The anthropology of the figures

Before modelling a face, it is worth knowing whose it is.
Fidelity to the scene begins with the concrete body.

Between the world and the scene

This chapter stands between the general context of first-century Judaea and the scene-by-scene work. It does not compose, does not model, does not clothe. It answers, once and with the evidence available, a set of questions that the nativity-scene maker cannot avoid before starting. Who the protagonists of the cycle are, understood as concrete people. How old they were. What social stratum they belonged to. What physical features they shared as a human type of the first-century Mediterranean Levant. What secondary figures surrounded them. What they wore, in what colours, with what materials. What animals were part of their surroundings.

It is not a matter of closing these questions: many have no definitive answer. It is a matter of gathering what is known today with reasonable academic consensus, making clear what is debated and offering a plausible framework from which to enter each scene without starting from scratch.

This chapter carries no images, and not through oversight. No portrait exists of any of the people of the cycle: not of Mary, not of Joseph, not of a shepherd of Bethlehem, not of the Magi. What there is are skeletal remains, coins and portraits of other peoples and other regions, useful for describing a human type, not a face. Any ancient face placed beside these pages would end up being read as proof of what is only a framework. The representations that do exist —the Magi dressed in Persian fashion, the ox and the ass beside the manger— are iconographic tradition, and each is dealt with, with its image and its date, in the chapter to which it belongs.

It is also worth saying what is left out, because it is becoming common. Images of «the real Holy Family», of «a shepherd of Judaea in the first century» or of «Jesus according to science» circulate online, generated by artificial intelligence systems and presented, at times, as historical reconstructions. They are not. Such a system has seen nothing of the first century, because there is nothing to see: it produces an image from the regularities of millions of earlier images, and the earlier images of this subject are, in their overwhelming majority, the European painting that this block has spent chapters examining. Ask it for a Jewish woman of the first century and it returns what a Madonna usually looks like, with somewhat darker skin. The result has the finish of a photograph and the authority of none: no one can say where each feature comes from, because it comes from nowhere. There is no observation; there is the average. The matter, with its evidence, is developed in «Form without an author».

What this Manual states about the bodies of the cycle is in the text that follows, with its sources and its declared limits. An image that «showed» it would add no knowledge; it would add a certainty we do not have. And the concrete figure —the body that resolves what is here only described— is the work of the sculptor, not of a machine or an illustration.

The protagonists

A note on structure before going in: this chapter is the census of the cycle. It presents each character once —age, origin, body, wardrobe— with what is essential for composing, and refers onwards. The full development of each one —who they are according to the corpus, their inherited image with dates, their presence scene by scene— lives in the block of characters, whose pages are linked here as they come into existence.

Mary

Age. The fact is unknown: no text gives Mary’s age in any scene. What can be fixed is the framework for the decision, and it has two sources of unequal weight. The Mishnah gives the virgin 12 months between betrothal and wedding (Ketubot 5:2); but it is a norm written down around AD 200 —analogy, not proof for the first century, the same caution this Manual applies to the Mishnah in matters of dress—. How far that norm was followed is another question, and historians do not read it alike. Michael Satlow, a historian of ancient Judaism, separates the ideal from practice (Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, pp. 104-109): the legal sources give the impression that fathers betrothed their daughters while they were still minors, and no doubt this happened, but we do not know how often. A survey of the epitaphs of Jewish women from late antiquity shows few married in their early teens —all from a single Jewish cemetery in Rome— and many more in their mid-teens or later; no ancient Jewish inscription records a woman married under the age of twelve. His conclusion, with his own reservations, is that in Palestine and the western Diaspora men would have married around thirty, to women «in their (mid or late?) teens». Tal Ilan, a historian of Jewish women in Greco-Roman Palestine, reaches something similar from the few cases of known age in Palestine (Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine, pp. 65-69): Berenice, daughter of Agrippa I, first married at about 13; Mariamme, Herod’s Hasmonean wife, at 16 at least and probably 18 or older; Salome Alexandra, at 27 at least; and a few funerary inscriptions of girls between 13 and 22, some unmarried and some married. She concludes that there is no «firm indication that 12 was the customary age of marriage for girls». In the opposite direction, Adiel Schremer reads the rabbinic sources on the marriage of girls as the reflection of «a real (and even widespread) custom», according to the quotation translated and discussed by Satlow (p. 307, n. 33). The evidence is scarce on both sides: epitaphs largely late and from other regions, and cases from royal families. Workshop decision: a betrothed girl of between 14 and 19; within that range, each choice of body knows which source it follows. The twelve-year-old bride fixed by the rabbinic norm is not ruled out, but she answers to the ideal of the law, not to what the evidence shows as usual. Mary appears in Luke 1 as betrothed and not yet living with her husband, and that fits any point in the range. The young adult Mary of European iconography —the Florentine, Venetian or Flemish Madonna— is devotional representation, not historical fact.

