarring forms that craftsmen developed in the local
production of female igurines: nudity, for example, which
might seem anomalous among Christian media (Figures 5,
8c, 11). Yet instead of resolving this anomaly by appeal to
a putative “heathen” legacy (Isis? Aphrodite?) in Christian
terracotta workshops, we should consider the magical

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

power of the nude igurine to convey to saint or ancestor a

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:

receptivity for conception and maternity on the part of the
supplicant or to bless her or her household with fecundity
(Bahrani 1996).
Another detail in the production of these igurines also
bears on this issue of eficacy and mimesis on the part of
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craftsmen: their attention to eyes and hairstyles (Bailey

David Frankfurter
2008: 45–6) (Figures 1, 3–5). Even in the crudest igurines
the attention to these “cosmetic” features suggests that
such details were crucial to their eficacy – they made the
igurines “work.” But why? What did they signify? Eye-
highlighting and hair-style signiied public self-presentation
and could render a girl a woman. These adornments lent
a woman social visibility and framed and emphasized her
portals of communication (Olson 2008: 116).
For example, a story from the Miracles of St. Menas, the
principal public propaganda for the Abu Mina pilgrimage
shrine (whence so many female igurines have been
excavated), describes a barren woman lamenting that
she bore no adornment to the shrine: “She prayed and
besought God with tears, seeing all the women wearing

Volume 11
gold and silver and diamonds and carrying their children,

Issue 2
but she had no adornment of gold or silver because of
the grief in her heart; and therefore she was illed with
envious longing” (Drescher 1946: 133, txt 43). At about
the same time, ive hundred and sixty kilometers south,
Abbot Shenoute complained that “your daughters and
their mothers apply ... perfume to their head(s) and
eyeshadow to their eyes, adorning themselves to deceive
206 those who see them ... [while] going to the martyr’s shrine”
(Amélineau 1909: 201). But highlighting the eyes must
have meant more than an inclination to lirt. It signiied
public presence, status, and quite likely a visual receptivity
to the saint’s presence, for a number of ritual spells from
Roman Egypt prescribe various types of eyepaint as part
of the preparations to gain a “direct vision” of a god.6 All
David Frankfurter

these details endowed the igurines with the capacity to

Material Religion

idealize the prospective buyer and supplicant, to represent

her in a higher class, with public inery, whether for social
status or for authority with supernatural agents. This was a
component of the craftsman’s innovation.
 Participants in a culture in which maternity brought social
status, especially within the household, terracotta craftsmen
were fully agents in the creation of these igurines and the
maintenance of their accompanying ritual performances.
Unlike the Menas pilgrims’ ampulles (Figure 9) that seem
to have derived their iconography from some painting or
mosaic in the main Abu Mina basilica grounds, the igurines
do not index some master-image or prototype – beyond
the maternal igure itself. The forms come down to the
shop or family’s own notion of iconographic eficacy:
which construction of the female form would locally serve
procreative ritual.

Figurines in Culture: The Ritual Subject (Client) as

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Agent
We turn now to the client, the ritual performer in her imme-
diate social context, whose agency lies in choosing a igu-
rine from the selection offered by the workshop or, in some
cases, hand-modelling a igurine herself from local clay; and
in depositing the igurine at a shrine, by a tomb, or in some
domestic site. Through this series of performative moments
the igurine also becomes imbued with the agency of the
ritual subject, extending her presence, selfhood, and inten-
tionality to new situations.
The process of choosing a igurine involved family
custom (what did my sisters do?) and companions’ opinions
(“choose this one – it worked for my daughter!”), a sense
of the custom of the shrine, and of course an interest in
mimesis: which could be me? Which should be me? Which
would I like to be? Which might represent my desires? David
Morgan describes a process of recognition whereby an
image is drawn into meaningfulness as a ritual object, and
the image is endowed with the mimetic capacity to objectify
the self or to conjure empathy through the image (Morgan
1998: 18, 34–58). That process might involve the gaze
on one’s own body as mimetic of the igurine (and vice-
versa), as LeRoy McDermott proposed for neolithic igurines
(McDermott 1996). But the choice and identiication with the
207
image takes place in a social, if not collective, situation, with
recommendations from accompanying women or (at least)
a sense that the igurines, their function, and procreative
fertility itself all involve tradition and responsibility.
The ritual subject might craft the image herself, perhaps
in the course of visiting a tomb or a shrine without a igurine
market. Such a hand-crafted igurine, of a woman giving
birth, was found in the entrance area of a tomb in the
Bahariya oasis from the Late Period (ca. VI BCE), suggesting
one context for the many hand-modelled female igurines
from the Pharaonic through the Roman period (Colin 2006;
 compare Boutantin 1999). We might imagine that the
process of crafting one’s own igurine, an image of one’s
own ideal fecundity, for eficacy with an entombed ancestor
would involve an even more concrete endowment of self
and body in the image than in selecting a igurine from a
craftsman’s offerings (Clark 2009: 246–47). It may well have
involved ritual gestures in the detailing of the mimetic body
of the igurine: the breasts, the belly, an infant emerging,
the highlighting of the genitals, or – in one unusual hand-

