by Joel S. Burnett
When it comes to understanding religion in Iron Age Jordan (ca. 1200–550 BCE), terracotta figurines offer one of our most abundant and expressive forms of archaeological evidence. These three-dimensional artistic objects fit readily into one hand (typically 10–15 cm), apparently crafted for personal use. At the same time, they appear across a range of social settings, from the household, to tombs, to temples and other public settings of formal worship.
As in periods before and after the Iron Age, figurines take the form of animals (most often horses and bulls but sometimes others), human beings (female and male), and inanimate objects (for example, furniture). While female figurines from the southern Levant have dominated scholarly attention for decades now, much less consideration has gone to their proportionally less frequent male counterparts. For Iron Age Jordan, male figurines are well attested, numbering at least 65 published examples.
The male figurines have much to tell us about the religious beliefs and practices of people living during the Iron Age. Yet basic questions remain debated: What do these figurines represent? How did people use them in ritual? How can the male figurines help us understand relationships between household religion and other socioreligious realms in Iron Age Jordan?
With these questions in view, I focused the research of my ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellowship for spring 2025 on male figurines from Iron Age Jordan. I have sought to interpret the male figurines based on their archaeological contexts, physical features, and comparative artistic evidence. What I found was a wide variety among the male figurines in terms of their form and subject matter, and their apparent ritual functions, along with clear indicators of the impact of the region’s political kingdoms on household religion during Iron Age II (ca. 950–550 BCE). Here are some preliminary insights with illustrating examples.
Gods and Men: The Household and the Palace
Nearly half the identifiable male figurines survive only as head fragments (sometimes including the upper torso). These are variously hand-modeled or pressed from a mold. Male figurines lacking headgear and constructed in a variety of styles likely represent human subjects, perhaps as images of venerated human ancestors or as votive objects representing living human worshipers or embodying concerns of daily life.[1]
A rare instance of a fully preserved male figurine is the “traveler” from Tall as-Sa‘idiyyah in the Jordan Valley (Fig. 1). This pillar-style figurine depicts a bearded male wearing a thick headband or turban, a long-sleeved mantle, and a backpack thrown over his left shoulder, containing a large round object that James Pritchard interprets as a pilgrim flask (Pritchard 1968). This figurine’s domestic find context (dated to the mid-8th century BCE) and the accompanying specialized objects are consistent with its place in household worship, the male figurine likely serving as a votive representing a senior male of the household (cf. Pritchard 1968, 26, 29).
In contrast to that depiction of full clothing, six unfortunately headless figurines from several sites in Jordan portray nude males (Daviau 2022, 261, n. 7). An artistic portrayal placing nude male figures into a broader visual context is a relief frieze decorating a ceramic krater from Iron II Tall Nimrin in the east Jordan Valley (Flanagan et al. 1992). It shows a procession of nude males taking part in a fertility ritual (Dornemann 1995). Based on this comparison, nude male figurines might have served in communal or household rituals concerned with male fertility. At the same time, a stone statue of a nude male figure at roughly contemporary Khirbat al-Mudayna, in the Wadi Thamad in northern Moab, offers a presumably honorific portrayal of either an elite individual (Daviau 2022, 261) or possibly a deity. Nudity occurs as a regular motif in artistic depictions of female deities in the Levant and broader West Asia (Bloch-Smith 2014; Darby 2014, 330–338, 398–406). Given the ethnographic and comparative literary evidence for multiple representations and functions, even for the same figurine (Moorey 2003), the nude males might have portrayed a deity or supernatural being while also embodying a concern for male reproduction addressed in ritual.
A high deity is more clearly in view among figurine head fragments from Amman and locations affiliated with other material culture. Examples from outside a “palace” building at the Amman Citadel (Zayadine et al. 1989, 362), from Tall Jawa 10.5 km south of Amman (Daviau and Dion 1994), and from farther south at Tall Jalul (Younker et al. 1996) wear a form of the atef crown deriving ultimately from Egyptian tradition and appearing in Iron II stone statuary as the emblem of the leading god of the Ammonite kingdom (Abou-Assaf 1980; Daviau and Dion 1994; Burnett 2016; 2024). The Tall Jawa example’s discovery inside a domestic building, along with other cultic objects (Daviau 2003, 136–137), indicates this figurine’s function as a terracotta image of the Ammonite chief deity, perhaps a replica of larger stone statues at the capital, within domestic ritual at this outlying location. The domestic use context for this example and likely the one from Tall Jalul (Daviau 2001, 201) shows that the iconographic system supporting the Ammonite monarchy was incorporated into that of the family-based realm of domestic worship.
Messengers and Mediating Figures: Houses, Tombs, and Public Worship Places
More than a dozen other male figurine heads wear various forms of a conic or pointed cap resembling the headgear of horse and rider figurines so well attested for the Amman Citadel and nearby sites and from the Jordan Valley (Fig. 2). The fully preserved horse-and-riders tend to bear decoration of black and white painted lines and other designs on their headgear and clothing. The uniform thus portrayed, along with the headgear’s resemblance to a pointed helmet (variously depicted for warriors in multiple ancient Near Eastern battle scenes; Dornemann 1983, 137–138), suggests a military association for these figures, although they tend to appear without weapons or other military equipment. A messenger figure might thus be the implication, especially considering the quality of swiftness the horse represents. In any case, most of the population would not have had horses, and these widely attested figurines likely reflect royal military imagery and its impact on household and family religion.
The two-headed horse carrying a rider excavated at Tall Damiyya in the Jordan Valley (Petit and Kafafi 2016) suggests a depiction of supernatural beings. The discovery of these hybrid depictions (combining zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures) in a worship sanctuary, amid fragments of a cult stand (Petit and Kafafi 2016), and in tombs (Harding 1945; 1950) would be consistent with imagery of divine messengers mediating between higher deities and their living and deceased human worshipers. Like the atef-crowned figurines, the horse-and-riders show the institution of the monarchy to have shaped conceptions of divine-human relationships in household, mortuary, and public religious life, as well as the connections among these societal realms on the Ammonite plateau and the Jordan Valley during Iron Age II.
Another type of mediating figure appears in male figurines attached to the entrances of ceramic miniature shrines, thus marking and guarding spatial boundaries. The best-preserved example was excavated in the Iron II temple at Khirbat Ataruz, overlooking the Dead Sea (Ji 2012, pl. 47). It features two male figurines flanking the shrine’s entrance, each with a bare upper body and holding a small animal. These guardian figures’ positioning at the threshold indicates their liminal status, mediating the boundary between divine and human, sacred and profane.
Conclusions: Variety and Range among the Male Figurines
While questions remain, the array of male figurines yields many insights into the religion of Iron Age Jordan. Human beings and their life concerns, deities, and mediating supernatural beings find representation, with some figurines perhaps combining more than one referent. In their ritual functions, the male figurines serve as propitiatory votives, stand-ins for human worshipers, and miniature divine images, and serve other attention-focusing roles, for example, in mediating divine-human interaction. Male figurines reflect personal and family concerns such as reproduction, perpetuation of the household lineage, and care for the deceased. Other examples, such as the atef-crowned heads and horse-and-rider figurines, signal the monarchy’s relevance to the household’s general wellbeing. Continuing research and new archaeological discoveries hold promise for refining these preliminary results. What is clear is that these well-attested artistic objects embody a variety of representations, cultic functions, and socioreligious circles.
References
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Burnett, J. S. 2016. “Egyptianizing Elements in Ammonite Stone Statuary: The Atef Crown and Lotus.” In R. A. von Stucky, O. Kaelin, and H.-P. Mathys (eds.), 9 ICAANE: Proceedings of the 9th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (June 9–13, 2014, University of Basel). Volume 1: Traveling Images, 57–71. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Burnett, J. S. 2024. The Amman Theater Statue in Its Iron Age Contexts, with contributions by R. Gharib and D. F. Parker. AASOR 75. Alexandria, VA: American Society of Overseas Research.
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[1] See the list of possible representation and uses of figurines Christopher Tuttle has developed, building on the model of Peter Ucko and Mary Voigt (Tuttle 2009: 246).
Joel Burnett is a professor of religion (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament studies) at Baylor University. His research centers around the history and religion of Iron Age Israel and Transjordan. His most recent publications include “The Persistence of El in Iron Age Israel and Ammon” (pp. 297–330 in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of P. Kyle McCarter Jr. ANEM 27, ed. C.A. Rollston, S. Garfein, and N. H. Walls. Atlanta: SBL, 2022), “Geochemical Characterization of Jordanian Basalts Using Portable X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry and Sourcing of the Amman Theater Statue” (coauthored with Carolyn D. Dillian, Aktham Oweidi, and Romel Gharib, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 46 [2022]: 103720), and The Amman Theater Statue in Its Iron Age Contexts (with contributions by Romel Gharib and Don F. Parker. Annual of ASOR 75. Boston: ASOR 2024).