South Arabian Abstract Alabaster Stone Male Head

South Arabian (Qataban / Saba), Yemen, circa 3rd century B.C. – 1st century A.D.

A powerfully abstracted ancient South Arabian funerary head, carved in finely translucent honey-cream calcite-alabaster from the great caravan kingdoms of pre-Islamic Yemen. The artist has reduced the human face to a striking sequence of confident planar volumes: a broad domed forehead descending into wide, gently arched brows; a narrow angular ridge-nose; large almond-shaped eye sockets recessed deeply to receive now-lost inlays of shell, limestone and bituminous paste; an ovoid, slightly parted mouth; and small protruding lug-form ears. The reverse is left flat and roughly hewn, exactly as expected for this class of object.

Size:  7 inches H. x 5-1/2 inches W. + custom pedestal block base.  Provenance: NYC collection, ex. New York Trade  #8733 on back. 

Heads of this type are among the most iconic productions of the South Arabian funerary tradition and are most often associated with the great cemetery of Hayd ibn 'Aqil at Tamna', capital of the kingdom of Qataban. Each head was originally fitted with gypsum plaster into a rectangular niche high on an inscribed limestone funerary stele, which would have named the deceased and recorded their lineage; comparable complete examples are illustrated as nos. 277–287 in St John Simpson, Queen of Sheba: Treasures from Ancient Yemen (British Museum). 

The radical simplification of feature and the geometry of the planes have long made these heads favorites of modernist collectors — figures like Brâncuși, Modigliani, and Giacometti drew directly on this same reductive Arabian visual vocabulary, and the piece reads as compellingly today as a 20th-century sculpture as it does as a 2,000-year-old votive.