Origin and social stratum. Rural Galilee. A peasant family or one of modest craftspeople. In the first century Nazareth was a village of fewer than 500 inhabitants, according to the archaeological estimates of Jonathan L. Reed (Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus). The household economy revolved around subsistence farming —wheat, olive, vine, fig— and modest craftwork.

Body and appearance. A Semitic woman of the Mediterranean Levant, at full term of pregnancy during the scene of the Nativity. Short by modern standards: an average of 1.50–1.55 m for Jewish women of the period, according to the studies of skeletal remains published by Joe Zias and others on Herodian necropolises. A lean build from a diet of cereals, oil, pulses, vegetables and little meat. Olive skin, dark hair, dark eyes. The hands of a woman who has worked since childhood: grinding grain, weaving, carrying water.

What we do not know. Nothing of her actual face. No individual physical detail has come down to us. What we can uphold on a sound basis is the anthropological type to which she belonged.

The wardrobe. Mary’s complete wardrobe can be listed, and it is worth having it in front of us because the moments of the cycle do not change the wardrobe: they manage the same pieces. An everyday tunic of undyed wool —a second one as a reasonable inference in a craftsman’s house—, the good garment from her trousseau, the veil, the sash and a mantle that is also a blanket at night: the law orders that a mantle taken in pledge be returned before nightfall because it is its owner’s only covering (Exodus 22:26-27), and «el que tiene dos túnicas, dé al que no tiene» — whoever has two tunics, let him give to the one who has none— (Luke 3:11) says exactly what having two meant. In the core of the Nativity —from the Annunciation to the Presentation— Mary has been married for one or two years: her good garment is her wedding garment, almost new —surely the only complete new outfit of her adult life, in service afterwards as a married woman’s good garment until the cloth will take no more mending.

The ornament. On the tunic of undyed wool, ornament sewn by her own hands during the year of the trousseau: a skein of wool dyed with madder —one gathering of roots, one pot, one afternoon: the cheapest sign in the whole system and the most charged—, sewn by lamplight on winter nights while she waited for the wedding. That ornament is her identifier: the same tunic with the same motif makes her recognisable from scene to scene throughout the cycle. On her body, the ornament of a young married woman from a modest household: ears pierced since childhood, the earring from the trousseau, beads and bronze rather than gold —the archaeological parallel is the woman in tomb 1 of the Jericho necropolis (30 beads, earrings, a bronze ring), the only ordinary person with ornament documented within the window of the cycle—. If she wears any metal, it may be precisely the household’s savings: the portable dowry. In public, as a married woman, her head covered (Ketubot 7:6, quoted below).

What she does not wear. The full blue mantle is visual tradition: it is born of the price of lapis lazuli in European painting, not of her world or of her person, and a garment entirely in blue does not pass the test of availability for an ordinary figure. Gold and silk, out: at the Presentation the family hands over the offering of the poor —the pair of turtledoves of one who cannot pay for the lamb (Luke 2:24 on Leviticus 12:8)—, the only household economy the narrative documents. The entirely dyed garment is not forbidden: it calls for an occasion —the Presentation, the trousseau.

By scenes. Annunciation and Visitation: the everyday tunic with its ornament, and the veil. Journey to Bethlehem: the same —everything she has is worn or in the bundle—. Birth and the days immediately after: the same; the leading role passes to the Child’s swaddling —bands of wool as the preferred option and linen as an auxiliary cloth or possible inner layer (rule of climate; wool dominant in the surviving corpus; Soranus of Ephesus expressly recommends wool for the bands and sets linen aside because «it tightens with sweat» —a 2nd-century analogy, verified), with apotropaic knots as a reasoned possibility; the personal mark on the swaddling bands, unknown— representable only as a declared artistic decision. Presentation in the Temple: the good garment from the trousseau —which is one, not a new outfit—. Flight into Egypt: what she has on.

Joseph

Age. Here two traditions coexist that cannot be fused.

