Jewels at the Edge of Empire: An Egyptian Goddess from the Land of Canaan

 by Mary Harrsch © 2025

I'm still working on images of exhibits I photographed in 2009 at The Field Museum in Chicago, IL in preparation for uploading them to Wikimedia Commons and came across these images of this stunning necklace of carnelian and gold from Deir el-Balah, dated to the 13th century BCE, featuring a small gold pendant of the goddess Hathor.

Deir el-Balah lies on the southern Levantine coast, in what is now Gaza. During the Late Bronze Age it sat along the great Via Maris, the land route that connected Egypt with Canaan, Syria, and the broader Near East. By the 13th century BCE, this stretch of coastline had become an important Egyptian outpost—part military installation, part administrative center, and part hub for the movement of goods and officials across the empire.

My research revealed excavations at the site uncovered unmistakable signs of Egyptian presence: Ramesside-style anthropoid coffins, Egyptian pottery, faience amulets, scarabs, and architecture built in Egyptian fashion. Yet these objects weren’t simply imported—they were part of a cultural blend, produced and used by a local population living under Egyptian rule but still deeply connected to Canaanite traditions.

Carnelian and gold were elite materials associated with prestige, diplomacy, and official status. The fiery red-orange beads were almost certainly made from carnelian quarried in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, the primary source used by New Kingdom artisans. Their smooth but slightly irregular shapes are characteristic of Egyptian beadmaking, where each piece was individually ground, drilled, and polished rather than mass-produced. This style contrasts with the highly standardized, heat-treated carnelian beads traded from the Indus Valley in earlier centuries.

The presence of Hathor is also especially telling. As the goddess of music, beauty, fertility, and safe journeys, Hathor was a traveler’s protectress and a familiar divine presence in Egypt’s frontier zones. Her image appears everywhere Egyptians moved—across Sinai, down into Nubia, and along the Levantine coast.

So this necklace represents a snapshot of life in a borderland where Egyptian administrators, soldiers, merchants, and local Canaanite communities interacted daily. Its materials, craftsmanship, and iconography reflect a world where political power, religious symbolism, and cultural exchange flowed freely along the edges of pharaoh's domain.

This piece was loaned to The Field Museum by The Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

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Beyond El Dorado: The Real Golden Kingdoms of Colombia

 by Mary Harrsch © 2025

These small geometric gold figures—called tunjos—were votive offerings crafted by the Muisca people of the high Andean plateau in present-day Colombia. They were placed in shrines, temples, and sacred lakes as offerings to deities and ancestral forces associated with water, fertility, and cosmic balance.

Gold geometric-type Muisca figurine north central Colombia dated between 800-1600 CE that I photographed at The Field Museum in Chicago

Gold geometric-type Muisca figurine north central Colombia dated between 800-1600 CE that I photographed at The Field Museum in Chicago

Gold geometric-type Muisca figurine north central Colombia dated between 800-1600 CE that I photographed at The Field Museum in Chicago

Gold geometric-type Muisca figurine north central Colombia dated between 800-1600 CE that I photographed at The Field Museum in Chicago

In the Muisca worldview, gold was not a symbol of material wealth but a sacred substance representing sunlight, vitality, and the creative energy of their gods. Their rulers acted as mediators between the human and supernatural realms, and in rituals—most famously at Lake Guatavita—gold served as a spiritual medium rather than a display of earthly power.

Muisca art is distinguished by its deliberate geometric aesthetic. Human and animal forms were intentionally abstracted into triangles, cylinders, and simplified features. This was not a technical limitation but a consistent visual language, reflecting a conceptual approach that emphasized spiritual essence over naturalistic detail.

The European legend of El Dorado, or “the Gilded One,” originated from Spanish accounts of Muisca investiture ceremonies. During these rites, a new ruler, covered in gold dust, would journey to the center of a sacred lake and submerge himself while attendants cast gold offerings into the water. Over time, Europeans transformed this ritual into a myth of a city of gold, fueling centuries of speculative maps and disastrous expeditions. In reality, its origin lies in the Muisca’s cosmological use of gold, not in vast material wealth.

To the west, in the warm river valleys of the Middle Cauca region, the Quimbaya culture developed a strikingly different artistic tradition. As master goldsmiths, they produced some of the most naturalistic human figures in ancient Colombia. Their art is characterized by rounded modeling, balanced proportions, and serene, lifelike faces, particularly seen in the famous ‘Lord in the Trance’ pendants. This naturalism reflects a worldview where the human form itself was a perfected vessel for spiritual connection. Geographically separated from the Muisca by the vast breadth of the Colombian Andes, this ecological divide helps explain their distinct artistic vision. The Quimbaya’s daily and ceremonial life was regulated by rituals like the Poporo ceremony, which maintained personal and cosmic balance. It involved chewing coca leaves to enhance the meditation and polished thought needed to establish a connection to the spiritual realm, or Aluna. For the Quimbaya, spiritual attainment was not about escaping the human form, but about achieving a state of perfected, meditative harmony within it.

