Small Terracotta Head of a Man with Ringed Eyes

1st millennium BCE, probably 6th–4th century BCE · Terracotta · Mould-made

A very small solid head of a man on a long neck, broken at the base of the neck and tilted slightly back. The eyes dominate the face: each is set inside two or three raised concentric rings, which give the face a wide, staring, almost spectacled look. The nose is large, sharp and pointed, with small drilled nostrils. Below it, short horizontal ridges at the mouth and chin read either as a moustache and trimmed beard or simply as heavy lips. The skull is round and plain; a faint band or hairline may cross the forehead.

The clay is orange-red, with white deposit caught in the eye rings and other recesses. A fine crack runs across the brow, and the modelling is soft and blurred, as from a worn mould.

Commentary

This head was made by pressing clay into a mould, and its small size and quick finish suggest an inexpensive votive or household figurine of the Cypriot mould-made tradition. The multiple ringed eyes are its most unusual feature. The closest stylistic parallels are small mould-made male heads in the Louvre catalogued as from Sidon and dated only to the 1st millennium BCE. One, a bearded man in a tiara, is 5.2 cm high [1]; another, slipped and painted, is 4.6 cm [2]. Both share the concentric outlines round the eyes and the heavy, beak-like nose seen here, and a head in a pointed helmet from El-Helaliyeh near Sidon belongs to the same family [3]. The resemblance reflects how closely Cypriot coroplasts worked with the Phoenician coast: moulds and types moved freely across the sea, and Kition was a Phoenician city on the island from the 9th century BCE.

Cypriot coroplasts also gave mould-made faces strongly ridged eyelids. A head in the Metropolitan Museum from Amathus, dated to the early 6th century BCE, has "large eyes with ridged eyelids" [4]. On that head the lid is a single emphatic ridge; here it is doubled and tripled into rings, the same idea pushed further.

Without a find-spot the date is best left broad: the 1st millennium BCE, most probably the 6th to 4th centuries BCE, when mould-made heads of this kind were most common in Cyprus.

The worn surface and burial deposit give no reason to doubt that the head is ancient.