Stone Age Death Masks

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In the Neolithic period (c. 8000–4000 B.C.), Near Eastern peoples created a number of arresting images to represent (or influence) their world. They carved small female figurines immodestly presenting their breasts or pregnant stomachs, for instance, and they depicted animals being viciously stabbed with flints. Perhaps the most powerful and haunting of these Stone Age images are plaster human heads—modeled on the skulls of deceased human beings after the 020flesh had decayed away—that eerily stare back at us across the millennia.

But what do these modeled heads symbolize?

The standard interpretation is that they were created for use in an ancestor cult. The British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who found plaster heads at Jericho, called them “portrait skulls” to suggest that each was modeled on the skull of a dead ancestor. According to this theory, the living could reclaim the powers of the dead by making a likeness of the deceased’s head.^a

It is time to challenge this interpretation. Not only do the facts fail to support it, but it flies in the face of thousands and thousands of years of Near Eastern history.

First: the facts. Perhaps because these plaster skulls are so well known, scholars often refer to them as “common.” But that is not the case; we have only 44 examples, half of them in poor condition, from six sites: Tell Ramad (23) in Syria; Ain Ghazal (6) in Jordan; Jericho (10), Kfar HaHoresh (2) and Beisamoun (2) in Israel; and Kosk Hoyuk (1) in south-central Turkey. The earliest modeled skulls, dating about 7100 B.C., are from Jericho and Ain Ghazal. The practice continued in the south until around 6000 B.C. and at Kosk Hoyuk until about 5500 B.C.

Although some have claimed that the plaster skulls were buried in multiples of three, they have actually been found in seemingly random numbers. At Tell Ramad, for example, excavators found caches of twelve and eight skulls, whereas Jericho yielded caches of seven and two skulls. At most of these sites, moreover, excavators have found single skulls not associated with others.

At Beisamoun and Kosk Hoyuk, plaster skulls were discovered inside a building, while at Tell Ramad, they were excavated outside a structure. Skulls from Jericho were simply thrown into a ditch, while Ain Ghazal skulls were neatly buried beneath floors that had been carefully plastered and painted. Some skulls were found associated with human or animal bones and others with such funerary offerings as figurines or flint tools.

Apparently age did not matter. Modeled skulls represent the elderly (about 60 years old), young adults (25–30) and even a youth (mid-teens). Nor do skulls simply depict men—among the examples whose sex can be identified, 12 are of women and 10 are of men.

Thanks to the generosity of the museums housing the skulls, I have had the opportunity to examine them firsthand.^b Each one was an experience. Anyone who looks at these sculptures must feel their strange presence. This was the first time in the Near East that a life-size human face was represented. And so naturalistically!

Although the skulls are dispersed in space and time, they are clearly part of the same tradition. Not only are they similar in general appearance, especially in the modeling of facial features, but they were also prepared in the same way. Before the plaster was applied, the original skull was separated from the rest of the skeleton and its mandible removed; the teeth of the upper jaw were also pulled out. (The 021decapitated heads and severed jaws were buried separately from the rest of the skeleton.) The plaster chin was simply modeled on the bone of the upper jaw, forcing the mouth and nose to shift upwards and thus squeezing the cheeks. The skulls were also sculpted so that they tilt backwards, appearing to make eye contact with the viewer and giving the eyes a mysterious squinting or sleepy look.

Within this long tradition, we find considerable eclecticism in the modeling techniques from site to site and from cache to cache. For example, at Jericho only the visage was covered with plaster, whereas at Kfar HaHoresh the entire head was treated and at Tell Ramad the neck was shown. The ears, absent on some skulls, were depicted as small rings or crescents on others. The eyes were mostly portrayed open, though at Kfar HaHoresh they were closed and at Ain Ghazal the eyelids were sealed with bitumen. When the eyes were shown open, they were mostly modeled with plaster or inlaid with black stone. The Jericho skulls, however, use bivalve shells to replicate the glossy surface of the cornea; most of the shells were broken in half before being inlaid, creating the vertical slit at the center of the eyes that gives them their bewitching look.

