Greco-Egyptian Uterine Amulets

Current location: Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman Medical Library

Small, roughly cut and covered in strange symbols, these little stones have made their way through museum collections, passed from Classical departments to Egyptology ones, Medieval to European Prehistory. They’ve represented exotic religious doctrines and containers carried by devotees of Isis. Their central motif has depicted a “vase of sins” of the Gnostic Christian sect, a vase to collect water from the Nile, a pneumatically driven musical instrument, a cooking pot and no doubt many more entertaining conjectures which never made it to paper.