HELLO, GODDESS

Gaza Strip Farmer Digs Up 4,500-Year-Old Statue of Canaanite Goddess of War

Archeologists say the statue shows the head of Anat, an ancient goddess of love, beauty, and war.

A Palestinian farmer working his land in the Gaza Strip dug up a 4,500-year-old statue of an ancient goddess. Archeologists say the limestone statue shows the head of Anat, the Canaanite goddess of love, beauty, and war who is thought to have been the model for the Greek goddess Athena. “We found it by chance. It was muddy and we washed it with water,” farmer Nidal Abu Eid told the BBC. “We thank God, and we are proud that it stayed in our land, in Palestine, since the Canaanite times.” The Canaanites were a Semitic-speaking civilization in the second millennium B.C. whose lands covered modern-day Israel, the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, and parts of Syria and Jordan.