Venus of Willendorf: This four-inch-tall figurine is a female icon of the Ice Age and is 30,000 years old.Olmec Colossal Heads: These 17 similar heads were thought to be portraits of Olmec rulers in Central America from 3,400 years ago.King Tut’s Funerary Mask: The 24-pound facial replica capped the wrapped mummy of the Egyptian king, who died in 1323 B.C. at the age of 19, after ruling just 10 years. Rosetta Stone: This bilingual, tri-script inscription enabled decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, unlocking all of the ancient civilization's writings.Terracotta Army: Thousands of life-sized clay warriors, lining trenches in military formation in the complex commissioned by Qin Shihuang, the first emperor to rule a unified China from 210 to 221 B.C.Dead Sea Scrolls: Nearly 1,000 tattered texts written between 300 B.C. and A.D. 70 that transcribe stories that predate the Bible.You've probably heard of the Dead Sea ...

Ancient Artifact: Olmec Colossal Heads

What are the most famous ancient artifacts? From the Venus of Willendorf to King Tut's funerary mask, here's what these items reveal about the ancient world.

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6 Iconic Ancient Artifacts That Changed History Around the World

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Bridget Alex

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Key Takeaways on 6 Ancient Artifacts: Venus of Willendorf: This four-inch-tall figurine is a female icon of the Ice Age and is 30,000 years old. Olmec Colossal Heads: These 17 similar heads were thought to be portraits of Olmec rulers in Central America from 3,400 years ago. King Tut’s Funerary Mask: The 24-pound facial replica capped the wrapped mummy of the Egyptian king, who died in 1323 B.C. at the age of 19, after ruling just 10 years. Rosetta Stone: This bilingual, tri-script inscription enabled decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, unlocking all of the ancient civilization's writings. Terracotta Army: Thousands of life-sized clay warriors, lining trenches in military formation in the complex commissioned by Qin Shihuang, the first emperor to rule a unified China from 210 to 221 B.C. Dead Sea Scrolls: Nearly 1,000 tattered texts written between 300 B.C. and A.D. 70 that transcribe stories that predate the Bible. You've probably heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls and seen King Tut's mask. But if you want to beat your family at Jeopardy, you'd better learn their backstories. Here's our cheat sheet for six iconic artifacts from the ancient world. 1. Venus of Willendorf: Artifact of the Ice Age Ancient artifact: Venus of Willendorf. (Credit: frantic00/Shutterstock) frantic00/Shutterstock How old and where is the Venus of Willendorf from? Around 30,000 years ago, Austria Where can you find the ancient artifact today? Natural History Museum Vienna in Austria Short, fat and nearly 30,000 years old, Venus of Willendorf is the female icon of the Ice Age. The four-inch-tall figurine bears pronounced breasts, buttocks, belly and vaginal lips, but lacks feet or facial features. Braids, or perhaps a knit cap, cover her head, and specks of pigment suggest the tan limestone artifact was once painted red. Archaeologists found the figurine in 1908, about a week into excavations at Willendorf II, an Austrian site along the Danube River, roughly 50 miles from Vienna. Throughout the 1900s and 2000s, several other digs occurred there, with ever-improving methods,  which unearthed two less-famous Venus figurines and hundreds of stone tools. Across Europe, nearly 200 similar statuettes have surfaced from sites between 23,000 and 40,000 years old. Although modern scholars call these artifacts Venuses, after the Roman goddess of love and fertility, the actual sculptors lived at least 20 millennia before Classical Rome. It’s unclear why Ice Age people carved these figurines, with researchers proposing they served as fertility symbols, self-portraits or pornographic items. In any case, the supposed sex appeal didn’t last: On a 5 point scale from unattractive to extremely attractive, Venus of Willendorf received an average rating of 0.14 in a 2011 survey of 161 undergraduates. Read more: The Origin of the 30,000-Year-Old Venus of Willendorf 2. Olmec Colossal Heads: Central American Artifacts Ancient Artifact: Olmec Colossal Heads. (Credit: Natalya Erofeeva/Shutterstock) Natalya Erofeeva/Shutterstock Where are the Olmec Colossal Heads from? Starting about 3,400 years ago, Gulf Coast, Central America Where can you see the artifacts today? Several Mexican museums, including Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology Sometimes called the mother culture of Mesoamerica, the Olmec civilization rose from the swampy forests of the Mexican Gulf Coast between about 400 and 1,400 B.C. More than two millennia later, in A.D. 1862, a farmer digging the same land struck a colossal stone head. It was the first