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The ancient mask was discovered on the West Bank. (Antiquities Theft Prevention Unit, Israel Antiquities Authority). It is one of only 15 in the world.
With oval-shaped holes for eyes and a small ridge for a nose, the mask resembles something a 1970s hockey goalie (or Jason in "Friday the 13th") might have worn.
The mask was discovered near Pnei Hever, an Israeli settlement east of Hebron in the West Bank.
Ronit Lupu, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) told Live Science that a man had been walking through a field when he picked up the mask from the ground and eventually turned it over to the IAA's Antiquities Theft Prevention Unit.
The archaeologists said that it could be one of the oldest surviving ritual masks in the world, however, there was not enough evidence available to identify what function the artifact served. It could also have been used as a death mask, for example, or displayed in another way, such as being hung up—as the holes drilled into its side would suggest.
The West Bank is landlocked Palestinian territory that has been under Israeli occupation since the 1967 Six-Day War. Disputes over artifacts uncovered there were a common feature of the long-running conflict.
Several representations of human faces have been found across the Levant, however, most of them tend to be relatively abstract, with experts divided over whether they could be definitively described as masks, Haaretz reported. As such, the recent finding and the 14 similar masks were considered the earliest definitive manifestations of this phenomenon.
-grabe subrang tanda ng mask na to...
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