Details

LOT 1236

Anatolian Alabaster Eye Idol

4TH-3RD MILLENNIUM B.C.

1 1/2 in. (34 grams, 38 mm wide).

With a squat body and two looped eyes, slightly convex base.

Provenance

Acquired in the 1980s.
Private collection, Switzerland, thence by descent.
Private collection, since the late 1990s.
This lot has been cleared against the Art Loss Register database, and is accompanied by an illustrated lot declaration signed by the Head of the Antiquities Department, Dr Raffaele D'Amato.

Literature

See parallel idols in the Louvre Museum, accession number SB 9141, for similar; Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession no.1988.323.8; British Museum, excavated by Professor Sir Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan, inv. Nos.126473, 126477 and 126479; see also Collon, D., Ancient Near Eastern Art, London, 1995, p.47, for type; for the discussion on Tell Brak, their iconography and the religious meaning of eye idols see Green, J.B. & T.R., Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, An illustrated dictionary, London, 1992, pp.78-79.

Footnotes

This type of figurine belongs to the type known as an ‘eye idol’ or ‘spectacle idol’, made of stone, marble or alabaster. Usually models having incised eyes (but also examples of open eyes are found) have been excavated mainly at Tell Brak, where thousands were found in a building now called the Eye Temple. There, in the precincts of the temple, excavators have found thousands of little 'eye-idols', schematised humanoid figures fashioned from alabaster, limestone, soapstone and black burnished clay.