The Great Shigir Idol is the oldest known wooden monumental sculpture in the world. Scientists assume that this idol is the personification of a spirit or deity worshiped by ancient people.
Great Shigir Idol
Creation period
11 500 - 11 000 years ago
Dimensions
340х23х12 cm
Technique
hewing, planing, polishing, carving
Exhibition
14
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Great Shigir Idol
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Great Shigir Idol
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The sculpture is made from a larch trunk, which ancient people split with wedges. The approximate age of the sculpture is eleven thousand years. It was found during gold mining in the Shigir peat bog seventy kilometres from Yekaterinburg in 1890. By order of Count Alexander Stenbock-Fermor, the sculpture was transferred to the museum of the Ural Society of Devotees of Natural Science (USDNS; now the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore).
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The sculpture has survived to this day thanks to the conditions in which it was kept. The peat created an anaerobic – oxygen-free – environment. Without access to air, all oxidative processes go very slow.
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Great Shigir Idol. Reconstruction by Dmitry Lobanov, custodian of the USDNS museum. Late 19th century.
Even in antiquity, the sculpture fell apart. At the end of the 19th century, the museum custodian Dmitry Lobanov made the first attempt to reconstruct the idol. From randomly combined pieces, he assembled a 2.8-metre figure with arms and crossed legs. But there remained unused fragments. In 1914, the archeologist Vladimir Tolmachev turned his attention to the odd parts of the idol and performed a second reconstruction. According to his project, the Great Shigir Idol grew up and became 5.3 metres high with a large head, a body in the form of a board and a three-dimensional base in the form of a cone. Later the lower 195-centimetre long part of the sculpture was lost, and now its height is 3.4 metres.
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To make the sculpture, ancient man used the greater part of a larch trunk, including its core. There are no fractures or burrs on the Great Idol. This suggests that they began to make the sculpture immediately after the tree was cut down.
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Beaver jaw tool — incisor.
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А — Reconstruction of the Great Shigir Idol by Vladimir Tolmachev 1914 (digits are fragments’ numbers); Б — present-day look of the Great Shigir Idol; В — scheme of placement of the Great Shigir Idol’s characters (digits are figures’ numbers).
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The body of the sculpture is covered with geometric patterns and images of faces. There are eight characters on the idol: the top figure with a three-dimensional head, three flat images on the front side and four flat images on the back side of the body. Researchers assume that initially there used to be more characters.
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Sverdlovsk Regional Ethnographic Museum
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Great Shigir Idol
Creation period
11 500 - 11 000 years ago
Dimensions
340х23х12 cm
Technique
hewing, planing, polishing, carving
Exhibition
14
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