纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 069瓦斯特克女神雕像（3）

（单词翻译）

Here in the Mexico Gallery at the British Museum, I am looking at a statue of a woman. Not just one woman, in fact, because although she is in prime¹ position, she is presiding² over a group of companions, three sandstone sisters, all carved to the same design.

Our statue is about five feet (1.5m) high, so more-or-less life-size, but she's not at all lifelike. She looks as though she's been shaped by a giant pastry-cutter - the contours of the body are straight lines, the surface is flat - you might almost imagine she's a huge gingerbread woman. When you step to the side, you can see that she's carved out of a very thin piece of sandstone. Edge-on, she's less than six inches (15 cm) thick. She folds her hands over her stomach, and her arms are held out from her sides, making two triangular³ spaces. In fact, she's really just a series of geometric shapes. Her breasts are perfect hemispheres⁴, and below the waist she wears a rectangular⁵ skirt, which falls flat and undecorated to the plinth. This is a lady of straight lines and hard edges, clearly not somebody you would choose to mess with!