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:
molded igurine from the Kharga oasis – the repeated
application of a pin to the breasts, perhaps to symbolize
lactation, perhaps to signify a breast ailment, but overall
serving to transfer agency to the igurine (Figure 8b). That is
to say, by adding speciic features the ritual subject renders
the igurine a surrogate, carrying her intentionality and hope
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into a space of potential eficacy. (Compare use of pinpricks

David Frankfurter
in Török 1993, #G56)7
But even a prefabricated igurine might invite the interest
in adornment discussed earlier. Holes in the ears or the
crown (Figures 3, 4 and 6) invite the addition of threads
or wires as “jewelry” (e.g. Recklinghausen Ikonenmuseum
Inv. 532, in Ägypten 1996: 124a), all in the service of
idealizing the ritual body of the igurine, the agent of the
subject herself (or perhaps her husband). One igurine
from a domestic site in Karanis was found with the
remains of a cloth “dress,” suggesting a further process of
personalization – a discomfort with the igurine’s nudity?
(Allen 1985: 95; compare evidence of fabric on hand-
modelled igurines from Greco-Roman Balat: Boutantin
1999: 44).8

Volume 11
Thus, through the course of manufacture or choosing

Issue 2
and acquisition, then purposeful transportation to the site
the ritual subject intends for it, the igurine became itself a
social agent, an extension of the devotee – in the words of
Alfred Gell, her “distributed personhood” (Gell 1998: 103,
123). It would signify her gaze, her gesture, her hopes, and
her receptivity to the saint’s (or, in the case of a cemetery,
an ancestor’s) blessings. If she carried it to a domestic
208 altar or her bedroom it would still serve in that axial space
as a functional extension of her agency and of the whole
social web in which it was acquired. At the same time, as
we will see, it might have represented a saint or domestic
guardian spirit on that altar, conjured into its own agency, its
own beneicent gaze, through proper placement and ritual
procedure (Gell 1998: 116–21, 143–53). In this position
David Frankfurter

the igurine comes to reify both the ritual agency of the

Material Religion

subject and the supernatural agency of the saint (Silva

2013). Since each of these potential ritual sites – shrine
and domestic altar – endows the igurine with a different
 meaning and valence of eficacy, I will look at them each in
turn, concluding with some attention to cemeteries as sites
of igurine deposit.

The Votive Offering

A common interpretation of the Greco-Roman and late
antique female igurines is that they served as votive offer-
ings, deposited in hope of or thanks for successful preg-
nancy (Török 1993: 30–31; Meskell 2004: 137–42). But we
often make the mistake of underplaying the self-determina-
tion involved in leaving such an object. At many shrines the
practice is that one leaves, as a symbol of one’s presence,
a standard form or token, one that everybody leaves there:
a lit candle, a pair of baby shoes, a small boat, a metal plate
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with eyes. Conformity in the votive offering demonstrates

