Ain Sakhri lovers figurine (-10000/-10000)British Museum
11,000 years ago, not far from Bethlehem, someone reached into a river and picked up a smooth pebble about the size of a human hand. Using a sharp rock, they chipped away at the pebble, carving shallow lines, until they had created a miniature sculpture of two lovers having sex.
What was going through the mind of this ice-age person when they decided to make this artwork? Were they thinking of a god, or of a story they had heard, or perhaps a person they knew? The Ain Sakhri Lovers, as this work is called, are an artistic mystery that speak across ages.
For such a small stone, the lovers are remarkably detailed. Like many other ice age artworks, they lack facial features, but the curved domes are undeniably heads, pressed together.
Their arms hold one another, while one lifts their hunched legs over and around the other, who squats low to the floor.
All other details are obscured - they have some privacy after all - but it's clear what's happening. They're locked in an intimate embrace.
The British artist Marc Quinn has noted that depending on how you look at this sculpture, the human forms seem to resemble genitalia and breasts. You can almost imagine the person who carved it, turning it over in their hand, proud of their visual punning.
The lovers were discovered in 1933, when the amateur prehistorian René Neuville was searching through a collection of finds made near Bethlehem. He contacted the Bedouin who originally found the object, and he was led to the Ain Sakhri caves.
The caves appeared to have been lived in by people of the Natufian culture, around the end of the last ice age. No burials were found in the caves, so it's likely that the lovers were carried by someone while they were alive.
Brancusi Statue (1949-10-10) by Francis MillerLIFE Photo Collection
11,000 years later, someone else had a similar idea. In the early 1900s the Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuși created The Kiss. The Ain Sahkri Lovers hadn't yet been discovered, and yet there is an eerie resemblance between these two artworks, separated by millennia.
Brancusi Statue (1949-10-10) by Francis MillerLIFE Photo Collection
Like the Ain Sakhri Lovers, Brâncuși has done away with nearly all details, leaving just the bodies pressed close. It shows how universal and enduring this simple image is, and how ice age people were no less sophisticated, emotional, or imaginative than us today.
Tap to explore
Today, you will find the Ain Sahkri Lovers in the collection of the British Museum, alongside other amazing artworks of prehistory, such as this delicately engraved rib bone and this mammoth tusk, carved to resemble a pair of swimming reindeer.
