Three Syro-Hittite Pottery Figure Fragments

Near East, Anatolia and Northern Levant, Syro-Hittite culture. A trio of hand-modeled terracotta figures reduced to their most abstract essentials, all of diminutive scale. The largest preserves a bust whose surviving arm bends sharply at the elbow to rest against the chest, the opposite limb now lost; applied pellets form the wide staring eyes, a pinched ridge the beaked nose, and incised bands describe a necklace and crossed garment straps. The two accompanying heads repeat the formula, one in buff clay with enormous perforated eyes beneath a browline ridge, the other in red-brown clay with a smaller, more compressed face. Such figures, worked quickly from pinched and applied clay, were likely votive or apotropaic, deposited in domestic shrines or graves as tokens of fertility and protection rather than as portraits of any named deity. "Syro-Hittite" is a collector's umbrella for the small clay idols produced across Anatolia, northern Syria, and the upper Levant during the second millennium BCE, a zone where Hittite, Hurrian, and Amorite populations shared a visual shorthand for the human figure. The type owes nothing to naturalism: the body is a tapering column, the head a flattened disc or beak, and identity resides almost entirely in the applied eyes, which are exaggerated to the point of dominating the face. That emphasis on the gaze is deliberate and widespread in Near Eastern votive art, from the alabaster worshippers of Tell Asmar onward, where the wide open eye signals perpetual attention before the divine. Gendered examples typically distinguish females by applied breasts and cradled infants and males by weapons or headgear, while the crossed bands seen across the chest of the larger figure here recur on both. Item # 204549

Estimate:£170.26

View all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorEthnographical