Face to Face: The Oldest Masks in the World

Face to Face The Oldest Masks in the World Debby Hershman with contributions by Yuval Goren; Leore Grosman, Ahiad Ovadia, and Alexander Bogdanovsky The Israel Museum, Jerusalem The Israel Museum, Jerusalem The catalogue and exhibition were made possible through the generosity of Face to Face: The Oldest Masks in the World Judy and Michael Steinhardt, New York March–September 2014 and the donors to the Museum’s 2014 Exhibition Fund: Temporary Exhibition Gallery Claudia Davidoff, Cambridge, MA, The Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Archaeology Wing in memory of Ruth and Leon Davidoff Hanno D. Mott, New York Curator: Debby Hershman The Nash Family Foundation, New York Assistant curator: Alexander Bogdanovsky Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild Foundation in Israel Exhibition design: Chanan de Lange Additional support for the catalogue was provided by Catalogue design: Yael Bamberger The Montgomery Securities and Friends Editor of the original Hebrew: Tami Michaeli Endowment Fund of the Israel Museum English translation: Nancy Benovitz Photographic credits and copyrights: p. 96 Pre-press: Art Scan, Tel Aviv Printed by: Art Plus – Green Printing, Jerusalem Catalogue no. 612 ISBN 978 965 278 429 2 © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2014 All rights reserved On the cover: The Large Mask from the collection of Judy and Michael Steinhardt, New York www.imj.org.il/face_to_face James S. Snyder Foreword ........................................................................................................................ 4 The Masks Debby Hershman In Our Own Image ........................................................................................................ 8 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 8 Beginnings: The Dayan Mask .................................................................................... 10 Archaeologists Uncover Rare Finds: The Masks from Nahal Hemar and Basta .................................................................. 12 The Prodigious Priest Purchases a Mask: The Mask from the Musée Bible et Terre Sainte, Paris .............................................. 16 Surprise at the Palestine Exploration Fund: The Mask from er-Ram .............................................................................................. 18 The Hidden Mask: A Mask from a Private Collection in Israel .................................... 19 The Masks near “the Picasso”: The First Group of Masks from a Private Collection in New York ........................................................................ 20 On the Banks of the Hudson: The Second Group of Masks from a Private Collection in New York ........................................................................ 24 Deciphering the Symbolic Code: The Skull-Mask Statue from a Private Collection in New York ................................................................................. 27 The Neolithic Masks: Prehistoric Evidence, Ethnographical Parallels, and Anthropological Interpretations ........................................................................... 30 The Spiritual World of the Makers of the Masks ........................................................ 40 Unmasking the Masks Yuval Goren Scientific Examination of the Prehistoric Stone Masks .............................................. 48 Leore Grosman, Ahiad Ovadia, and Alexander Bogdanovsky Neolithic Masks in a Digital World ............................................................................... 54 Map ............................................................................................................................... 60 Images of the Masks ..................................................................................................... 61 Symbolic Code – The Iconography of the Masks ............................................................ 89 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 90 8| In Our Own Image | Debby Hershman Introduction A small, rare group of 9,000-year-old masks – the oldest masks known to date – which were created during the Neolithic Period in the Judean Hills and the nearby Judean Desert and its fringes, are on view in the exhibition Face to Face: The Oldest Masks in the World. The exhibition, the fruit of ten years of research, unites these enigmatic artifacts for the first time since they were dispersed around the world, presenting them side by side in their land of origin. The masks that were located during the course of the research joined the three that were already known to us, which are on permanent display at the Israel Museum. The entire group numbers 15 (or perhaps even 16 – one will probably always remain a mystery); two of these are mask fragments. Some were studied in the past, while others were located and examined in the framework of the scientific project led by the Department of Prehistoric Cultures at the Israel Museum. The aim of this initiative, which involved specialists from the fields of iconography and scientific archaeology, was to conduct in-depth research into the entire set of masks in order to decipher their possible symbolic meaning and function. The whole group is published together here for the first time as a kind of group portrait of stone faces. The return of the Neolithic masks, discovered in the twentieth century, to the region and context in which they were made and their presentation as an assemblage enable us to come face to face with the oldest artworks made in our image. The masks share common visual features, among these the eye sockets, truncated noses, and gaping mouths, which produce an astonished or threatening expression, reminiscent of human skulls. The perforations along the edges may have served for tying the masks on the face or for affixing them to pillars or statues; they were perhaps also used for the attachment of hair, which would have given the masks a more human appearance. Based on the similarity between the carved stone masks and the cultic skulls of ancestors that were found in the villages of this period – the era of the agricultural revolution and the transition from hunting and gathering to a settled lifestyle and food production – we assume that the masks represented the spirits of the dead and were used in religious and social ceremonies and in rites of healing and magic. Through the creation of human images for cultic purposes, which became the dominant trend in the Neolithic symbolic world, the members of the early agricultural societies expressed their increasing ability to master nature, and, for the first time in human history, they depicted the supernatural powers in their own image. |9 New discoveries from Neolithic sites excavated in our area have enriched our knowledge of the makers of these masks, the people who laid the foundations for the first organized, complex societies, the forerunners of the social structures and cultural institutions that accompany human society until today. We shall never fully know what was hidden behind these carved stone countenances. But if we look straight into the eye sockets that seem to be watching us, we shall find the reflection of the spirit of our ancestors, the creators of civilization. As a university student I was fortunate to have participated in the archaeological expedition to Nahal Hemar, where the first masks to come to light in a controlled excavation were revealed. Today, as curator of the Department of Prehistoric Cultures at the Israel Museum, and in the context of my academic research on the subject of cult, I am privileged to be entrusted with the care and study of these masks. In the section “The Masks” I present the fascinating story of the Neolithic masks and the archaeological, artistic, and comparative methods used to determine their origin, age, and function. The section “Unmasking the Masks” presents the results of microscopical analyses of the masks conducted by my friend and colleague, Prof. Yuval Goren, Director of the Laboratory for Comparative Microarchaeology at Tel Aviv University – who also participated in his youth in the expedition that discovered the masks in the Judean Desert – along with the results of research conducted by Dr. Leore Grosman, Ahiad Ovadia, and Alexander Bogdanovsky of the Computerized Archaeology Laboratory at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The catalogue and exhibition offer a unique opportunity to get to know these powerful, magical, and artistic stone faces, uncover their story, and reveal their secrets. The experience unites the spiritual, artistic, and cultural aspects of these eternal objects with the joy of discovering their meaning.