of 17 similar heads yet to be recovered, thought to be portraits of Olmec rulers. The imposing statues stand between 5 and 10 feet tall, each weighing more than a full-grown elephant. They portray surly men with almond-shaped eyes, flat noses and plump lips. But each head wears a unique visage, expression and headdress, supporting the idea that the carved boulders depict particular leaders. The first accidental discovery occurred at Tres Zapotes in the foothills of the Tuxtlas Mountains, which provided the basalt stone used to make them. But archaeologists later uncovered most of the heads nearly 60 miles from the basalt source, at the ancient capitals of San Lorenzo and La Venta. Though surely laborious, it remains unclear how the Olmec transported these massive boulders, eventually carved and displayed in central plazas. And, several heads seem to have been broken and buried long ago, leading some archaeologists to think ancient people deliberately destroyed old statues as new rulers seized power. Read more: The 3,400-Year-Old Olmec Colossal Heads Origins 3. King Tut’s Funerary Mask: The Young, Ancient Egyptian King Ancient artifact: King Tut's burial mask (Credit: Jaroslav Moravcik/Shutterstock) Jaroslav Moravcik/Shutterstock Where was King Tut’s mask from? 3,300 years ago, Egypt's New Kingdom Where can you find the mask today? The Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Egypt Say pharaoh and most people will imagine the funerary mask of King Tutankhamun. The 24-pound facial replica capped the wrapped mummy of the Egyptian king, who died in 1323 B.C. at the age of 19, after ruling just 10 years. The solid gold base glints with lapis lazuli, turquoise and other semiprecious stones. The chin sprouts a tube-like beard, and the forehead displays a vulture and cobra, deities who together symbolized unification of Lower and Upper Egypt. The mask reemerged to the modern world in 1922, when British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s nearly intact tomb in the Valley of the Kings, a royal burial ground along the Nile River. Over the ages, modern and ancient looters emptied most Egyptian royal tombs, so Tut’s burial chamber was the first to reveal the phenomenal wealth pharaohs took the grave. Read more: The Origins of King Tut’s 3,300-Year-Old Funerary Mask 4. Rosetta Stone: Unlocking Ancient Civilization Languages Ancient artifact: Rosetta Stone (Credit: Takashi Images/Shutterstock) Takashi Images/Shutterstock Where is the Rosetta Stone from? 2,200 years ago, ancient Egyptian city of Rosetta Where can you see the Rosetta Stone today? The British Museum, England Honestly, the Rosetta Stone is a boring read, a priestly decree issued in 196 B.C., affirming the divine cult of King Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation. But its scribe chiseled the message into the black slab three times in a row in different scripts: Ancient Greek, Ancient Egypt’s formal hieroglyphs and its more casual, cursive demotic script. And that bilingual, tri-script inscription enabled decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, unlocking all of the ancient civilization's writings. Discovered in 1799 by French soldiers during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, the artifact wound up in London after British troops defeated the French there in 1801. Ancient Greek was understood, so scholars and the public immediately recognized the stone’s potential for deciphering hieroglyphs. But it would be another 20 years before Jean-François Champollion successfully cracked the code. The most popular item in the British Museum today, the relic measures 3 feet 9 inches and weighs 1,680 pounds, though about a third is missing, knocked off over the ages. The full text is still known, however, because other monuments bear the same decree. Read more: Unlocking Ancient Texts with the 2,000-Year-Old Rosetta Stone 5. Terracotta Army: Thousands of Life-Sized Clay Warriors Ancient artifact: Terracotta Army (Credit: lapas77/Shutterstock) lapas77/Shutterstock Where was the Terracotta Army from? 2,200 years ago, Shaanxi Province, China Where can you see the army today? Museum erected at the site, Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum Imagine building your tomb for more than 30 years — fueled by limitless power, resources and yearning for immorality. Even then your mausoleum might not compare to the complex commissioned by Qin Shihuang, the first emperor to rule a unified China from 210 to 221 B.C. According to ancient Chinese texts, more than 700,000 laborers worked for the site, which sprawls 22 square miles, far more land than most college campuses (all but three in the U.S., in fact). The site features statues of dancers and acrobats, gold-embellished carriages and bronze waterfowl in diorama-like canals. But it's perhaps best known for the Terracotta Army, thousands of life-sized clay warriors, lining trenches in military formation. In 1974, farmers