Disclaimer: None of these pictures are mine. I found them on the Internet. If any of them are yours, and you don’t like them being used in this post, contact me and I’ll be happy to take them down.

This is the Lady of Elche, Spain.

As you can see, her shoulders are hunched up. Some people describe her as having an “elongated head,” but it could just be the hat. Or it could be a hat meant to imitate elongated heads, as we see in many other cultures, but especially Egypt and MesoAmerica, where there was also head binding.

The following two links are my bibliography. You can follow them to check what I’m about to tell you about the Lady.

https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/lady-of-elche-002305

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-lady-of-elche

When I first heard that this Lady had been found buried in Iberia, it freaked me out. That’s because my understanding of pre-Roman Iberia was that it was basically Celtic. I was prepared to find Celtic- or Scythian-style artifacts there, such as images of people with narrow chins, large eyes, and moustaches; men with deer antlers; horses, and spirals, perhaps worked in silver, wood, stone, or even gold.

Celtic portrait, with torque necklace

Kurgan stelae in Kyrgyzstan, closer to the probable homeland of the Celts/Indo-Europeans

That’s what I expected to find in Spain. Or maybe something that looked like Etrusacan art, or like statues from the Archaic period of Greece.

I was not prepared for a massive, highly realistic stone statue that looked more classical Greo-Roman in style and featured attire more reminiscent of … I don’t know. Ancient Mesopotamia? Peru? The Lady of Elche freaked me out because it seemed to suggest a whole different style of civilization in Iberia, previously unknown. I was thinking Stone Age or pre-Flood.

Then, I heard that the Lady was believed to be Carthaginian. She instantly became less mysterious, but no less horrifying.

Carthage was a colony of Phoenicians. Phoenicia was an advanced civilization from the Levant. They inhabited the port cities of Tyre and Sidon, near ancient Israel. This explains why the Lady seems to be dressed like someone from the Ancient Near East. The Phoenicians had a shipping empire, so not surprisingly, they started a colony in North Africa. Carthage was here:

As you can see, they are very close to Europe, including territories in Spain. That explains how the Lady of Elche could have Western European facial features and Carthaginian dress.

Like most advanced civilizations of the Ancient Near East, the Phoenicians practiced atrocities in their pagan worship. This was the group that had the god Molech, to whom babies were sacrificed in the fire.

They were dropped down into, or placed in niches in, the red-hot statue. Drums and horns covered the sound of the infants’ screams. Incredibly, Israelites kept taking part in this practice and God had to keep telling them to stop. There was even an Israelite king who “made his son pass through the fire.”

Given that Carthage was part of an advanced, baby-killing empire, the Lady of Elche at once becomes more horrifying. The blank look on the woman’s face becomes more sinister. Is this just a death mask? Or is it because she is cruel? Or mindwiped by all that she had seen and done?

I don’t have any historical reference for this, but an anonymous commenter on the Internet has asserted that the “ear covers” were worn by priests and priestesses to block out the screams of the victims of more gruesome rituals. The bigger the ear muffs, the worse the ritual. I’d like to pooh-pooh that, but it fits with everything else we know about the ancient world. Christ conquering the nations suddenly sounds much less like a step in oppression and more like a relief. If you know more about the earmuff question, I’d love to hear it I wouldn’t exactly love to hear about it, but I’m curious and please send me your information.

If you know how to indicate your interest in the Lady to the algorithm, you may find people dressed in historical re-constructions of the Lady of Elche’s garb, like these:

These ladies all look significantly happier than the original Lady.