This sculpture is no longer completely whole.... but the remaining pieces depicts the goddess Cybele sitting on a missing carriage (only the wheels remain) led by a team of lions. A Museum placard informs us that the 2nd century bronze piece depicts the Anatolian goddess with her usual attributes- "a patera (libation bowl) in her right hand and a large tympanum (drum) in her left."
Wikipedia (
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"Cybele ... perhaps "Mountain Mother"; Lydian Kuvava; ...was an originally Anatolian mother goddess; she has a possible precursor in the earliest neolithic at Çatalhöyük (in the Konya region) where the statue of a pregnant goddess seated on a lion throne was found in a granary. She is Phrygia's only known goddess, and was probably its state deity. Her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread from there to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies from around the 6th century BCE.
In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She was partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, her Minoan equivalent Rhea, and the Harvest-Mother goddess Demeter. Some city-states, notably Athens, evoked her as a protector, but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a transgender or eunuch mendicant priesthood. Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, who was probably a Greek invention. In Greece, Cybele is associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions.
In Rome, Cybele was known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"). The Roman State adopted and developed a particular form of her cult after the Sibylline oracle recommended her conscription as a key religious component in Rome's second war against Carthage. Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas. With Rome's eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanised forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout the Roman Empire. The meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods were topics of debate and dispute in Greek and Roman literature, and remain so in modern scholarship."
As for the Asteroids, Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
"Cybele asteroids are a group of asteroids in the outer main belt with a semi-major axis between 3.27 AU and 3.7 AU, an eccentricity less than 0.3, and an inclination less than 25°. The group is named for the asteroid 65 Cybele. As of 2010, the group is thought to have been formed by the breakup of larger object in the distant past.
Some of the largest Cybele asteroids are 87 Sylvia, 65 Cybele (the group's namesake), 107 Camilla, 121 Hermione, 76 Freia, 790 Pretoria, and 566 Stereoskopia. Some of the group also have asteroid moons, such as 121 Hermione."