one’s participation in the larger cult. Purchasing and depos-
iting such a token is like submitting oneself to the whole
language of gestures and movements traditional to a shrine
(see Mayeur-Jaouen 2005: 200–206 on modern Coptic
votive rites).
It is conceivable that purchasing and depositing a certain
type of female igurine in late antique Egypt involved this
kind of engagement with shrine custom, just as at other
shrines one might tie a string or leave a padlock or (in some
modern Shiite shrines in Syria) toss a plastic doll.9 But in
fact what anthropologists and archaeologists ind among
votive deposits is a much broader range of things, some
quite assertive in their representation of hope, demand,
or gratitude – in their very mediation of social agency
(King 2005). Votive deposits, whether personalized notes
or lit candles, are the very epitome of Gell’s “distributed
personhood.”
Selecting a igurine from among others would have called
the buyer – the ritual subject – into a process of mimetic
identiication: does this look like me, or not? Does it convey
me as modest and prayerful or sexually fertile? Who am I
that this face, this hairstyle, this body should represent or
209
mediate for me? In an important essay on the interpretation
of prehistoric igurines the archaeologist Douglass Bailey
alerts us to the dialectic of identiication and defamiliarization
in the gaze between subject and igurine: how the
exaggerated, highlighted, or deemphasized attributes of
the igurine “loosen and rearrange the fabric of the actual.”
Through its selection of features the igurine allows the
“deining, expressing, claiming and legitimating [of] one’s
own identity or ... suggesting and realigning the identity
of others” (Bailey 1996: 292–93, 294). This process of
endowing the igurine with social agency through a dynamic
visual encounter would, moreover, take place in a social
 environment, in which the igurine comes to crystallize a
whole series of social interactions, traditions, and customs.
The igurine is also a miniature, compressing and
condensing the “totalities” of the ritual subject herself, the
female body and its potentialities, and perhaps even the
saint and his corporal blessings. And as miniature it serves
as a controllable site for the negotiation of the traditional
and the ideal, much as a doll provides for a young girl or a
Christmas crêche for a Catholic family. As the critic Susan

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:
Stewart has described, the miniature aligns the fantastic
with the real and compresses or erases time in the course
of the subject’s mimetic “play” (Stewart 1993: 37–69).
Finally, left in its chosen location, the igurine continues to
signify the devotee herself, to act for her. Unlike prayers, the
igurine’s very material – and in many cases self-standing –
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form engages a spatial mediation of devotions: a thing one

David Frankfurter
places “here” after processing “there”, circumambulating
there, and before feasting over there. Two unprovenanced
igurines of nude females, each bearing the word Phib
(on the belly of one, on the back of the other), probably
derive from the shrine of the healing saints Phib and Apollo
in Arsinoë (Perdrizet 1921: 5–6; Bayer-Neimeier 1988:
147–48: 262) (Figure 11). They may have been crafted with
the intent that the igurine should lie on top of the saint’s
tomb as a miniaturized version of the “prostration” that
Saint Phib and his companion Saint Apollo enjoined upon
devotees who wished for puriication (Papaconstantinou
2001: 55). That is, the igurine’s materiality and form invite
placement and therefore attention to place, even if the place
is restricted from the main part of the shrine.

Volume 11
Issue 2
The Domestic Altar and Its Images
While the archaeology of houses elsewhere in the Medi-
terranean world shows various forms of domestic altars –
speciic locations for family-based devotions, often holding
images of gods, ancestors, or local spirits – the evidence
is more complex for late Roman Egypt. Decorated wall
210
niches in houses in Karanis, in the Fayyum, most likely
served the purpose of altars (Husselman 1975: 47–48), and
some larger houses and estates seem to have had rooms
or chapels set apart for images (Nowicka 1969: 114n.44,
135–36; Hope and Whitehouse 2006: 316–18; and Frank-
furter 1998: 135–36 on Coptic literary evidence). Traditional
free-standing terracotta igurines of gods from the Roman
period, many of which were found in domestic contexts,
David Frankfurter
Material Religion

tend to suggest some type of deliberate, perhaps festal,

placement in the home (Nachtergael 1985; Frankfurter
1998: 132–42); and one Coptic legend from the
sixth or seventh century recalls – or imagines – that
 FIG 11
Standing nude female igurine
holding breasts, the name Phib
mold-pressed backwards into
the abdomen. From cemetery in
upper Egypt, VI CE. H: 16.2 cm;
W: 7.4 cm; D: 3.3 cm. Sammlung
Kaufmann, Liebighaus, Frankfurt am
Main, inv. 2400.1617. Photograph
from Kaufmann, “Archäologische
Miscellen,” 106-7 (public domain).
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non-Christians in the late fourth century had images of the

