A STONE SPECTACLE IDOL TELL BRAK, CIRCA 4TH MILLENNIUM B.C.

拍品描述

A STONE SPECTACLE IDOL, TELL BRAK, CIRCA 4TH MILLENNIUM B.C. Of flattened trapezoidal form, rising from a broad rounded base to a narrower shouldered body surmounted by two large pierced discs joined at the centre, the whole carved from a single piece of pale stone with warm ochre and pinkish inclusions. The two circular eyes, each drilled through, dominate the upper portion and are separated by a slight vertical ridge suggesting the bridge of a nose. The body is left plain, its surface smoothed but retaining traces of tool marks and encrustation, the edges softened by wear. The reductive form belongs to the class of so-called eye idols or spectacle idols recovered in large numbers from the Eye Temple at Tell Brak in the Khabur region of northeastern Syria. The figures reduce the human presence to its most essential feature: the gaze. The disproportionate emphasis on the eyes, drilled entirely through the stone, has been read as an evocation of the wide-eyed votive attitude familiar from later Sumerian temple sculpture, in which the worshipper stands in perpetual attention before the deity. The absence of mouth, limbs, or clothing places the entire communicative weight of the object on ocular contact. The eye idols were deposited in their thousands within the successive shrines of the Eye Temple, dated to the late Uruk period, and were almost certainly votive rather than funerary. The choice of stone, worked in a soft calcite or gypsum-alabaster available in the region, allowed rapid production at scale while retaining a translucency and pale tonality appropriate to sacred dedication. Variants include single figures, pairs, and family groups with smaller idols carved above the shoulders, but the doubled-disc "spectacle" type represented here is the most numerous and the most iconic of the series. The type stands at the beginning of the Mesopotamian tradition of the votive figure, a lineage that would culminate in the wide-eyed gypsum worshippers of Tell Asmar and the Early Dynastic temples of southern Iraq. This idol exemplifies the schematic clarity of Late Chalcolithic votive sculpture at Tell Brak, in which the entire vocabulary of religious presence is compressed into eyes and body. Its interest lies precisely in that reduction: an object made not to depict a person but to hold their gaze before the god. Dimensions: Height: 5cm

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