Skulls from Ain Ghazal and Jericho (a rare example preserves the mandible and some teeth) stand out for their artistic quality—with the cheeks and eyebrows rendered extremely sensitively. The Jericho skull even introduces the modeling of the eyelids, showing the upper lid naturalistically overlapping the lower, a stylistic detail otherwise unknown until the workshops of Akkadian kings around 2300 B.C.

As I studied the skulls, it dawned on me that the principal differences lay not between skull and skull but between cache and cache. Of the excavated skulls from Tell Ramad, for example, the eight examples from Level I had red color only on the forehead and the back of the cranium, but the three skulls from Level II were red all over. A cache at Ain Ghazal yielded three plaster faces that had become separated from the skull on which they were originally modeled, but all the other specimens from the site were still attached to a cranium. The cache of seven Jericho skulls had shell-eyes, but the separate skull did not.

What this means is that each cache was created as a group or a series, probably by the same hand. If each cache was the work of a single artisan, the ancestor-worship theory does not make sense. So we must find some other way to explain why these Neolithic peoples crafted such lifelike death masks.

The significance of symbols created by dead societies cannot be retrieved with a trowel. Archaeology therefore relies on other disciplines to shed light on the symbolism of the past. On the assumption that societies at a similar stage of development may share similar traits, cultural anthropologists sometimes try to elucidate ancient customs by looking for parallels among existing archaic cultures.

In examining plastered skulls from Jericho in the 1950s, Kathleen Kenyon relied on this kind of ethnographic evidence. She compared the Jericho skulls to ancestors’ masks from 19th-century A.D. New Guinea, 022and she suggested that the Jericho masks might have served a similar purpose in honoring revered ancestors. Kenyon’s ancestor-cult theory still endures, though it was modified by some scholars to include a hero-cult theory when skulls of young adult males 25 to 30 years old were excavated at Kfar HaHoresh and Ain Ghazal.

Another way to interrogate the ancient past is to assume that some traditions are persistent over time. That is, pre-literate Neolithic peoples may have used certain symbols much as their literate descendants did. It seems to me that the texts and symbols of early Near Eastern peoples are far more likely to shed light on their Neolithic ancestors than are the practices of 19th-century New Guinea tribesmen, some 7,000 miles away.

The ancient literature of the Near East provides numerous references to human skulls. The most famous severed head is that of Huwawa, the guardian of the Cedar Forest in the Gilgamesh Epic.^c Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu subdue the monster, decapitate him and carry his head back to the Sumerian city of Nippur, where they present it as a gift to the chief Mesopotamian god, Enlil. In the ancient Near East, Huwawa’s head became a popular amulet worn to deter evil, cure diseases and help in divination.

Royal furniture from the palace of Ebla—a city in modern Syria that thrived during the latter centuries of the third millennium B.C.—shows soldiers returning home carrying the severed heads of enemies by the hair or in sacks on their backs, very much like Gilgamesh and Enkidu returning to Nippur with Huwawa’s head.

Near Eastern magical incantations—spells compiled on cuneiform tablets for the benefit of ancient healers—make it clear that human skulls in general were viewed as potent medicine to cure various ailments. For example, skulls were used to treat 023individuals who ground their teeth during sleep:

You take a human skull, you spread a cloth over a chair and place the human skull on it, you recite the incantation seven times into the skull, you have the patient kiss the skull seven and seven times in front of his bed, and he will get well.¹

Other texts illustrate that skulls were part of doctors’ kits: “You mix [various drugs] and fumigate the patient with fire in a human skull.”² Dust from a human skull, mixed with tamarisk seeds or other ingredients, was made into a balm to be rubbed on patients who saw dead people in dreams.

