Male Funerary Head
Unknown · c. 1500 BC
Another bearded man with the visor-cut hair, this head is more worn than its neighbour: the unbaked clay has crumbled at the edges and the surface has softened, but traces of white paint still cling to the face. The beard is full, the eyes wide, and the mouth set in a firm line. At nearly twenty five centimetres it is close to life size.
Excavators working in the Royal City of Susa between nineteen twenty four and nineteen twenty eight found this head in a collective vaulted tomb, part of a group of funerary portraits dating to about fifteen hundred BC. Their purpose is thought to have been to give the dead a lasting face, since the bodies themselves were laid out without coffins in family chambers. The white paint shows the heads were finished in colour, with details like eyes and hair probably picked out in darker tones. The head came to the Louvre through the division of finds with Iran.
Did You Know? White pigment survives on the face, a reminder that these heads were painted in lifelike colours.
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