That rare case when just one artifact presented at a temporary exhibition was awarded a separate note by Reuters.
We are talking about an unusual figurine of the Neolithic era, nicknamed the “7000-year-old mystery”: scientists do not know what it is, who made it, where and why.
The bird-faced figurine is exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens as part of a temporary project with the self-explanatory name “The Invisible Museum” - a hint at the museum's vaults invisible to the general public, which contain almost 200,000 ancient artifacts, from statues and household utensils to gold decorations.
The small figurine, recovered from the storerooms and set in a brightly lit display case, lacks the grandeur of the marble and bronze statues of Classical Greece.
In the general exposition, it might not have attracted much attention from visitors. But, as museum archaeologist Katya Manteli aptly put it, There are really many mysteries.
To begin with, the place of origin of the ancient statuette is unknown: it came to the museum from a private collection, but no one knows where it was found. Scientists suggest that the figurine was made in the north of modern Greece, in the historical regions of Thessaly or Macedonia.
When? Everything suggests that the figurine belongs to the late Neolithic era, the dating range is from 4500 to 3300 BC. But, unlike the overwhelming majority of sculptural works of that era, the figurine with a “bird's” face is carved from stone, and not from a soft pliable rock like limestone, but from hard granite.
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How - it is not clear: metal tools suitable for processing hard rocks did not exist in the Neolithic era.
The size of the figure is also unusual: 36 cm in height.
Neolithic craftsmen, if they created stone figurines, were limited to small sizes - only 5% of the known Neolithic stone figurines exceed a height of 35 cm, and all of them are made of soft rocks.
For example, the world famous Neolithic “grandmother” from Chatal Huyuk, found last year, is made of a local variety of marble, weighs a kilogram, but her “height” is limited to 17 centimeters. In addition, the Turkish “grandmother” has undeniably recognizable forms, which cannot be said about the Greek artifact.
The face of the granite figurine is indeed very birdlike - a sharp nose-beak, large hollows of the eyes, a long neck …
A small, very “birdlike” tilt of the head is noticeable, as if a statuette is pensively looking up at the viewer.
The graceful top blends into a massive, elephant-like bottom. The long neck flows into a rounded tummy, but the figure's back is unnaturally flat and straight. Legs like sausages are sharply "chopped off" - perhaps so that the figurine can stand upright.
No less strange is the complete absence of allusions to the sex of the mysterious creature.
Is this related to the “technical” difficulties of working with hard stone, or was this the original intention of the sculptor?
On the one hand, the figurine was polished - this is done only with finished pieces. However, on the surface of the figurine, there are unpolished areas where the original color of the stone is visible - it is curious that these areas coincide with… let's call it intimate areas of the human body.
Perhaps the craftsman lacked the skill or the right tools to give the figurine a more definite - male or female - look?
All these oddities, according to Manteli, make the funny granite figurine one of the rarest artifacts of the Neolithic era. After March 26, the mysterious statuette will return to the vaults of the National Archaeological Museum of Greece inaccessible to ordinary people.