Idol with a bird face
Coordinates: 48 ° 13 ′ 35.5 ″ N , 15 ° 19 ′ 43.7 ″ E
The bird-faced idol is an anthropomorphic clay figure with a bird's face from the Middle Neolithic and was found near Melk in Austria in 1933 .
The clay figure was discovered in 1933 during road construction work on the Austrian Höpfenbühel , an elevation on federal road No. 1 between the towns of Melk and Loosdorf . The scientist Richard Pittioni described the 5.2 cm high clay figure in 1940 and particularly emphasized the bird's head-like face and the only stubby arm. He dated the find in the Lengyel culture of the Middle Neolithic; typological comparisons with similar representations support this theory. Today the original is in the Melk City Museum .
During restoration work in the Natural History Museum in Vienna, it was found that the Höpfenbühel idol originally had two arms. With its round head and columnar body, the figure, according to Elisabeth Ruttkay from the Natural History Museum, occupies a special position in the idol world of the Moravian-Eastern Austrian group of painted ceramics (MOG), as similar head, neck and torso representations are not common in this group. She traces the depiction of the idol, trained as a bird-human hybrid, to influences from the cultures of the Northern Balkans at the same time .
literature
- Elisabeth Ruttkay: The idol with a bird's face from Höpfenbühel near Melk - Contributions to the younger Lengyel culture in Eastern Austria. In: Sborník prací Filozofické fakulty brněnské univerzity. M, Řada archeologická , M4 1999, pp. 103-118. With illustrations. (PDF; 2.87 MB).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Richard Pittioni : The Neolithic settlement of “Höpfenbühel”, district of Loosdorf-Neubach near Melk, Niederdonau. In: Our home. Journal for regional studies of Lower Austria. Sankt Pölten 13/1940, pp. 67–81. ( ZDB -ID 510114-1 ).