'Ain Ghazal

'Ain Ghazal in context

A large Neolithic town in Jordan

'Ain Ghazal, near modern Amman, was one of the largest Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlements known, occupied from about 7250 BCE. It is famous above all for caches of large lime-plaster human statues — standing figures up to a metre tall, with painted features and shell-inlaid eyes — among the earliest large-scale representations of the human form.

The human image, further south

The 'Ain Ghazal statues express, in plaster, the same Neolithic fascination with representing the human body that the Taş Tepeler carvers worked in stone. Seen together with Göbekli's T-pillar figures and Karahan's carved heads, they show how widely, and how variously, early Neolithic communities set out to make images of themselves.