local god “mounted in the niches of their houses” and would
“bow down and worship him” on entering (Panegyric on
Macarius of Tkow, see Frankfurter 2007b: 180–82).
But especially for the crowded non-élite domiciles of
Roman Egypt (Hobson 1985) we must broaden our sense
of how and when places in homes might be set apart for
211 devotion or the placement of ritual images. In contrast,
for example, to the clearly deined altars to the ancestral
Lares and Penates in Ostia (Bodel 2008: 255–64), some
Egyptian houses kept shrines on the roof (Husson 1983:
63–65); others may simply have designated divine or saintly
presence through wall or panel paintings (Husselman 1975:
36; Rondot 2013); and for Egyptian Christians, like their
traditional ancestors and neighbors, the designation of
spaces for images may have responded to festival times,
crises like illness or desired pregnancy, or anxieties about
demonic assault (see the apotropaic charms in Meyer and
Smith 1994: 19–26, 64, 67). Thus my use of “altar” in this
 discussion will not presume a speciic architectural feature
or furniture but rather the physical space in which an
image is placed and which is thus transformed through the
temporary or extended presence of the image.
Of course, recent years have seen a spate of research
on domestic altars from ancient Roman to modern Afro-
Caribbean cultures, and these studies have unpacked
such features of the phenomenon as its bricolages of

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

idiosyncratic taste and oficial tradition, its miniaturization

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:

of cult, and the broader deinition of domestic spaces that
follows from the establishment of such altars (Thompson
1993; Frankfurter 2008). One important issue is the
identiication of the images placed on altars or designated
spaces in the home. We tend to assume that particular
igurines are included and propitiated on domestic altars as
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representations of speciic gods or heroes: Saint Joseph or

David Frankfurter
Our Lady of Guadelupe, Dambala or Ezili Danto, Shiva or
Ganesha, Harpocrates or Bes. But certain iconographies
and speciic igurines can become so enmeshed in
family memory and so idiosyncratic in domestic function
that, rather than designating a ixed character from a
standardized pantheon, their appearances and names can
serve as mere categories or contexts for local or household
spirits. Household images invariably acquire associations
according to who in the family bought them, how long
ago, where, and under what circumstances, according to
personal experiences with the igurine or a particular image
of the saint (e.g. in dreams), and according to domestic
crises and spatial order. Household images symbolize family
memory as much as the particularities of the saint and often

Volume 11
stand for a family’s historical relationship with that saint.

Issue 2
In that sense we must imagine the igurine in its domestic
setting as itself an axis for story and memory, bringing
together family tradition, local tradition, and the ideas and
ideologies of some “great tradition.”
This matter of the identiication of images in domestic
contexts – their status as “representations” – pertains
especially to the late antique female igurines, for they lack
212 any explicit identity as saint or god. The only igurines with
a name inscribed refer to the local male healing saint, Phib
(Figure 11); it is not the name of the image itself. A number
of late antique female igurines shaped in a mater lactans
or kourotrophos form (mother suckling baby) (Figures 1
and 6), some from the Abu Mina shrine, have convinced
some historians that Isis and/or Mary are represented
David Frankfurter
Material Religion

(Parandowski 1990: 205; Török 1993: 33–34; Langener

1996). But this particular iconography of Mary was not
widespread in late antique Egypt (Tran Tam Tinh 1973;
1978: 1234–39; Bolman 2005), nor was the lactans pose
uniquely or typically associated with Isis, either in Egypt or
 the broader ancient world (Dunand 1979: 70; Ballet 1991:
502; Boutantin 1999: 54, 69; Budin 2011: 86–87). In their
association with fecundity, female igurines – both hand-
crafted and molded – endeavored to depict all aspects
of sexuality, fecundity, and maternity, lactation included
(Colin 2006: 35). It may be more appropriate to regard
the interpretation of kourotrophos images in terms of one
goddess or another not as a ixed “representation” but as
an historically and regionally speciic tradition. The igurines
of mother and child from Christian Egypt may well have
been sold, bought, or identiied at home as an “Isis” or a
“Mary,” but not necessarily. Indeed, one of the remarkable
features of the much earlier, Pharaonic-era female igurines
is the vagueness of their names, at least as texts referred to
them (Waraksa 2009: 125–48).
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But what would such a igurine have done in the home

