A STONE EYE IDOL TELL BRAK REGION, CIRCA 3500-3300 B.C.

拍品描述

A STONE EYE IDOL, TELL BRAK REGION, NORTHERN MESOPOTAMIA, CIRCA 3500-3300 B.C. Of trapezoidal form, tapering from a broad flat base to a narrower shoulder surmounted by a stylised head, carved from a pale cream stone with warm ochre encrustation across the incised surfaces. The head is reduced to its essential features: two large lentoid eyes with heavily raised rims and drilled pupils, framed above by a continuous ridge that serves as a joined brow, and pierced at the outer corners with small drilled apertures suggesting ears or points of suspension. Between the eyes rises a prominent triangular nose in relief. The body of the idol is carved in low relief and incision with a schematic representation of a torso: two rounded breasts flank a central axis, and below them a triangular pubic panel filled with punched dots is set within a field of chevron and zigzag incisions running across the lower half. The figure belongs to the class of anthropomorphic votives known as eye idols, produced in considerable numbers at the site of Tell Brak in the Khabur basin of northeastern Syria during the Late Chalcolithic period. Most surviving examples reduce the human form to a flat plaque dominated by a pair of oversized eyes, and the type takes its name from that feature. The present figure is a more elaborate variant, in which the schematic body has been retained and articulated with sexual and decorative markings, giving a fuller anthropomorphic reading than the simpler plaque form. The chevron pattern across the torso is consistent with the incised ornament found on other figures of the group, and may render textile or body decoration. Eye idols were recovered in great quantity from the so-called Eye Temple at Tell Brak, a monumental structure whose inner sanctum yielded hundreds of these objects deposited as votive offerings. Their concentration in a sacred context, combined with the emphatic treatment of the eyes, has led to their interpretation as votive substitutes representing the worshipper in an attitude of perpetual attention before the deity, a function paralleled in later Sumerian temple statuary where oversized eyes serve the same devotional purpose. The choice of stone, worked in a soft, translucent material that could be shaped with copper and flint tools, was itself significant: stone offerings carried a permanence that clay or wood could not, and their deposition in the temple was intended to endure. The elaboration of the present example, with modelled breasts, incised pubic triangle, and patterned torso, sets it apart from the plainer eye plaques that dominate the corpus and places it among the more figural members of the group, in which the anthropomorphic identity of the votive is made explicit. Such pieces stand at the beginning of the long Mesopotamian tradition of the votive figure standing before its god, a form that would find its fullest expression in the Early Dynastic worshippers of the third millennium. This idol exemplifies the more developed end of the Tell Brak eye idol tradition, in which the reductive frontal eye plaque is expanded into a fully anthropomorphic votive without abandoning the schematic vocabulary that defines the group. It documents, at the threshold of the historic period, the emergence in northern Mesopotamia of the standing worshipper as a durable religious form. Dimensions: Height: 18cm

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