Goddesses with animals – overview

Eva B. Mannheimer, The Mother of Gods in Alexandria; 2017 http://www.materfilia.se/the-mother-of-gods-in-alexandria/

“The relief sculpture of a mature goddess, enthroned in her naiskos, which has recently been acquired by the University of Alexandria, Egypt and exhibited in the Faculty of Arts Educational Museum, represents one of the most influential and widespread votive depictions of the Greek Meter, Mother of the Gods, Kybele, and Rome’s Magna Mater, Cybele, originally the Phrygians Matar, Matar Kubile, Mother and Mountain Mother.
The Mother is seated on a low throne in a naiskos, between two lions. Both the goddess and the lions, seated on their hind legs, are shown strictly frontal, in a hieratic position. The goddess holds a large tympanon in her left hand, vertically and from under, and a flat libation bowl, slightly damaged but probably a phiale, in her outstretched right hand. She wears a medium high polos, a chiton, (damaged on the upper part of the body but probably) pinned on both shoulders, and a himation or mantle, attached to her polos and extending from under her right arm, and draped across her lap, falling down in a tip on her left side. She sits with her legs somewhat apart with her feet (probably?) on a footstool. […]
This Kybele-naiskos, made in white limestone, is most probably a votive from the late Hellenistic or early Roman era. It is modelled after the marble votive reliefs of the Greek Meter which were produced ‘en masse’ in the Greek centers of her cult, Athens and Pireus, during the 5th and 4th centuries BC, and reproduced and distributed, as a sign of the goddess’s growing popularity in the Hellenistic and later in the Roman world – the center of the cult by then once again western/central Anatolia, now Roman Asia.”