– on an altar, perhaps, or by a bed? What identity does
it acquire by virtue of its siting in the domestic world? On
a domestic altar the igurine or statue often serves as the
axis-point of regular or calendrical devotions, or as the
axis of transitions in the life of a family: the establishment
of the household, anticipation of pregancy, childbirth, and
crisis (Morgan 1998: 172–73; Daniels 2010). In this context
female igurines might have signiied the generative power
of a traditional local spirit (compare Bailey 2008: 46–47),
as one inds in many “house-doll” traditions in Europe and
Asia. It is possible that, given the permeation of Egyptian
culture with Christian elements by the ifth century CE,
house occupants placing such a igurine in some visible
location may already have had Christian symbols (a cross,
a Menas ampulla), so that the female igurine could acquire
a Christian interpretation through its addition to the overall
domestic assemblage.
Rather than as identiiable images of female saints,
igurines brought from a saint’s shrine like Abu Mina may
have functioned as “fecundity talismans” of the shrine,
carrying the blessings of Menas or another saint into the
home like the souvenir ampulla or lamp, but conveying
213 those blessings through the image of – and in the sphere
of – conception and maternity. To behold the igurine in
its proper place in the bedroom, then, was to behold a
maternal surrogate of the saint as well as an image of
oneself blessed with child. They conjured a temporary
mimetic relationship (like the transitional object), facilitating
ritually the movement through sex, pregnancy, and
maternity.
A great many late antique female igurines have had
their heads detached from the trunks, a consistency
in destruction that cannot altogether be attributed to
the exigencies of casual disposal (e.g. the selection
 in Török 1993) (Figure 8a–c). Of those hand-modelled
examples from the Kharga oasis, none include the heads,
a good number of which were found separately (Figure
8d)10. Comparable breakage (and in some cases repair)
patterns can be seen among Greco-Roman igurines and
Pharaonic-era igurines.11 Using ritual texts from the period
the Egyptologist Elizabeth Waraksa has argued that the
Pharaonic-era igurines that appear deliberately broken had
been used to absorb misfortunes and illnesses, so that

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:
breaking the igurine signiied a inal elimination of potential
harm (Waraksa 2009: 69–76, 148–53). While the detailed
fecundity attributes of many of the late antique igurines
resists their interpretation as acquirers of misfortune, it
may be that a gesture of deliberate breakage concluded or
sealed some stage in the ritual utility of the igurines (Wilfong
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2002: 115–16).

David Frankfurter
Both votive offerings at shrines and additions to altars
(or other types of designated spaces) in homes provide
likely ritual-spatial models for the use of female igurines
in Christian Egypt. Even more, each model allows us to
see the roles such igurines played in the integration of
Christianity, its pantheon, landscape, and discourses
of authority, with the habitus of local culture. That is to
say, as people chose and deposited such igurines at
shrines, endowed with their ritual agency, or brought them
home from shrine or workshop to hang in a bedroom,
discussing these activities the whole time, they were actively
creating Christian strategies of ritual action and material
representation. Even if it is “what we have always done,” it is
now done under Christian aegis.

Volume 11
But then what of the uses of igurines at tombs? Do

Issue 2
ritual actions at these spaces somehow stand outside
“Christianity,” properly conceived for the fourth through
seventh centuries? Does their persistence somehow
prove that uses of female igurines belong under the rubric
of “pagan survival” and are therefore irrelevant to the
understanding of Christianity as it took shape in Egypt? This
returns us to the methodological question I raised at the
214 beginning of the paper: what should count as an artifact of
Christianity in a culture that was oficially Christian? Does
the outsider’s selecting-out of certain artifacts as “pagan”
relect indigenous classiications or a modern, romantic or
theological conception of what belongs with each religion?
In fact, if historical Christianities are regarded as the creative,
essentially syncretistic productions of many different local
David Frankfurter

