Art of Mesopotamia
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The art of Mesopotamia has survived in the record from early hunter-gatherer societies on to the Bronze Age cultures of the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires. These empires were later replaced in the Iron Age by the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia brought significant cultural developments, including the oldest examples of writing.
Main Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites in the Fertile Crescent c. 7500 BC. The north and northwest of Mesopotamia were already settled by humans; the rest, with insufficient rainfall, was not.
The Urfa Man, from Upper Mesopotamia circa 9000 BC, the "oldest naturalistic life-sized sculpture of a human". Şanlıurfa Museum.
Jar in calcite alabaster, Syria, late 8th millennium BC.
Urfa Man
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The Urfa man, also known as the Balıklıgöl statue, is an ancient human shaped statue found during excavations in Balıklıgöl near Urfa, in the geographical area of Upper Mesopotamia, in the southeast of modern Turkey. It is dated c. 9000 BC to the period of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, and was considered as "the oldest naturalistic life-sized sculpture of a human". It is considered as contemporaneous with the sites of Göbekli Tepe and Nevalı Çori.
Urfa man portrait, with obsidian stones in the eye sockets
Urfa man detail