digging a well discovered the first statue. Since, three major excavations have uncovered 2,000 additional soldiers, although another 6,000 likely remain buried. Each statue seems to portray a real soldier in Qin Shihuang’s force, based on their individual hairdos, caps, tunics, facial hair and functioning bronze weapons, which remain remarkably sharp to this day. Even their ears are unique, according to a 2014 study in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Read more: An Underground Army: The 8,000 Terracotta Warriors 6. Dead Sea Scrolls: Original Transcribing of Stories Predating the Bible Ancient artifact: Dead Sea Scrolls (Credit: ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock) ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock Where are the Dead Sea Scrolls From? About 2,000 years ago, Dead Sea shores in West Bank and Israel Where can you find the scrolls today? The Israel Museum, Jerusalem In 1947, Muhammed ed-Dib, a Bedouin shepherd, went searching for a stray goat along craggy cliffs banking the Dead Sea. What began as a goat pursuit resulted in one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century: In a narrow cave, ed-Dib discovered clay jars stuffed with ancient scrolls — the first of nearly 1,000 tattered texts written between 300 B.C. and A.D. 70 that comprise the Dead Sea Scrolls. About 230 of the scrolls transcribe stories in the Hebrew Bible or Christianity’s Old Testament — though these copies likely predate the Bible’s compilation. The rest contain other religious texts, like prayers, hymns and rules. Though mostly written in Hebrew, the archive also features older paleo-Hebrew, several Aramaic dialects, Greek, Latin and Arabic. Over the years, archaeologists have recovered many more scrolls from 12 caves near the first trove and a few more distant spots. Thanks to the briny desert conditions, some scrolls aged intact. But most deteriorated, constituting a corpus of more than 25,000 bits of parchment and papyrus. Like a jigsaw puzzle — with innumerable missing pieces — fragments have been painstakingly reassembled by matching handwriting and materials. In the future, DNA sequencing could help because many scrolls are made of animal skins. The method, tested on 26 fragments in a 2020 Cell paper, successfully matched scraps from the same creature. From what can be read, researchers debate the scrolls’ authors. Some say the texts came from diverse sources; others attribute them all to a Jewish sect that lived near the 12 caves in the first century A.D. Read more: At 2,000 Years Old, The Dead Sea Scrolls Help Inform Ancient Language This story was originally published in 2020 and has since been updated by the Discover staff. Article Sources Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article: The Natural History Museum Vienna Handbook of Obesity: Etiology and Pathophysiology, Second Edition Anthropologie International Journal of Human Diversity and Evolution. The time of the Willendorf figurines and new results of Palaeolithic research in Lower Austria. Semantic Scholar. New research on the Aurignacian of Central Europe: A first note on the 2006 fieldwork at Willendorf II PNAS. Early modern human settlement of Europe north of the Alps occurred 43,500 years ago in a cold steppe-type environment Cambridge Archaeological Journal. The 40,000-Year-Old Female Figurine of Hohle Fels: Previous Assumptions and New Perspectives University of Chicago. Prehistoric Venuses: Symbols of Motherhood or Womanhood? Journal of Anthropology. Venus Figurines of the European Paleolithic: Symbols of Fertility or Attractiveness? Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Creating Memory and Negotiating Power in the Olmec Heartland The Art of Mesoamerica: From Olmec to Aztec (Sixth) (World of Art). By Mary Ellen Miller Latin America Studies. Olmec Colossal Heads University of Texas Press. In the Land of the Olmec Smart History, the Center for Public Art History. Tutankhamun’s tomb (innermost coffin and death mask) World Scientific Connect. Tutankhamun’s Golden Mask Investigated with XRDF The British Museum. Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment. By R. B. Parkinson, Whitfield Diffie, Mary Fischer, R. S. Simpson Journal of Archaeological Science. Computer vision, archaeological classification and China's terracotta warriors The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. Learn About the Scrolls The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The Dead Sea Scrolls Cell. Illuminating Genetic Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls Bridget Alex is an anthropologist at Harvard University and was a frequent contributor to Discover.

6 Iconic Ancient Artifacts That Changed History Around the World

What are the most famous ancient artifacts? From the Venus of Willendorf to King Tut's funerary mask, here's what these items reveal about the ancient world.

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