Taweret is my guess as to the statue 
on the island. Note the four toes! She is a goddess of maternity and childbirth. Hmmm, pregnant women...need for protection... that sounds oddly familiar... Oh yeah, this is Lost. Opet is the more human looking goddess that replaced Tawaret later on and is another possibility, although the ears and hat make me think differently. I'd also keep a sharp eye out for Sekhmet (the
bringer of disease and curer of ills). I think I'll be disappointed, but not surprised, if this turns out to be a more obvious god. I'm looking at you, Anubis.My only problem with my theory is that Egyptian goddesses are traditionally shown with longer gowns and gods are shown with shorter skirts. We'll see...
On a more practical note, statues of this size were rarely (if ever) made to be freestanding on two legs. I'll have to look it up, but such technology would point to this being built at least during the later quarter of the ancient Egyptian time-line.
I can't stress enough the difficulty of constructing something of this size with separated legs and no drapery, base or throne behind the legs to keep it standing. For example, the 10-story Colossus of Rhodes (280 BC) was made of Bronze, probably used drapery or a cape for stability, surely did not have the legs separated across the harbor entrance (despite popular images), and was still toppled within 80 years. If our Lost island statue existed it would truly be the ultimate wonder of the ancient world.
While researching, I was checking out the dimensions of the Eye of Horus and came across this:
As you can imagine, I was excited to find many of the numbers, but unfortunately not all of them. Check out the article here.
That is a pretty interesting find! But I can't help but wonder why the women on the island who get pregnate can't get through to their 3rd trimester. If the island heals and makes sperm count of men higher on the island than on the main land, why are the pregnate women dying? It's like the island is saying, "Yeah, you can get pregnate, but I am going to punish you by taking yours and your baby's life." When the statue was erect when the Dharma people were there, they could give birth to live, heathy babies. (I am assuming the statue was intact when they were all still alive) Now that the statue is in ruins, no woman can carry a baby to term. But then why does a island that heals need a statue to begin with. Most puzzling. Is this Jacob's punishment for some crime like Cain and Able?
ReplyDeleteAt any rate I enjoy reading your website :) this is Diane btw not sure if I can make my id come in for Failariel ha
Argh! I typed a long comment and then pressed back accidentally...
ReplyDeleteI don't think the statue was intact during Dharma times. We had another flash after seeing it. I do think it points to this battle between factions going on for ages. We have already seen hieroglyphs on the island and I have suspected the Egyptians either started this or were a heavy part of it. I also think that whatever birth problems there were could have happened in a cycle and the statue could have been erected to stop them. I don't think the destruction of the statue caused them (although I was thinking it would be cool if Smokey was the pissed-off Egyptian god - nahhhh, hehe.
I AM surprised that the statue is Egyptian at all though since they tended to not build the feet and legs separately but to make kind of a base with legs carved in for stability or, more commonly, with a throne. However, if I am right about who the statue is, it would have been built at a later time in history when Taweret was more humanized and the Egyptians had contact with Romans who taught them some of their building techniques.
Ok, now about the pregnancy issue:
1. I think the island's healing properties see an already pregnant woman as a single entity and everything is fine.
However, I believe the island perceives a mother and child (that is conceived on the island) as separate entities and tries to purge one of the other and thus kills them both.
2. If we are to believe Richard's scans of the uterus that he shows Juliet then things might be different. The pregnancy issue could be related to the island constantly being in time flux where the uterus and baby are in different times than the mother - causing the uterus to age, the baby to die, and the life of the mother to be in danger (unless they give her a full hysterectomy and not let her carry the baby to the second trimester).
I think this is because when life actually begins for the island (let's say when the heart starts beating) then the baby starts to flux in time and their time becomes different from the mother.
Whereas, a mother that is already pregnant and lands on the island would give birth and be fine since she is somehow in the same time-line as her baby.
It would be interesting to see a case where the mother is "just barely" pregnant (i.e. heart not beating yet) and brought to the island... but that won't happen.