AFRICA, MALTA, ETC. 



low stool with her feet tucked under her. There 

 is no sign of clothing, except on one figure which 

 shows a long shirt and a plain bodice with very 

 low neck. All these statuettes are characterized 

 by what is known as steatopygy, that is, the over- 

 development of the fat which lies on and behind 

 the hips and thighs. 



Steatopygous figures have been found in many 

 places, viz. France, Malta, Crete, the Cyclades, 

 Greece, Thessaly, Servia, Transylvania, Poland, 

 Egypt, and the Italian colony of Eritrea on the 

 Red Sea. The French examples are from caves 

 of the palaeolithic period ; the rest mainly belong 

 to the neolithic and bronze ages. Various reasons 

 have been given for the abnormal appearance of 

 these figures. In the first place it has been sug- 

 gested that they represent women of a steatopygous 

 type, like the modern Bushwomen, and that this 

 race was in early days widely diffused in the 

 Mediterranean and in South Europe. Another 

 hypothesis is that they represent not a truly 

 steatopygous type of women, but only an ab- 

 normally fat type. A third suggestion is that they 

 portray the generative aspect of nature in the 

 form of a pregnant goddess. 



Naturallv there are considerable local differences 

 in the shapes of the figures from the various 

 countries we have enumerated, and it may 

 be that no single hypothesis will explain them 

 all. 



107 



