A photo of the Greek Goddess Aphrodite’s sculpture is being falsely shared as 2000-year-old Maa Saraswati’s sculpture. - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
December 4, 2023
A video explaining the discovery of a 2000-year-old Maa Saraswati’s sculpture in pre-Islamic Saudi Arabia is being shared on social media. This video claims that the sculpture was found in the city of Tayma and is now kept in the British Museum. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: An idol of the Hindu Goddess Maa Saraswati was found in pre-Islamic Arabia.
Fact: This actually shows the sculpture of the Greek Goddess Aphrodite sitting on a goose or a swan. According to the British Museum’s official website, this sculpture, probably made in Cyprus, was produced somewhere between 3rd BC and 2nd BC. Hence the claim made in the post is Fasle.
To check the veracity of the claim that the sculpture is of Maa Saraswati, which was allegedly found in pre-Islamic Arabia, we performed a reverse image search on the photo of the sculpture from the viral clip. This search led us to a Facebook post from 2012, which identified the sculpture as Greek Goddess Aphrodite, dated 3rd century BC.
Taking this as a hint, we further searched the internet using relevant keywords, leading us to the British Museum website containing the same sculpture photo. The description of this sculpture on the  British Museum’s website identifies it as a “ Terracotta figurine of Aphrodite seated on a goose.”
Further, we also found a photograph(here and here) of a similar sculpture of the Aphrodite riding on a goose from around 470-450 BC, and searches regarding the existence of Vedic culture in the pre-Islamic era also did not lead us to any credible evidence to support it. All of this evidence makes it clear that the viral video claiming to show the discovery of a sculpture of Maa Sarawati in pre-Islamic Arabia is just a fake story woven around the Terracotta figurine of Greek Goddess Aphrodite.
To sum up, the sculpture claiming to be the one of Hindu Goddess Maa Saraswati is actually of a Greek Goddess named Aphrodite.