Quimbaya figure Gold copper alloy in the collections of the Museum of the Americas in Madrid, Spain courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Michel Wal

On the Caribbean slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the Tairona people (flourishing from around 450–900 CE and later) developed yet another unique goldworking tradition. In contrast to the small, geometric tunjos of the Muisca, the Tairona created larger, dynamic cast-gold pendants and figurines. These works are characterized by complex postures, elaborate body ornaments, and a powerful sense of movement. Tairona figures often display exuberant jewelry—nose rings, ear spools, pectorals, and towering headdresses—modeled with remarkable detail using the lost-wax technique.

Hollow gold Tumbaga pendant of a transforming shamanic female figure produced by the Tairona culture on the Caribbean slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of Colombia dated between 450-900 CE that I photographed at The Field Museum in Chicago

While the Muisca used gold as a sacred medium for offerings, Tairona goldwork often functioned as personal regalia, worn by elites to signal rank and spiritual authority. A key feature of Tairona art is its embodiment of shamanic transformation. Figures frequently display non-human traits: wide eyes with long, horizontal pupils (signifying an animal or spirit), muzzle-like noses, beaked headdresses, and wing-like ear spools. These elements visualize a shaman caught mid-transformation, shifting between human and animal identities to communicate with the spirit world. For the Tairona, this fluidity of identity was fundamental to maintaining cosmic balance.

In summary, the goldwork of these three cultures reveals profoundly different worldviews. The Muisca favored a geometric, schematic style that emphasized social and cosmic roles. The Quimbaya produced calm, naturalistic portraits of elite individuals in a state of meditative trance. The Tairona, however, embraced an artistic vocabulary of dynamic transformation, where human forms merge with animal traits to express shamanic power. Together, they demonstrate the extraordinary diversity of artistic and spiritual expression in pre-Hispanic Colombia.

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Quetzalcóatl as Ehecatl, the deity controlling the wind as the breath of life

by Mary Harrsch, 2025

In Aztec thought, Quetzalcóatl was a complex god associated with creation, knowledge, rulership, and priestly authority, but under the name Ehecatl he took on a very specific cosmic role—that of the animating wind that brings the world into motion. The Nahuatl term ehecatl means simply “wind,” yet the deity embodied far more than natural breezes: he represented the vital breath of life itself, the invisible force that activates both humans and the gods.

This basalt sculpture represents Ehecatl, the wind aspect of the great deity Quetzalcóatl, created by Aztec artists between 1350 and 1521 CE in what is now Tlaxcala State, Mexico. Photographed at The Field Museum in Chicago, IL by the author.

In Aztec cosmology, Ehecatl plays a pivotal part in the myth of the Fifth Sun, the current cosmic era. After the gods sacrifice themselves to bring the sun into being, the sun initially hangs motionless in the sky. It is Ehecatl who steps forward and blows with divine force, setting the celestial body on its daily journey across the heavens. Because of this mythic role, wind was understood not as a passive environmental element but as a cosmic catalyst, the energy that makes cycles of day and night—and therefore life—possible.

The sculpture captures Ehecatl’s essential qualities through a set of distinctive iconographic features. The most striking is the elongated, duck-bill-like mask, a hallmark of the deity. This unusual feature is not literal but symbolic: it represents the divine windpipe or the projecting breath through which the god exerts his cosmic influence. Many depictions of Ehecatl show him exhaling or blowing, and this mask visually conveys the sense of forceful wind issuing from his mouth. The figure also wears a conical headdress, often interpreted as a kind of wind cap associated with ritual specialists, and the surface of the carving is intentionally rough, carved from porous volcanic stone typical of the region surrounding Tlaxcala.

Despite being a god of an invisible and fluid natural element, Ehecatl is frequently rendered in rounded and simplified forms. Aztec artists often avoided sharp angles when depicting him, perhaps to evoke the softness and movement of air. Yet regional styles varied, and the sculptural traditions of Tlaxcala tended to favor more robust, blocklike forms with strong textural emphasis, as seen in this example.

Ehecatl held a unique place in Aztec religious practice. Temples dedicated to him were often built with circular floor plans, a rare architectural choice in Mesoamerican sacred construction. The circular design eliminated corners that might "trap" the wind, allowing air—and symbolically, the god—to move freely. Ritual offerings associated with Ehecatl frequently included shells, symbols of breath and sound, as well as incense whose fragrant smoke drifted like divine wind across temple courtyards.

This sculpture, that I photographed at The Field Museum in Chicago, is an evocative example of Late Postclassic Central Mexican religious art. Its powerful abstracted features and volcanic stone medium communicate the dynamic energy of a deity who was believed to breathe life into the cosmos. As an object of devotion, it would have served as a reminder of wind’s essential role in sustaining both the rhythms of the universe and the cycle of human life.

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