Fighting the anxiety that tightened her throat, Zoe arched her back, desperate to relieve the ache and fatigue that had knotted themselves solid after an entire day on her feet. She and Thalia had spent almost twelve hours unpacking and arranging Max’s extensive collection of Venus figurines, some as old as 20,000 B.C.

Finishing her stretch Zoe looked around the room, drinking in an awesome sight that had dazzled away the critical barriers she erected between her heart and her profession. They surrounded her, a small battalion of holy women—more than three hundred statuettes covered every horizontal surface, each one tagged with file numbers, descriptions, and index numbers to more extensive files. They were made of baked clay, terra-cotta, alabaster, ceramics, and cast copper. A large carved alabaster frieze cut from the wall of an Anatolian temple was crated separately and remained to be unpacked.

She looked down at a nine-thousand-year-old baked clay Venus less than a foot long. The woman’s breasts, belly, and genitals were extravagantly portrayed; the figure was seated with her arms resting on carved panthers. By contemporary body images, the women portrayed in the most ancient of the statuettes would be classified as morbidly obese.

The sight transported her to a mysteriously primitive world of so very long ago; it diverted her mind from the dread that hid in her heart, raided her sleep at night, and all too often crushed her spirit in the day. Instead of the approaching consequences of the coming few days, she felt now the beauty of the long-vanished artisans and a world they had tried to interpret through these pieces of their art that had survived.

“Captivating, aren’t they?”

“Oh!” Zoe exclaimed as Thalia’s voice startled her and snatched her back to the present.

“Sorry.” Thalia looked down at the clay figure that had held Zoe’s attention. “She’s one of my favorites too. So pure in her lack of artifice and decoration, made of local mud and baked in the ashes of a fire that way back then was still mystical in its own right.”

“Way back then…”Zoe said softly as she gazed at the figure.

“I think maybe it was around just such a campfire that somebody looked deep into the flames and saw the reflections of a vast incomprehensible world that scared the bejesus out of her. And this”—she pointed a white-gloved hand at the clay statuette—”this is how she dealt with it.”

“That’s what makes it so fascinating. I mean, you’re talking about the origin of religion.” Zoe shook her head. “I know so little about their history—”

“Prehistory,” Thalia said as she picked up the clay woman. “That’s why there’s so little to know.”

“Exactly. I’ve never needed to know about art much before a thousand years B.C. or so. Only a few specialists in my business do, actually. This is more archaeology than art.”

“All art is archaeology,” Thalia said. “Art reflects culture and culture is the way people try to make sense of life. It’s just that most of us are dependent upon written history to give us some hints about the art.”