The first, of apocryphal origin, starts from the Protoevangelium of James (2nd century), where Joseph appears as an elderly widower with children from an earlier marriage. The construction is theological: it dogmatically protects Mary’s virginity by making Joseph a guardian rather than a husband. This tradition prevailed in Western iconography from the Middle Ages and explains the bearded old Joseph of most nativity scenes.

The second, dominant today in historical criticism, places him as a young adult. How old he was when he married is stated in no text, and the sources on custom do not agree. The rabbinic ideal had men marry early too: the Mishnah sets «at eighteen, the bridal canopy» (Abot 5:21), and another tradition, twenty (Ilan, pp. 65-66). Satlow, outside those normative texts, finds something else: in Palestine and the western Diaspora men —at least those of the elite, with the author’s own question mark— would have married around thirty, like Greeks and Romans, when they were in a position to found a household of their own (pp. 104-109). Workshop decision: a Joseph of between 20 and 30, an established craftsman, who accepts an adolescent girl —the range fixed above— in a marriage arranged by the families.

The decision is not neutral. It changes the body, the physical strength, the posture, the weight of the road to Bethlehem, the way of holding the child. The plausible option is the second: it responds better to the historical framework and frees Joseph from the devotional cliché of the old protector. Whoever prefers the first should know that they are quoting apocryphal tradition, not Gospel.

Trade. Mark 6:3 identifies Jesus as τέκτων (téktōn), and Matthew 13:55 identifies him as «son of the téktōn», that is, son of Joseph. The term does not mean only «carpenter» in the modern sense. It designates the craftsman who works with wood and, in first-century Palestine, also with stone. In a region where the standard house was of limestone with wooden beams and roofs, the téktōn took part in domestic building, in farm implements, in basic furniture. He was not a cabinetmaker in a workshop: he was an all-round rural craftsman.

Body and appearance. A Semitic man of the Levant. A sturdy build from physical work, calloused hands, skin weathered by exposure to the sun. Average height of 1.60–1.65 m. A beard according to observant Jewish custom (Leviticus 19:27).

The child Jesus

Age according to the scene. Newborn at the Nativity (Luke 2:6–7). 8 days old at the Circumcision (Luke 2:21). 40 days old at the Presentation (Luke 2:22; reckoning of Leviticus 12). Possibly a few months —no longer newborn— at the Adoration of the Magi: Matthew 2:11 says that they entered «into the house» (οἰκίαν, oikían), not into the stable or the cave, and found him with Mary. The text suggests a settled domestic scene, weeks or months after the birth. The representation of the Magi adoring the newborn in the manger is a later harmonisation, not Matthew’s text. 12 years old in the final Lucan scene of the cycle (Luke 2:42).

Body. A newborn wrapped in swaddling clothes (the Greek verb: ἐσπαργάνωσεν, Luke 2:7; ἐσπαργανωμένον, 2:12). Swaddling was common practice: bands of linen or wool that immobilised the newborn to keep it warm and give it security. The naked Jesus in the manger, so frequent in European painting, is incompatible with the Gospel text and with the winter climate of Bethlehem.

The shepherds

Herding is not synonymous with a single social condition. It was a continuum within the rural economy of the first century. There were large flock owners, often absent, who hired shepherds; small peasant families with a flock of their own, in a mixed regime of subsistence and saleable surplus; hired hands with neither land nor flock, taken on by the day —the μισθωτός of the fourth Gospel—; and semi-nomadic pastoralists on marginal land. All of that cannot be reduced to «the poor» without loss of precision. The hired hand was poor in the proper sense; the son of a small owner lived modestly without falling into destitution.

The division of labour by age followed a pattern well documented in the ethnography of Mediterranean peasant societies, confirmed by biblical and ethnoarchaeological evidence. Children aged 7 to 12 herded near the village, often accompanied by an old man or by an adult with physical limitations. Adolescents took on the bulk of the work when there was distance or transhumance. Adult men were left free for farming, building and the trades that demand strength or trained skill, and herded only when the family had no land or when the season required it. David is a shepherd because he is the youngest of Jesse’s sons (1 Samuel 16:11). Joseph is na'ar —a lad— when he keeps the flock with his brothers (Genesis 37:2). Rachel is a shepherdess (Genesis 29): the trade was not exclusively male, although night work did tend to be.

