The ʿAin Ghazal statues: monumental Neolithic figures
- Date
- c. 9,500 – 8,250 years ago (c. 7500–6250 BCE)
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Levant (Amman, Jordan)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
At the large Neolithic settlement of ʿAin Ghazal, on the outskirts of modern Amman in Jordan, inhabitants of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic produced some of the oldest large-scale representations of the human form.
Discovered in two buried caches deposited roughly two centuries apart, the assemblage includes around fifteen full statues — some about a metre tall — and a similar number of busts, among them unusual two-headed figures. Each was built from lime plaster modelled over a core of bundled twigs and reeds, with painted features and shell-inlaid, bitumen-rimmed eyes that give the figures an arresting gaze. Their deliberate burial in caches suggests they were ritually 'retired' rather than discarded, hinting at complex ceremonial lives. The statues testify to the artistic ambition, technical skill and symbolic richness of early farming communities, and to the importance of representing ancestors, deities or social roles in monumental form. As precocious works of figurative sculpture, they extend the long Levantine tradition of plaster art — seen also in the plastered skulls — into freestanding three-dimensional imagery.
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Further reading
The wider story
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