The world’s oldest masks Made of polished limestone around 7,000 BCE, these mysterious mas
The world’s oldest masksMade of polished limestone around 7,000 BCE, these mysterious masks have been found over the years in ones and twos in the deserts and hills of Judea. While earlier masks of wood almost certainly existed long before these, they have not survived to be excavated, so these mysterious Neolithic faces are the oldest known masks. No one knows what they represented or how they were used, whether ritual or entertainment (or as was common in older times a mixture of both), but they all share a somewhat grotesque quality to the oval faces (human or otherwise) they depict. The ages of the faces also seem to vary.They weigh between 1 and 2 kg each (except for one miniature brooch sized specimen), which would have made them burdensome to wear, as they have holes around the outer edges allowing for some kind of string to keep them on the face. A few of them bear traces of pigment, implying that they were once painted in bright colours.Any idea related to their meaning and use is bound to be speculative, but archaeologists suggest that they may represent ancestors, and have served in rituals designed to bind communities to the land that said ancestors initially cleared and occupied, bearing in mind that they date from a early epoch in the growth and spread of agriculture when permanent settlements were still a newish idea and nomadic hunter gathering remained the lot of most of humanity. Some of the 15 known examples come from an excavation in the 1980’s at Nahal Hemar cave and has clumps of hair still stuck to them, sitting high in limestone hills overlooking the Dead Sea while others come from around the region.LozImage credit: 1: Elie Posner/ Israel Museumhttps://bit.ly/2ILF3V5https://bit.ly/2FUSUL4 -- source link
#limestone#judea#geology#neolithic#archaeology#dead sea#namal hemar