In Mesopotamian necromantic texts, manuals providing instructions on how to perform divination from corpses, the human skull is endowed with supernatural powers. For example, a necromancer could use a skull to exorcise a ghost from a haunted individual or to summon a ghost for the benefit of patrons anxious to peek into the future.

According to one text, before summoning a ghost, a skull was to be smeared with a magic unguent consisting of “a male and a female shelduck, dust from the crossroad, dust of a centipede, a wild sow of the steppe and an upturned potsherd from a crossroad.”³ The concoction was crushed, mixed with oil and left outside overnight. In the morning, the unguent was spread on the skull. The necromancer could then summon a cooperative ghost to answer questions or mediate a matter before the gods of the underworld.^d

In royal cuneiform texts, kings often boast of their victories by telling how they made heads roll. For example, the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (680–669 B.C.) recounts: “Sanduarri … like a bird, I snared him out of his mountains and cut off his head.” And again: “I cut off their heads … And that the might of Assur, my Lord, might be manifest, I hung their heads upon the shoulders of their nobles and with singing and music, I paraded them through the public square of Nineveh.”⁴

Curses carved on stone monuments warning that the bones of violators will “never be joined together again” reveal what the Assyrian kings had in mind when they cut off the heads of their enemies. A common belief was that the ghost of a dismembered individual was doomed to wander aimlessly throughout eternity, drinking dirty water and eating refuse. Decapitation was therefore the worst possible outrage that could be inflicted on an enemy, preventing him from ever achieving peace in the afterlife. Sargon II (721–705 B.C.) of Assyria exhumed the skeletons of 024dead kings in conquered countries and exposed them “to prevent their spirits from ever resting in peace.” Assurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.) ordered a rebel’s bones to be ground to powder by the rebel’s own sons.

The Assyrian kings, who had a taste for the macabre, decorated their palaces with images of their soldiers severing heads with curved swords, scribes counting heaps of skulls, and soldiers playing catch with decapitated heads. One of the most gruesome scenes shows the defeat of the Persian Elamites by the Assyrian king Assurbanipal (668–627 B.C.). The Assyrians decapitated the Elamite king Teumman; as Assurbanipal boasts in his annals, “With a knife, I cut the tendons of his face and spat upon it.” A relief in the king’s palace at Nineveh shows the swollen, decaying head of Teumman hanging on a tree as Assurbanipal lies on an elegant couch, with the queen seated near him, listening to music and sipping drinks.

Although we have no texts earlier than about 2700 B.C., the iconographic record concerning skulls goes further back, linking history to prehistory. The motif of birds devouring enemies’ heads, for example, endured over thousands of years. Reliefs from the Assyrian king Assurnasirpal’s throne room in Kalhu (modern Nimrud in Iraq) show birds of prey looming over beheaded cadavers; these date to the ninth century B.C. Similarly, a Sumerian victory stela dated about 2500 B.C. shows a flight of vultures carrying away heads of enemies in their beaks. And some 3,000 years before that, about 5900–5700 B.C., a Neolithic painting at Catal Hoyuk (in south-central Turkey) depicts vultures with enormous wings and voracious open beaks assaulting decapitated figures above a set of actual human skulls. The evidence of Near Eastern iconography indicates that for 5,000 years, defeat and humiliation were symbolized by birds swarming on beheaded enemies.

In the ancient Near East, one simply did not honor ancestors by cutting off their heads. On the contrary, the texts and images consistently suggest that decapitation was an abomination. It seems that we must, in this case, abandon the anthropological method—in which the Neolithic skulls are interpreted by comparison with practices of archaic peoples in New Guinea. The literary and iconographic evidence, combined with the fact that the skulls were modeled in series, rather than individually, and the fact that many of the skulls were those of women, strongly suggests that our haunting images were not the death masks of revered ancestors or heroes.