The shepherds of Luke 2:8 are agrauloúntes, spending the night in the fields, on night watch. That points to adults or older adolescents, not to children. Night herding is of another order: it demands vigilance against wolves, thieves and the hillside in the dark. It is plausible that they were hired hands who could not leave the flock even at night, or landless heads of family who depended on their small flock. Not the apprentice child, but not the canonical patriarch either.

For the repertoire of figures to be modelled, this widens, without betraying history, the range of legitimate shepherd figures: child, adolescent, adult hired hand, old man, cripple, and the shepherdess as a secondary possibility. Jeremias’s classic characterisation —shepherds ritually impure, despised, excluded from the Temple— was built mostly on late rabbinic material projected backwards; Sanders and Fiensy–Strange have firmly moderated it. What can be upheld is real humility, neither picturesque destitution nor a stigma of impurity. The development of each shepherd in his scene —annunciation, adoration, return to the fields— is left to the corresponding block.

The Magi

Matthew 2:1–12 speaks of μάγοι (mágoi), an indeterminate plural, coming «from the East» (ἀπὸ ἀνατολῶν, apò anatolôn). Nothing more. No number, no names, no races, no mounts, no royal status. What can be upheld on a textual and contextual basis: they were mágoi, eastern sages linked to the Persian or Mesopotamian astrological tradition —the Greek term translated the Zoroastrian priests—, adult men, learned, wealthy (the gifts imply it), belonging to a non-Jewish religious caste, of eastern physiognomy and Persian dress: long tunic, trousers (anaxyrides), cloak, Phrygian cap or cylindrical tiara.

Later tradition added the number three (from the gifts), royalty (a Christological reading of Psalm 72), the three races (medieval iconography) and the names Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar (Excerpta Latina Barbari, 6th century). All of that exists and all of it can be used, provided the nativity-scene maker knows that they are quoting iconography, not Gospel.

The detailed treatment of the Magi —their origin, their caravan, their meeting with Herod, their adoration, their departure— belongs to a block of its own within the cycle and is developed there.

Herod and his court

Herod the Great, client king of Rome, Idumaean by origin, of a people Judaised by John Hyrcanus (Josephus, Antiquities XIII, 9, 1), but viewed with reservations by the priestly elite of Jerusalem. He reigned from 37 to 4 BC. Flavius Josephus describes him in Jewish Antiquities XV–XVII and in The Jewish War I as a monarch of remarkable political intelligence and of a cruelty that grew with the years. He died around 4 BC. At the time of the scene of the Magi he would have been a man of nearly 70 (Josephus, Antiquities XVII, 6, 1), sick and paranoid.

He dressed in the Roman manner for public appearances —tunic, toga, purple when rank allowed it— and in the eastern manner in the domestic sphere. The court mixed Hellenised officials, a personal guard (Thracian, Gaulish and Germanic mercenaries, according to Josephus), scribes, loyal priests and relatives at odds with one another. A nativity scene that represents the scene of the Magi before Herod can work with that pluralism: not everyone in the palace was Jewish, nor was everyone dressed alike.

Simeon and Anna

Simeon. Luke 2:25–35 describes him as «justo y piadoso, que esperaba la consolación de Israel» — righteous and devout, who was waiting for the consolation of Israel—. The text does not specify his age, although tradition has always represented him as an old man because the verb ἀπολύεις (apolýeis, «now you let depart in peace») has been read as a farewell to life. There is no direct textual basis, but the reading is ancient and consistent with the content of the blessing.

Anna. The text is more explicit: 84 years old, according to the usual reading of Luke 2:37 (some manuscripts allow the reading «a widow for 84 years», which would give an even greater age). A widow, a prophetess, linked to the Temple, of the tribe of Asher. Probably the oldest figure in the whole cycle.

The anonymous figures

The cycle is not only the protagonists. Other human groups take part in the scenes, explicitly or implicitly, and it is worth being able to represent them without inventing.

Around the Nativity: neighbours of the house or the courtyard where the Holy Family takes shelter, midwives —whom Luke does not mention but whom the anthropology of childbirth in the first century imposes: no woman gave birth alone—, extended family.

At the census and registration: Roman scribes and local assistants, officials, soldiers on watch, pilgrims obliged to register.

In the Temple: priests on duty, Levites, pilgrims, sellers of doves and lambs, money changers, other families carrying out rites of purification.

In the flight and the return: caravan drivers, border guards, Jewish communities in Egypt —Alexandria and the Fayum had large Jewish populations—.

In the shepherds’ fields: other bands of shepherds, sheepdogs, possible night travellers.

