Marble copy of the Mask of Warka

This is the so called "Mask of Warka", made between 3300 BC and 3000 BC. It was found in the temple precinct of Inanna, Uruk (today village of Warka)...

Everyone is raving about this piece of art because it is considered to be the first anatomically correct depiction of the human face in Mesopotamia.

What I find absolutely amazing, is that no one is commenting on the fact that the head is actually carved out of marble, but in a way as to mimmic a head sculpted out of clay. Look at the hair. It looks like crudely fashioned with few thumb strokes going from back forward...

Was this an exact marble copy of previously existing clay head?

To me it looks like someone made a quick sketch of a human head in clay, and told a stonemason: this is how you do it. So he did. He copied everything exactly as he saw on the model. To the last detail... 

Here is another picture of the Mask of Warka, uder different light, which makes it look like it was made of clay. 

Look at the eyebrows. They look like they were gouged by a single stroke of a sharp piece of reed or wood through a soft clay. To me this is totally fascinating...

I mean even the eyes look like they were cut by a sharp knife in a single stroke. Look at the bottoms of both eyes, the thin lip of the material sticking out, like it was pressed out and down during the cutting movement. And was just left like that, like in a quick sketch...

How did this stay unnoticed I have no idea. Or maybe it was noticed but I haven't come across the article that talks about it...

But then we have the most delicately and beautifully sculpted bottom half of the head. The chin, lips, cheeks (and probably nose before it was broken off) are so life like. They are perfect...In sharp contrast to the top part of the head which was left "half finished"...

It gets curiouser and curiouser the more you look at this thing...

I think that the reason why the top part was left the way it is (sketched or unfinished or unpolished, called it what you want) is because the top of the head was covered with the wig, false eyebrows were inserted into the eyebrow groves and false eyes, with false eyelashes were inserted into eye sockets...

Which would make the "sketched" or "unfinished" or "unpolished" parts of the head invisible, and which is why the artist didn't bother to finish them. 

What is strange is that if you were doing this head straight out of a piece of stone, the unfinished parts wouldn't look like this

But they would look exactly like this if you made the head out of clay. 

What I think happened is that there was another, earlier, original, clay head, of which this stone head is a copy. It had a wig, false eyebrows and false eyes, which covered the "unfinished bits"...

That head was sacred. It could even have been a depiction of Inanna. And you don't mess with Inanna. You definitely don't change the head of the goddess, if you were told to make a stone copy of her miraculous idol, which was made in her likeness, who knows when...So you copy it exactly...

It's like the icons painters who copy icons exactly, because they believe that they are miraculous, sacred, exactly the way they are...