Female Funerary Head
Unknown · c. 1500 BC
A woman's face modelled in unbaked clay looks out with a calm, slightly heavy expression, her hair arranged in a broad halo around her head. The surface is cracked and part of the head is lost, which is unsurprising for clay that was never fired. Heads of this kind were placed beside the dead in the vaulted family tombs of Susa, and each one seems intended as an individual likeness.
Made around fifteen hundred BC, in the early Middle Elamite period, these funerary portraits are among the most personal objects to survive from Susa. Excavators found them in collective underground chambers, apparently set near the head of the deceased, and their varied faces and hairstyles suggest real people rather than a stock type. The unbaked clay was sometimes painted, and the sculptors worked the features with surprising sensitivity. Nothing quite like them is known elsewhere in the ancient Near East. The head reached the Louvre through the division of finds from the French excavations at Susa.
Did You Know? Because the clay was never fired, the head survived only because the tomb stayed dry for more than three thousand years.
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