Each of these presences is developed in the scene-by-scene record. Here it only matters to establish that they exist and that their absence from a nativity scene is an aesthetic decision, not fidelity to the text.

The angel

One presence remains that this census cannot treat like the others and cannot pass over in silence either: the messenger. It is not a human figure and has no anthropology —no age, condition or physiognomy that can be documented: its existence and its form lie beyond the reach of proof, and the descriptions in the corpus portray the narrative, not a being—. But it sets off every turn of the cycle: the conception is announced, Joseph is held back, the birth is made known, the flight is ordered, the return is authorised. The complete character —the office and not the species, belief as history, the corpus dossier, the inherited image and the criterion for its representation— lives on its own page, with a workshop record, and here its consequence is enough: the supernatural is not modelled; it is represented through stage lighting —so that the angel, in the scene, is measured in the bodies of those who see it. And those bodies do belong to this census.

Common physiognomy

All the protagonists except the Magi and part of the Herodian court share an anthropological type: a Semitic people of the first-century Mediterranean Levant. The osteoarchaeological studies of Qumran, Jericho, Masada and other sites, together with representation on coins, mosaics and the Fayum funerary portraits, make it possible to describe it with considerable precision.

Olive skin, a medium tone between light wheat and soft copper; not white as in European painting, not black or African, not the yellowish tone of Romantic orientalism. Dark hair, brown or black, with occasional reddish tints, straight or slightly wavy; men wore it medium length, women long and gathered up. Dark eyes, brown or black. Short by modern standards: an average of 1.60–1.65 m for adult men, 1.50–1.55 m for women, according to the anthropological studies published on necropolises of the Herodian period.

A lean build. The diet —cereals, oil, wine diluted with water, pulses, cheese, seasonal fruit, fish on the lake and river shores, meat on feast days— did not produce the corpulence that appears in certain Renaissance iconographies. Bodies were wiry, worked, often marked by physical effort. Teeth worn down from youth by bread with grit from household milling. The hands of craftsmen and peasants, calloused and marked; those of shepherds, weathered by sun and open air; those of women, rough from daily household work: grinding grain, kneading, weaving, carrying water, cleaning.

Clothing as a whole

The specific chapter on clothing will be developed separately, with details of garments, fabrics, cuts and archaeological references. Here the overall framework is enough, which is what allows the nativity-scene scenographer to compose coherent groups from the very first moment.

The basic structure was universal: an inner tunic (ketonet), an outer mantle (simlah or tallit) thrown over the shoulders, sandals, some kind of belt or sash. Women added a veil or head covering in public.

Everything else varied. Quality of fabric according to class. Number of garments according to means. Length and fullness according to social function. Finishes: ritual fringes (tzitzit) on observant Jewish men; ornament sewn on the woman’s identifying garment at any economic level —it is paid for in time, not in money, and poverty grades it, it does not erase it—; what marks status is not that there is ornament, but the material, the density and the colour. Signs of religious belonging: broadened phylacteries (tefillin) and enlarged fringes in the case of scribes and Pharisees, both criticised in Matthew 23:5.

The shepherd and the peasant wore a tunic of undyed wool, sometimes reduced to a single garment that served by day and by night; over it, a thicker mantle. In winter, sheepskins or goatskins thrown over the shoulders. Feet shod in sandals with leather soles and straps: never barefoot in winter.

The well-off craftsman —Joseph probably fits here— wore linen or better-worked wool, with one change of clothes or two, and a somewhat finer mantle.

The Jewish woman always added a veil in public. The uncovered head of a married woman was a sign of grave dishonour, to the point of appearing in the Mishnah (Ketubot 7:6) as justified grounds for divorce.

The Magi and the Herodian court wore something else. The former: a long Persian tunic, trousers (anaxyrides), cloak (kandys), Phrygian cap or tiara. The latter: tunic, toga and signs of Roman rank in the case of officials; military uniforms in the case of the guard.

The Romans —soldiers, officials, possible census-takers in the scene of the registration— wore military uniform (subarmalis, lorica, sagum, caligae) or the civilian toga according to function.

Palette: dyes and fabrics

The palette of the biblical nativity scene should be conceived, except in the scenes where power enters, within the range of natural colours and cheap vegetable dyes.

