(pleasant jazzy piano music)
- [Narrator] We're in the Brooklyn Museum
looking at a life-size male head.
(murmuring)
- [Narrator] This is one of the oldest terracottas
from Sub-Saharan Africa.
In fact, it's about 2,500 years old.
- [Narrator] It's from a part of Africa
that we now call Nigeria.
And this is one of numerous life-size human figures
that have been found.
- [Narrator] We've found heads,
we've found bodies positioned in standing,
or seated, or prayer positions.
And we have also found animals from this region.
They're called Nok terracottas,
and Nok really just refers to a small village
where the very first one was found.
But since then we've found quite a few
in present-day Nigeria.
- [Narrator] These have been found
by farmers, people tilling fields.
And as a result, many of the objects
come without a careful scientific archeological method
that would give us more information
about the objects themselves.
- [Narrator] And, in fact, we don't even have
a name of a culture that made them, they're so old.
But what we do know is that originally they were fired
with a slip and they were smooth in texture.
- [Narrator] They're terracotta and they're hollow.
And they would have originally had color applied to them.
And what slip really is are very small fragments
of clay, often with iron oxide
that's mixed in that can become a black
or a red depending on how it's fired.
- [Narrator] They were either built up
through a coiling technique, or maybe it was
a block of clay that was then hollowed out,
which suggests a subtractive technique.
- [Narrator] Well, there's no question
that there's some subtractive work here.
Because we can see it in sizing into the surface.
And we can see it scraping away, creating these beautiful,
highly-refined geometric forms for the face.
- [Narrator] And most of the objects that we've found
are very stylized and similar in that
they all have this triangular shape eye
with a perforated pupil, these arched brows.
- [Narrator] One of the most distinctive features
of this head is the hair, wonderful mounds,
these craters around the back of the head.
- [Narrator] If you look closely in the back,
you can actually see lines suggest
the parting of the hair and striation,
which even suggests the combing process.
- [Narrator] It's important to remember
when we're looking at an object like this
that we're not seeing it in its original context:
the way it was used, the kind of environment
it would have been in.
And, of course, it's original colors
and whether or not there would have been anything added.
When I see, for example, the perforations
of the eyes, which go all the way into the hollow
of the clay object itself, my instinct
is to imagine that that was filled with something.
But we don't know.
- [Narrator] And then if we also look
at the mouth, the mouth is slightly open.
It suggests, maybe, speech,
that the figure has something to tell us.
- [Narrator] It's so animated.
This is a figure that seems to be
in the midst of a conversation.
This is an object that was made
at the same time that Ancient Greece and Rome were in power,
that Ancient Egypt was still functioning.
And yet, here we are in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Clearly evidence of a very sophisticated culture.
It suggests that there was a art making tradition
in West Africa that is as ancient as Egypt,
and that these artists were concerned
with representation of the human form.
We don't have an example of the body
that this went with, but we know that the bodies
generally were smaller in scale than the head.
So it suggests that the head was the most significant part.
And we find that tradition of the head
as the center or the seat of wisdom
in other cultures throughout West Africa
in the same region today.
- [Narrator] There's a subtlety to the abstraction
of the face that I find really compelling.
Look, for example, at the way that the eyes,
which are straight across at the top
and then dip down, creates a sense of quietness
in the figure, and a sense of seriousness,
a sense of gravity in the figure.
But then it's perfectly echoed in the area above the eye
between the top lid and the eyebrow.
- [Narrator] It suggests an inner calm
or an inner serenity that may tell us something more
about the figure than just their surface depiction.
It may suggest something about an inner thought
or an inner morality that the artist was trying to convey.
(pleasant jazzy piano music)