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Paintings, sculptures, engravings, frescoes, mosaics, prehistoric Venus figurines, illuminated manuscripts, coins, carvings, ancient cave art, painted earthenware, jewelry, woodcuts… in short, anything that was used to depict nude female form.

Today’s topic are prehistoric Venus figurines, small statuettes from prehistoric times portraying women, that archeologist excavated at various archeological sites all around the world, but my main focus will be the ones discovered in the region of Eurasia.

Let me start up my time travel device. First stop, -187 years ago, no internet, no electric motor yet for another few years, but according to google, the birth year of the world’s oldest living person. It happens, when everything is run by computers and there’s no one left to monitor them. Come to think it, this site might suffer the same fate when I stop updating it.

If I set my time dial to -2000. No Allah yet, Jesus just finished high school, deciding which places to visit during his ten year rumspringa. Maybe head south to see the pyramids, perhaps north to visit the Athenian Acropolis, or go east, to visit the lands of the wise Buddha.

Next stop some -4000 BCE, and the pyramids are gone. While some people were occupied with inventing the wheel, others tried to figure out how to write down how they did it.

Go back another two millenniums and, hooray, we just invented beer. No, glass bottles or metal cans to store it though, so perhaps a ceramic amphora will do.

Not much human records left, so I’ll just jump to 35,000 BCE, the approximate date when the oldest of these Venus figurines, Venus of Hohle Fels, was made.

Oh, look at that, the woolly mammoth made a comeback, so did the woolly rhinoceros, and there’s a cave bear and watch out for those cave hyenas scavenging its kills. Luckily, we are still in Eurasia and not Americas, or we’d have to deal with saber-toothed tiger as well.

But the years of all these creatures are numbered. Because the person who made the Hohle Fels Venus figured the mammoth’s tusks are just the right material for his work of art, much more durable than wood and easier to sculpt than rock. A person from another tribe was occupied with inventing flutes, the wooden ones produced nice pitch, but a neanderthal choir using flutes made out femurs of a cave bears, angelic. And how about that poor guy, hunting down hyenas because his woman needs a new carpet every full moon. And let's not forget the guy whose performance in bed was questioned, so a quick visit to a shaman for advice, and the fate of woolly rhino was sealed.

Since there are no written records, archeologist can only speculate why were this figurines made and what purpose they served. Some say it was depiction of mother goddess (a personification of nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction…), they could be fertility objects, some of the figurines look like dildos, so they could be used as sex aids, or in some kind of rituals I don’t even want to think about, one theory suggests that the Venus figurines could be self portraits of women without access to mirrors, and so on and on.

I’d probably go with the first one, a personification of nature. Mountains, rivers, winds, zodiac signs, sun travel, rain, snow, thunder, volcanic eruptions, comets, shooting stars, birth, death, singing, stars, planets, Earth, Sun, Moon, floods, disasters, rainbows, sun dogs, virtues, vices, traits… everything was deified or tried to be represented in ways understandable to humans.

To my untrained eye and limited knowledge, some of these figurines look like depictions of abundance (Venus of Willendorf), Venus of Savignano reminds me of Matterhorn mountain and it was located there about, and some younger ones, like the Venus of Falkenstein, Strelice, Idol from Ig, actually do look like depiction of Venus planet itself, but in those times the planet was probably considered a star, hence the spread of arms. The Willendorf Venus was also one of the reason for my recent trip to Ethiopia. Saw this photo, and I wanted to see where it all started.  Then I saw this girl there, and the Venus of Brassempouy shaped a different image in my head.The carvings on the Venus of Hohle Fels also came to life when witnessing a local ritual in a remote village, 1, 2, 3

I created a google map with 35 of these Venus figurines. You can check where they were found, with some basic info, for more, you’ll have to do your own research. I am not sure how long the google map will work though; Google climes I have 25,000 free requests a month for the map, but I have a feeling it won't be enough.

You can also check out other portions of the above site if you’re interested in depiction of female form in art. The database might have some errors in it, since it’s a hobby not a job.