AN ANATOLIAN MARBLE IDOL KUSURA TYPE, EARLY BRONZE AGE II, CIRCA 2700-2400 B.C.

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AN ANATOLIAN MARBLE IDOL, KUSURA TYPE, EARLY BRONZE AGE II, CIRCA 2700-2400 B.C. Of flattened schematic form, carved from a single thin slab of marble into a stylised female figure. The body is rendered as a broad, rounded lower half tapering inward at the waist, with laterally projecting shoulder stumps that indicate the arms without articulating them. A long, columnar neck rises from the shoulders and terminates in a disc-shaped head, set frontally and undifferentiated by facial features. A faint incised line across the base of the neck marks the collar or the separation of head and torso. The surface retains a soft cream to buff tone, weathered and pitted across both faces, with accretions of earth still adhering to the marble. The figure belongs to the Kusura type, named after the site in inland western Anatolia where such idols were first identified in stratified contexts. The type is defined by its violin- or fiddle-shaped silhouette: a rounded lower body, pinched waist, small angular shoulders, elongated neck, and a distinct round head carried on that neck as a separate volume. Facial features and anatomical detail are almost entirely absent, and gender is signalled only by the swelling of the lower body. Idols of this kind were produced across a broad zone of central and western Anatolia during the third millennium B.C., with related but distinct schematic figures known from sites in the Konya plain, the upper Maeander, and further west toward the Aegean coast, where they intersect with the Cycladic tradition of schematic marble figures. Marble was the preferred medium for these idols and its selection was not incidental. The white, translucent stone of the Anatolian plateau was worked into a small class of prestige objects, of which the schematic idols form the most coherent group. The reductive treatment of the human form, in which the body is abstracted to its geometric essentials, appears to have been deliberate rather than the product of technical limitation, since the same communities produced far more naturalistic work in clay. The idols are typically recovered from burials and from settlement contexts associated with domestic ritual, and are generally understood as cult figures connected to fertility, protection of the household, or the marking of the dead, though their precise function remains a matter of interpretation. This example presents the Kusura type in its clearest and most economical form, with the head, neck, shoulders, and body reduced to four cleanly resolved volumes. It exemplifies the Anatolian Early Bronze Age impulse to abstract the human figure into a stable geometric formula, a tradition that stands in close dialogue with contemporary Cycladic production while retaining its own distinct grammar of proportion and outline. Dimensions: Height: 22.5cm

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