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
Temporary Exhibition Gallery
The Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Archaeology Wing
Curator: Debby Hershman
Assistant curator: Alexander Bogdanovsky
Exhibition design: Chanan de Lange
Catalogue design: Yael Bamberger
Editor of the original Hebrew: Tami Michaeli
English translation: Nancy Benovitz
Photographic credits and copyrights: p. 96
Pre-press: Art Scan, Tel Aviv
Printed by: Art Plus – Green Printing, Jerusalem
and the donors to the Museum’s 2014 Exhibition Fund:
Claudia Davidoff, Cambridge, MA,
in memory of Ruth and Leon Davidoff
Hanno D. Mott, New York
The Nash Family Foundation, New York
Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild Foundation in Israel
Additional support for the catalogue was provided by
The Montgomery Securities and Friends
Endowment Fund of the Israel Museum

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

QR code generated on http://qrcode.littleidiot.be

 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, Neolithic Masks in a Digital World ............................................................................... 54

Ahiad Ovadia, and
Alexander Bogdanovsky

Map ............................................................................................................................... 60

Images of the Masks ..................................................................................................... 61

Symbolic Code – The Iconography of the Masks ............................................................ 89

Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 90

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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.
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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.