The most beautiful woman

This, I firmly believe, is the most wonderful piece of art. A lying lady who has been asleep for some three thousand - some even say four thousand - years. She is not dead, just sleeping. She may also be dreaming: a dream so beautiful that she has never woken up.

The Sleeping Lady, of which I have a cheap replica on my writing desk at home, has always fascinated me. Measuring 7cmX12cmX6.89cm and found lying in the Holy of Holies, presumably the most important part of the Hypogeum, the underground temple discovered by chance in Paola in 1902, has been the subject of numerous inquiries. The Lady prompted different people in musing about her, trying to unravel the mystery of the statuette's symbolism. These people range from prominent archaeologists to New Age freaks.

Theories centre around the belief that there must have been a matriarchal society living on the island back then. So, the lady could have been a symbol of Mother Earth, or a symbol of fertility. Some would also consider the statuette as the embodiment of some Goddess, and in fact some people prefer to refer to the statuette as the Dreaming Goddess. (Needless to say, this title is very much popular with New Age Women's groups who would be very angry if they read what follows.) Given that the place it was found at was an underground temple turned necropolis, some smart guys consider the lady to be the personification of death...not death in the sense of end, but death as an eternal sleep which carries your soul away from the sleeping body to some other place in the beyond. What a striking contrast this portly lady makes to the post-Christian image of death as a fleshless, cynically smiling skeleton.

Being a downright materialist, I suspect that in interpreting the life and times of our ancestors, we tend to over do it sometimes; we tend to put our preoccupations, our desires and wishes into their works of art. Maybe we miss too much the idea of having a religion; or we indulge too much in some kind of faith we have. Or we try to find the meaning of the actual in the primordial. Let's face it, it is so very trendy it seems to be esoteric. And we might even romanticise those poor ancestors of ours and attribute some noble, spiritual or even religious meaning to every single thing they left behind. Thus, the statutette must have been an object of some cult, must have been an embodiment of some deity, must have personified the beyond...she was all that, or some of that, or something like that. We almost treat the statuette as if heavenly sent.

Which brings me to the other point. To my knowledge, no one ever speaks of the sculptor, the creator of this sleeping lady, of the genius who made it. We speak about her - the lady - as if she was eternal, not from human born. Who was the sculptor? Was he some priest who wanted to sustain an aura around him by creating this statuette? Was she some priestess who created this effigy to show to her people? Was the sculptor some kind of teacher? Or was the sculptor simply an artist who one evening, caught sight of this woman who, after a whole day of hitting the limestone with a piece of flint to construct the underground temple, lied down dead tired and instantly fell asleep? Was this statuette the product of a magical moment of artistic frenzy of some sculptor who bewildered by the beauty of this strong woman, grabbed some clay and started etching to re-create her in matter, started picturing the tired, sleeping lady? Or should we muse that the sculptor looked lustfully at this fat, half naked woman (she only wears a skirt) and all sexed-up captured the moment, the image? Could the lady, after all, far from having been a Goddess, been an object of lust? I mean men like women and men like men, and women like men and like women...

What if, in five hundred years time, a Maltese bloke decides to dig his stairway to the centre of the earth, and in the process discovers a statuette of a sleeping man, lying on his left side?