Undyed fabrics. Wool in its natural colour: for the Levantine fat-tailed sheep, above all light tones —off-white, yellowish, beige—, with brown or greyish fleeces as a minority of the flock; the breed’s intense brown lives on the head and legs, which are not spinnable fleece. Undyed linen, in its characteristic creamy white. Goat hair, in dark browns or blacks —material for tents, sacks and ropes rather than for personal clothing—. These were the background colours of ordinary people.

Cheap vegetable dyes. Madder (Rubia tinctorum) for earthy and brick reds. Weld (Reseda luteola) served mainly as a component of double dyeings, for greens and oranges; a garment dyed yellow as its final colour is rare in the record of the Roman period (see Yellow in the biblical nativity scene). Woad or imported indigo for muted blues. Walnut husk, oak bark and pomegranate for browns. These dyes were within reach of the peasantry and the small craftsman, above all in faded or mixed versions.

Expensive dyes, reserved for power. Tyrian purple, from the murex (Hexaplex trunculus and Murex brandaris): an intense violet red, described in detail by Pliny the Elder in Natural History IX. Tekhelet blue, from the same murex by a different process. Kermes, from Kermes vermilio: scarlet red. A nativity scene that dresses Mary in ultramarine blue and a scarlet mantle with a gold border is quoting medieval and modern iconography, not the material reality of the first century.

The only murex blue on an ordinary person was the tekhelet thread in the fringes of the tzitzit, and only for those who could afford it; the rest used white fringes. On tekhelet and its archaeological reconstruction, the reference work is Baruch Sterman, The Rarest Blue.

Gold borders, precious stones and embroidery with metal thread are a later European iconographic convention. They have no place in a coherent biblical nativity scene, except, with prudence, in the figure of Herod or of one of the Magi.

Animals

Three planes that tend to be confused in iconography should be kept apart: what the Gospels say, what the iconographic tradition says, and what first-century domestic life says.

What the Gospels say. Nothing about animals in the scene of the Nativity. No ox, no mule, no donkey, no sheep. Luke 2:8 mentions «their flock» in the shepherds’ fields; Matthew 2 mentions no animal. The donkey as Mary’s mount on the journey to Bethlehem is a plausible reconstruction, not a Gospel fact: Luke says only «went up», without specifying the means. The donkey also has its own page as a character running through the cycle: there the full argument lives —ordinary use proven in the corpus, Joseph’s access to one inferred, continuity between scenes as a declared compositional decision— and it is linked from this census, as the human characters are linked.

What the iconographic tradition says. The ox and the ass, the canonical pair of the nativity scene since at least the fourth century, derive from Isaiah 1:3 —«conoció el buey a su dueño, y el asno el pesebre de su señor» — the ox knew its owner, and the ass its master’s manger— read in a Christological key. It is a prophetic quotation, not a historical description. The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (8th–9th century) consolidated the image in the apocryphal narrative.

What first-century domestic life says. A peasant house in Bethlehem or its outskirts usually lived alongside sheep and goats —housed on the ground floor or in an adjoining cave—, donkeys for carrying and draught, poultry (hens, doves) and possibly a guard dog. The ox was a working animal for heavy ploughing, proper to open cereal land: it might be there, but it was not the typical domestic animal of a modest dwelling.

The decision. The nativity-scene maker can choose between two paths. Either keep the canonical pair of the ox and the ass, knowing that they are quoting the iconographic tradition and the Christological reading of Isaiah 1:3. Or replace it with what there would really have been: sheep and goats in the lower part of the house, a pack donkey, poultry. Both options are defensible. What should not be done is to adopt one out of inertia.

In the shepherds’ fields. Sheep of the awassi breed —the traditional sheep of the Levant, fat-tailed—, black goat (Capra hircus mambrica), sheepdogs. No northern European dairy cows.

In the flight into Egypt. A pack donkey, possibly two if the family carried belongings. The camel, which appears in certain representations, is a long-distance caravan animal and the property of the well-off; a family in discreet flight would not travel by camel.

At the arrival of the Magi. The camel is plausible here. The eastern mágoi travelled in caravans, and the camel was the usual means on the long routes from the East to the Levant. Matthew does not mention it, but the reconstruction is admissible.

Before going on

With this census —people, bodies, clothes, colours, animals— the nativity-scene maker enters each scene knowing who may be present, what they are like, what they wear, what animals surround them. They do not come to the text with a blank page. They carry the material and human world of the first century within them, and particularise it in each scene according to what Matthew or Luke allow to be said.

What follows stops being an abstract catalogue and becomes the concrete application of everything that has gone before: the scenes of the cycle, one by one.