Instead, the archaeological evidence is consistent with the Near Eastern belief that the human skull held healing and divinatory powers. This hypothesis that the plaster skulls had apotropaic and prophetic functions is consistent with the indiscriminate use of males and females of all ages, the fact that many of the skulls were manufactured in a series, the distribution of skulls over a large geographic area and the lack of established rules for their disposal. The use of plastered skulls by healers and seers is also supported by the wear and tear visible on some specimens.

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Moreover, the skulls were apparently prepared for visual display; removing the mandible and teeth was a convenient way to tilt the skull upward for viewing. The eerie visage must have made an impression on patients advised to lick or kiss a skull in order to heal or to make contact with the Great Beyond.

There are two major problems with my reinterpretation of the Neolithic plastered skulls. Enough headless skeletons were found at the sites to make it likely that the skulls were those of people from the community, not from distant battlefields. Perhaps before the onset of organized warfare in the third millennium B.C., when supplies of enemy skulls would have been more plentiful, any skulls were collected when needed for medical or necromantic purposes.

The second problem is that skulls found in the historical period—that is, the period from which we have cuneiform texts—were not plastered. Possibly the Neolithic plaster heads were made for reasons not discussed in the texts, which come several millennia later.

This anomaly might be easily explained, however. The manufacture of plaster both started and reached its peak in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period (7100–6000 B.C.), when it was used in great quantities for plastering walls and floors, as well as for making vessels, statues and pendants. But plaster disappeared in the Yarmoukian period (5750–5000 B.C.). It was then probably replaced by unguents that easily disintegrated—much as described in the later texts.

Some will cry foul for pushing the traditional Near Eastern horror of decapitation back to the Neolithic period. But really this is not an extraordinary step. We know that agriculture, for example, was passed from Neolithic to Chalcolithic (c. 4000–3000 B.C.) and Bronze Age (c. 3000–1200 B.C.) peoples of the Near East. We have also shown how the symbolism 026of birds devouring beheaded people spread out over the Near East and persisted for millennia.

Still other examples explicitly link the Levantine Neolithic period with the Near Eastern Bronze Age and Iron Age (1200–600 B.C.). The image of a woman scooping her breasts with her hands, first attested at Jericho and Ain Ghazal around 6500 B.C., became the hallmark of Near Eastern deities for over six 027millennia: Sumerian Inanna, Assyrian Ishtar, Canaanite Astarte and Phoenician Tanit, among many now-nameless goddesses. Second, the baetyls (sacred standing stones) found in many Near Eastern Bronze Age and Iron Age shrines have precursors in the standing stones of the “temples” (c. 6000 B.C.) of Ain Ghazal.^e Finally, the token system invented around 7500 B.C. for counting—probably originally for keeping track of baskets of cereals—spread throughout the Near East and became, four millennia later, the prototype for signs in cuneiform script.^f These examples and others undeniably illustrate the influence of the Neolithic Levant on later Near Eastern tradition.

These skulls, at once so foreign and familiar, remind us of the power and durability of our symbols. Some English words can be traced back 5,000 years to what linguists call the Proto-Indo-European languages; and the letters of our alphabet are 3,500 years old. Many Christian symbols have been with us for 2,000 years, and they will remain with us until the last Christian is gone.

In making their plaster masks, our Neolithic ancestors may well have passed on what was already an age-old fascination with the human skull. And here we are, still moved, trying to reach back through history and prehistory to understand them.

In the Neolithic period (c. 8000–4000 B.C.), Near Eastern peoples created a number of arresting images to represent (or influence) their world. They carved small female figurines immodestly presenting their breasts or pregnant stomachs, for instance, and they depicted animals being viciously stabbed with flints. Perhaps the most powerful and haunting of these Stone Age images are plaster human heads—modeled on the skulls of deceased human beings after the 020flesh had decayed away—that eerily stare back at us across the millennia. But what do these modeled heads symbolize? The standard interpretation is that they were created for use in […]