and administrative cultures, then all ritual artifacts must

Material Religion

somehow speak to how Christianity was being articulated,

negotiated, and mediated in space and time. That Christian
liturgy had only marginal inluence on mortuary traditions in
late antiquity (Rebillard 2009) does not mean that Christian
 symbols, scripturalism, and folklore did not play themselves
out selectively in cemeteries and burial customs, even in the
absence of artifacts.
Not only were a good number of archaeologically
provenanced female igurines from the Christian period
found in cemeteries, but their use in mortuary spaces
does go back to Pharaonic times. Egyptologists tend
no longer to view such igurines as offerings to the dead
(e.g. as their “concubines”) but as media in rituals of
communication with ancestors, whose very status as
extensions of the family was to stimulate and beneit
further generations (Pinch 1993: 217–18; Török 1993: 31;
Riggs 2005). Duly transformed ancestors, that is, were
responsible for fecundity, so their tombs were the locus of
appeals for fecundity (Baines and Lacovara 2002): 21–23;
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Harrington 2013). And yet cemetery space in Christian

Egypt was not some zone of timeless, perennial beliefs,
untouched by the prevailing religion. Rather, it was the
locus of continuing local experimentation with the powers
and claims of a nascent Christian culture, especially
around the cult of martyr-saints (Frankfurter 1994). In the
late fourth and ifth centuries church oficials complain
about people congregating in cemeteries to ask questions
of martyrs’ spirits (Frankfurter 2010). Even in the eighth
century Egyptian cemeteries serve as a locus of Islamization
(Halevi 2004). Cemetery space participated in the prevailing
religious culture, even providing its central shrines in many
regions (MacMullen 2009). So while the continuing use of
igurines in cemeteries through late antiquity relects a basic
sense of familiarity with the immediate, ancestral, and heroic
dead, that use was certainly understood as Christian.

Conclusion
This paper has addressed the place of female igurines
in the religious world of late antique Egypt. That world
involved, to be sure, the “great tradition” of Christianity,
overseen by bishops and abbots and to some extent medi-
215
ated by monks, holy men, and attendants at saints’ shrines
(Brown 1995; Papaconstantinou 2001; Frankfurter 2003,
2007a). But it also involved local traditions and habitus
that, far from constituting “paganism,” actually enabled the
assimilation of Christianity in culture: forms of divination,
song, dance, ritual attention to the Nile surge, and female
igurines. As such, the igurines constitute artifacts of Chris-
tianity as practiced; but what did they mean and how were
they used?
I have argued irst that, like most ritual images
in antiquity, the igurines carried a lexible identity,
corresponding to their multiple uses in culture. The female
 igurine “could be” the ritual supplicant at the shrine, a
particular saint on a domestic altar, or a general igure of
communication in an ancestor’s tomb. It might be called
“doll” or “clay thing” in some cases, “woman” in another,
and perhaps in some villages an “Isis” without necessarily
recalling the ancient temple goddess.
I have also argued that the female igurine, as an
anthropomorphic object indicating aspects of maternity,

Reconstructing Lost Practices and Meanings

invited and conveyed that complex dialectic of identiication

Female Figurines in Early Christian Egypt:

and self-projection anthropologists call mimesis. Ritual itself,
as Jonathan Z. Smith has observed, “is a mode of paying
attention,” of selecting place and materials, of focusing on
key ambiguities in a controlled space or size (Smith 1987:
103, 1982: 54–56). And this is what the very miniaturization
in the igurine allows. At one level the igurine “represents”
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the devotee, the ritual subject – a vehicle of her agency.

David Frankfurter
At another level the igurine is itself a concrete medium for
one’s gesture and speech – to punctuate and empower
a ritual appeal (Budin 2011: 134–35). And at still another
level the igurine is an idealized image of the ritual subject
(or his wife), radiating to the shrine her hopes for maternity
and back to her the fantasy of those hopes fulilled. It is
this polyvalence that also emerges in the array of options
available for choosing igurines at many shrines.
As ritual implements, I have argued, the igurines
were produced, sold, and deposited in order to mediate
devotions both spatially – in this part of the shrine, in the
entrance of this tomb, on this altar – and materially: as
a physical presence, whose very placement condenses
tradition and family custom, personal agency and social

