World's Oldest Masks Modeled on Early Farmers' Ancestors
Sculpted stone faces—9,000 years old—represented family links to the land.
A dozen of the world's earliest known masks have been brought together for the first time for an exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The rare stone artifacts were sculpted by early farmers whose immediate ancestors had given up hunting and gathering and settled in the Judean Hills, the location of the modern city of Jerusalem, and in the fringes of the nearby Judean Desert.
That momentous change in lifestyle, along with the first stirrings of organized religion, may have prompted the farmers to create the stark stone images for their cult rituals.
Debby Hershman, curator of the museum's Prehistoric Cultures Department, has spent the last decade conducting the first comprehensive study of the 15 known stone masks from the
