This is precisely how we looked on returning from a week-long marathon through Gaziantep and Şanlıurfa. Gigabytes of impressions in the head, a mild existential shock in the eyes. We need time to digest it all; these fellows in the photograph, on the other hand, are in no hurry whatever.
Allow me to introduce the “eye idols.” The Şanlıurfa museum displays finds from two key excavations—Hacınebi and Zeytinlibahçe. They are the legacy of the Uruk period (4th millennium BC), the age when civilisation in Mesopotamia was only just beginning to feel for its own shape.
Looking at them, I could not help recalling my post on the Turkish verb bakakalmak. You remember? It describes the state of freezing in astonishment, unable to look away. These idols seem to me the oldest and most exact visualisation of that condition. They have quite literally bakakaldılar—stopped still, staring—in time.
What makes them remarkable? For all their age, they look like contemporary art objects, or like exceptionally expressive emoji. Archaeologists still argue about their precise purpose:
- An all-seeing deity: an attempt to convey the idea of divine presence through a single organ of sense—the most important one.
- Votive offerings: a worshipper would leave a figurine in the temple so that it could “keep an eye on” his prayers around the clock while he got on with more pressing business.
For the curious: if you would like to know more about the context of these finds, and about the celebrated “Eye Temple” where such figurines were counted in their thousands, read up on Tell Brak. It is one of the oldest urban sites in the world, and did much to determine the shape of early Mesopotamia.
So which of these idols best captures your own state on emerging from a museum full of interesting things?
