A History Of The World In A 100 Objects: No. 7

A History Of The World In A 100 Objects
Number 7
Ain Sakhri Lovers Figurine
Stone sculpture, found at Wadi Khareitoun, Judea near Bethlehem
9000 bc

This section of the book is mostly about the age of Human evolution in which Humans settled down & began to create communities & settlements, it comes at the dawn of the agricultural era & with better techniques & a better understanding of how to feed a population Humans were able to change from hunter gatherers to a settled, more agricultural & eventually more cultural society.
This item is a stone sculpture found in what we call the holy lands but then it was quite a fertile place that was made abundant after the end of the last ice age created a warmer climate & better conditions to grow crops both in numbers & in variety making Humans able to start to become the settled communities that grew into empires.
With this settling down came a greater emphasis on aymbols in the form of artistic expression. There are no written historical archives from this period, coming from some 11,000 years ago so items like this slightly potato shaped carved stone figurine. It's one of the earliest examples of an interpretation of the Human form purely for the purpose of creating a thing, a thing that has no intrinsic use but is merely created just to be.
It's smooth in texture & probably would have been naturally smoothed by coming from a river bed & further shaped to form a alisghtly abstract shaped couple embraced in a hug. It's a thought that the item would probably have had a particularly spiritual relevance to the creator of the item who it's thought is celebrating the union of man & woman which is evidence that the people of this time were beginning to think of themselves as communities.