The exhibition “The beginnings of sculpture. Archaeological finds from the Old World and Lesvos 2.5 million to 50,000 years before today” is organized by the University of Crete, the Benaki Museum and the Region of Crete, with the contribution of the General Secretariat of the Aegean and of Island Policy, of the North Aegean Region and the Municipality of Western Lesvos.

The exhibition is scientifically curated by Nena Galanidou, Professor of Prehistoric Archeology at the University of Crete and Thomas Wynn, Professor of Cognitive Archeology at the University of Colorado, and artistically by Tony Berlant, visual artist.

Presented at the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture (Koumpari 1), it opens to the public on Wednesday, September 27, 2023 and will last until Sunday, January 7, 2024.

The exhibition, which will be opened by the President of the Republic, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, includes stone tools as well as “stone figures” depicting birds, faces and bodies, coming from various places in Europe, Africa and the Middle East and presented for the first time time in Greece. The oldest is around 2.5 million years old and the most recent is only 50,000 years old.

The exhibition is based on the corresponding one entitled “First Sculpture: From Handaxe to Figure Stone” organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2018 and in its Athenian version it has been enriched with Paleolithic finds from Lesbos, Africa and Eurasia.

Exhibits include rare Paleolithic tools and stone figures from the collection of Tony Berlant in Dallas, the Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris, the Museum of Upper Galilee and the archaeological collection of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, the Museum of Anthropology and Archeology of University of Cambridge, the European Center for Prehistoric Research in Totavel and the Witwatersrand Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Next to them are presented, for the first time to the Greek and world public, tools from the important site at Rodafnidia on Lesvos, which the University of Crete has been systematically excavating since 2012.

The conversation of the Greek findings with findings from other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa highlights the importance of the Aegean as a gateway for the first inhabitants of Europe.

At the same time, it documents the special weight of the incompletely known Palaeolithic heritage of the Aegean Archipelago in the history of art, culture and human flows in the depths of prehistory, in a period before writing, during which technological achievements and aesthetic pursuits are written in stone.

Until now, the canon of art history recognizes as the most ancient artistic examples the sculptures of the Paleolithic “Venus”, the painting, the engravings and the reliefs on the sides of the caves, with the most famous being the caves of Lascaux and Altamira, all works of our kind , Homo sapiens. The exhibition “The beginnings of sculpture. Archaeological findings from the Old World and Lesbos 2.5 million to 50,000 years before today” argues that the aesthetic awakening occurs in the history of civilization much earlier than has been accepted until now.

Several hundreds of thousands of years before the appearance of Homo sapiens, ancestral species were making tools following the Achaelian technical tradition and sought symmetry by creating teardrop and spherical shapes. Sometimes they chose striking rocks, sometimes they created sharp edges around a central reference point inherent in the raw material, for example a fossil or a crystal imperfection, or they sought the giganticity of the tools. Other species recognized anthropomorphic or animalistic depictions on rocks and carried them to their camps.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog in two languages ​​(Greek, English), guided tours for the public, talks by experts from around the world, educational programs aimed at school and special audiences, production of film material and an original tactile experience to disseminate knowledge to the wider public.