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For millennia, man has looked to the heavens for inspiration and guidance. In ancient Anatolia (the Asian part of modern-day Turkey), someone in the third millennium B.C. sculpted this marble stargazer, so called because her head and eyes are turned upward toward the divine. The 6-inch-tall statuette of a woman is carved of white marble. Her face is similar to the contemporary Cycladic figurines from Greek isles bordering Anatolia.

The stargazer was sculpted by a civilization that left no written record. But, because her eyes and head are purposefully designed to look up, scholars speculate that she was either a cultic figure or represented funerary art with a specific role in the religion of her people. Approximately 15 “stargazer” figurines and numerous fragments are known. Many have been separated at the neck, suggesting a ritual beheading.