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Female Head

2700 BC - 2600 BC
Gypsum
Khafajah
8.0 cm x 7.5 cm x 8.5 cm
A12431

Oriental Institute Museum

Artifact Description

Female Head

Scholars believe that worshipper statuettes were placed in temples to stand in perpetual prayer while their owners went about their daily lives. This is the head of a gypsum statuette with eyeballs made of shell, and pupils made of lapis lazuli. The figure's hair, colored with a tar-like substance known as bitumen, is styled in the fashion typical of most female statues and statuettes. It is parted in the middle and braided into a number of small plaits; these, in turn, are plaited together to form a heavy pigtail, which is wound around the head in a counter-clockwise direction.

Collected by

Henri Frankfort, Field Director of the Iraq Expedition
Excavated by The Oriental Institute 1933-1934

Multimedia

A Worshipper Statue
What is a worshipper statue and why did the ancient Mesopotamians use them? Learn the answer to this question and more with this interactive.

What is Conservation?
Ever wonder what a conservator does? Oriental Institute Museum conservator Laura Laura D'Alessandro tells you all about her job in this video.

Suggested Readings

Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.

Frankfort, H. and H.A., John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen. Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1946.

Van Der Toorn, Karel. From Her Cradle to Her Grave. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994.

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