March
08
/ 2014
More than 10,000 years ago, ancient people living in the Judean Desert and Hills abandoned their nomadic lifestyles and established permanent settlements. Around this time, art, culture, and religious belief began to flourish, reflected in part by the creation of facial masks carved out of limestone and painted with colourful pigments. A collection of these masks will go on display to the public for the first time in the exhibition, ‘Face to Face: The Oldest Masks in the World’. The masks were found in the Judean Desert and Hills in an area of approximately 50 kilometres in radius. Some of the masks were found by Israeli archaeologists Ofer Bar Yosef during excavations at the Nahal Hemar cave in 1983. The
