Cracking mystery of the stone head

A mysterious crack has appeared in this stone head in the lounge

I have been meaning to compile a blog post about my favourite “ancient stone heads of the world” for a while – and now I have an excuse. The small stone head I bought at the Ideal Home Exhibition in the 1980s has suddenly developed a crack.

I say developed as it doesn’t seem to be the result of a sudden blow. There were mysterious signs of trouble a few weeks ago when the statuette, only about six inches tall, started weeping water. Not from its non-existent eyes, which would have been really spooky, but from its base.

The statuette is eyeless

After all these years this strange behaviour is a total mystery. I would understand if I had washed it in water and the liquid took a while to seep out of the porous stone, but I have never washed it in water. I would also understand if it had been exposed to extreme heat or cold, but it has been in a constant environment for decades. The only difference has been a wet summer this year. Could it be something to do with humidity?

The back of the cracked head

I don’t suppose I will ever have an answer to the mystery, which brings me to some famous stone heads of the world which have also been shrouded in secrets…

Cycladic figures of the Aegean

My little statuette is an imitation of the art of the Cycladic culture (3300-1100BCE) of the ancient Aegean, which existed alongside the Minoan (2600-1100BCE) and Mycenean (1600–1100 BCE) cultures.

This Cycladic stone head in the Louvre is twice the size of mine and dates from the Keros culture (2700–2300 BCE) – click on the picture to go the Wikipedia source information

Many of these Cycladic pieces were made of white marble and their simple features remind us of modern art, but apparently some of them show signs of having been painted in bright colours, which spoils the illusion, to our eyes.

There is no consensus about the purpose of these figures, whether they were decorative or had some ritual purpose. Interestingly all have been found deposited in graves – but that may just be because otherwise they would have continued in use and been broken or lost, meaning archaeologists would not find them.

The Moai of Easter Island

This Easter Island head, made of volcanic tuff, stands at well over five feet tall – it is in the Louvre and the image comes from Pinterest

Thor Heyerdahl’s book Aku Aku – this is the cover of the original Norwegian edition of 1957

Perhaps the most iconic giant stone heads in the world are those of Easter Island, a remote scrap of land in the southern Pacific. They are known as moai. I have been fascinated by them since I read books about them as a teenager, including Thor Heyerdahl’s Aku Aku.

The place was called Easter Island by a Dutch explorer in 1722 but the Polynesian name is Rapa Nui. It also has names which may mean the “navel of the world” and “eyes looking to the sky”, which sounds very mysterious.

The 900 or so moai were carved between 1250 and 1500 and nearly half still lie incomplete in the main quarry. But hundreds were set on stone platforms called ahu around the edge of the island. The tallest moai was almost 33 feet high, while the heaviest weighed 90 tons.

These were not staring out to sea, as you might expect, as guardians. They were the faces of deified ancestors and still gazed inwards across their clan lands when Europeans first visited. All had toppled by the end of the 19th century.

Standing in a row, the moai remind me of meerkats – this image is by Ian Sewell

American archaeologist William Mullo restored this moai, with red scoria topknot and coral eyes. Picture by Bjarte Sorensen

Pollen analysis shows that Easter Island was covered in forest until 1200AD but tree pollen disappears from the record by 1650. The suggestion is that the makers of the moai destroyed the trees, possibly using them to transport the statues on rollers. I can’t help wondering if that’s why they gave up and left them in the quarry – no trees left?

Although I have been calling these stone heads, they did have short bodies attached, although those shown on the cover of the Heyerdahl book were buried up to the neck. These were outside a quarry, unfinished, their eyes not yet hollowed out. They remained where they had been abandoned, partially covered in spoil.

I recall seeing a wonderful little science fiction cartoon once in which the moai are actually fully-formed aliens, emerging so slowly from the ground that we can’t see them move.

Colossal Olmec heads of Mexico

This Olmec head from San Lorenzo in Mexico is nearly six feet tall and now rests in the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa in Veracruz – image by Maribel Ponce Ixba

The Olmecs were the first major civilization of southern Mexico, farming the land beside the Gulf of Mexico from 1500-400BCE. Then they abandoned the cities of their heartland, possibly because of volcanic activity or some other environmental catastrophe.

There are at least 17 so-called colossal heads, five to 11 feet tall, sculpted from basalt boulders. All show men with a look that has sometimes been considered African or Oriental, but the facial type can still be found among the people of Tabasco and Veracruz.

Each head wears a distinctive headdress, often thought to be like the protective helmet of a participant in the ancient Mesoamerican ballgame played in a stone court with a hard rubber ball.

The boulders were brought some distance from the mountains, hinting that they may have been used to create portraits of powerful individual rulers. The heads were arranged in lines or groups at major Olmec centres.

Fallen gods of Mount Nemrut

A sculpted human head from the remains of a tomb at the summit of Mount Nemrut in Turkey – image by Klearchos from Wikimedia Commons

At the summit of Mount Nemrud or Nemrut Dagi in southeastern Turkey stands a row of large statues assumed to mark a royal tomb. The mountain’s name probably came from an Armenian story in which Nimrod was killed by an arrow during a massive battle between two rival armies of giants.

In 62 BC, King Antiochus I of Commagene built a tomb flanked by the statues, 26-30 feet tall, of himself, two lions, two eagles and various Greek, Armenian, and Medes gods. These were once seated, with their names inscribed on them. But the heads of the statues have at some stage been cast down and scattered across the site.

The terrace at the top of Mount Nemrut shows the stone heads with their statue bodies above – image by Alex Wang

It’s funny how disembodied heads have more impact on the imagination than complete statues.

Pieces of Constantine the Great

Head of the colossal statue of Constantine I at the Musei Capitolini in Rome

Head of Constantine I photographed by Jean-Christophe Benoist

The colossus of Constantine the Great (c280-337) was a huge “acrolithic” statue – a composite made of different materials – that once stood in the Basilica of Maxentius near the Forum Romanum in Rome. Portions are now on display at the Musei Capitolini.

The great head, arms and legs were carved from white marble, attached to a brick core and wooden framework, possibly covered with gilded bronze. The figure on its throne would probably have been 40 feet high. The surviving head is about eight feet tall.

The colossus was pillaged, probably for the bronze parts, and the marble fragments were found in 1486. They were moved to safety by Michelangelo.

One mystery of this statue is that two slightly different right hands remain. The suggestion is that a hand holding a sceptre was replaced by a hand holding a Christian symbol late in Constantine’s reign. He was famously Christian and founded Constantinople (formerly Byzantium and now Istanbul) in Turkey, straddling the Bosphorus.

Fragments of Ozymandias

Head of Rameses the Great – one of four colossal statues outside the temple at Abu Simbel in Egypt, relocated in 1968 for the building of the Aswan High Dam

They don’t come much bigger than statues of the ancient Pharaohs – and they don’t come much greater than Rameses II (the Great), who ruled over Egypt from 1279–1213BCE. His face is to be seen all over the land and one of his statues is said to have inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, published in 1818. Ozymandias is a corruption of Rameses’ title, Usermaatre Setepenre, meaning “The justice of Rê is powerful—chosen of Rê”.

Shelley began writing his poem in 1817, soon after the British Museum’s announced that it was to receive a seven-ton fragment of a statue of Rameses from a temple at Thebes, even though it didn’t arrive until 1821. The poem is about the ultimate decay and oblivion of great men and their empires…

Head of Rameses II at the British Museum, inspiration for Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

That seems like a good place to conclude these musings on the mysterious nature of colossal stone heads…