Cybele's Tympanum (Drum) - New York City, NY
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 40° 46.720 W 073° 57.767
18T E 587523 N 4514704
This sculpture is located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Waymark Code: WMKK9R
Location: New York, United States
Date Posted: 04/25/2014
Views: 5
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 (
visit link) adds:
"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.