Volume 11
encouragement, the direction of experts and personnel,

Issue 2
habitus and spontaneous gesture, and so on. Moreover,
as we gather from studies of modern pilgrimage, the act
of placement is performed as part of a series of acts and
social and spatial encounters: pilgrimage, stational circuit,
festival, or simply domestic excursion.
Finally, I have placed the igurines in the context of an
overall endeavor to construct ritual eficacy, by which I
216 mean the religious sense that a sequence of gestures with
objects is appropriately done to address a type of crisis.
The eficacy of these images comes not from what they
represent iconographically but from the total complex of
gestures and social encouragement in which their uses
are embedded. Indeed, as stiff and still as the igurines are
molded, those postures stood in dynamic counterpoint to
David Frankfurter
Material Religion

the low of real women who kneeled, squatted, swung their

arms, moved their hips, clapped, and danced. The stillness
of the igurines – in some forms prayerful – culminated an
energetic pilgrimage or climb to a tomb. In some ways
 this is a theory of “female igurines in motion,” to borrow
Robert Farris Thompson’s famous reconsideration of African
sculpture (1979).
Each of these points extends in implication not only to
votive or altar images more generally but also to other types
of physical images in which eficacy, spatial context, shifting
identities, and the ambiguity of mimesis all complicate
simple interpretations of “meaning” or “representation,”
“pagan” or “Christian,” even “magic” or “religion.” Moving
beyond the identiication of an image to its functions and its
ritual eficacy should enlarge our sense of the image cross-
culturally and reestablish the material in our sense of early
Christian devotional culture.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the New
York University Institute of Fine Arts conference, Beyond
Representation: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Nature of
Things (27–29 September 2012), the Society of Biblical Literature
2012 Annual Conference (S17–213), the American Academy at
Rome conference, Ritual Matters (17–18 May 2013), and to the
Department of Religion and Theology, Utrecht University (13 June
2013). I am grateful for invaluable comments from Birgit Meyer
and the Casablanca Group, and for the help of Helen Evans and
Brandie Ratliff of the Metropolitan Museum in securing images of
the Kharga igurines.

Disclosure statement
No potential conlict of interest was reported by the author.

notes and references

1
Major published corpora include:
217 Kaufmann 1910; Perdrizet 1921;
Allen 1985; Bayer-Niemeier 1988;
Török 1993; Bailey 2008; Teeter
2010.
2
On women’s ritual agency at
saints’ shrines see Mernissi (1977)
and Betteridge (1992) on modern
Muslim cultures, with Wissa Wassef
(1971: 147–9), Inhorn (1994), and
Mayeur-Jaouen (2005: 184–5) on
modern Egypt speciically.
3
Unlike children’s playthings of
the period, these igurines are stiff
rather than articulated and breaka-
ble rather than soft (Janssen 1996;
Johnson 2003; Pitarakis 2009:
242–50).
4
The doll is, in this sense, the
clearest example of Alfred Gell’s
“distributed personhood,” carrying
agency into various ritual contexts
(Gell 1998). However, in stressing
the performative context in which
the agency of ritual objects should
be put, I seek to avoid some of the
criticisms Gell’s notion of agency
incurred. Meskell 2004: 4–6,
51–55.
 5
While the terminology is mine,
inspired by Schatzki 2002, this
perspective on the visual and social
worlds in which objects gained
meaning and agency is best
approximated in Yasin 2009.
6
PDM xiv.115–15, 304–8,
695–705, 875ff in Betz 1986: 201,
213, 232–33, 240; compare “Cop-
tic eyepaint” (PGM V.65; VII.335, in
Betz 1986: 102, 126).
7
Compare Wilburn 2012: 74–83 on
comparable dynamics in the
selection and use of anthopomor-
phic igurines for erotic binding
rituals in Roman antiquity.
8
The sociologist Gordon Lynch
Downloaded by [Boston University] at 13:04 17 October 2015
(2010: 46–48) proposed the model
of the transitional object, in the
sense that such ritual images serve
vitally for a period of time – desired
procreation, for example – and then
lose signiicance, are destroyed or
passed on.
9
Paulo Pinto, personal communi-
cation, 15 February 2013.
10
http://www.metmuseum.org/
collections/search-the-collec-
tions?ft=coptic+igurine+kharga
11
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