IN MUSEUMS AROUND THE WORLD, display cases are populated with what are beyond any doubt the most frequently overlooked objects in the history of human images: clay figurines.

These small beings first step onto the world stage around six thousand years ago, in the fourth millennium BC. The earliest are among the strangest - the so-called ‘Eye Idols’, found in the 1930s by the archaeologist Max Mallowan at Tell Brak in Syria.

They were found in the ruins of a building known now as the Eye Temple, and seem to represent worshippers.

Other strange and wonderful figures appear in ancient Syria and Cyprus, highly decorated figures with large eyes and a rather comic feel, full of ancient life.

Terracotta figures made in ancient Ecuador are the earliest images known from South America. They have wonderful bouffant hairstyles - presumably the best way of signalling status in a world before designer clothes.

They were followed in the next millennium by the endless stream of figurines and small sculptures of humans made by the Olmecs, further north around the Gulf of Mexico, including their famous sitting infants.

In the great Anthropology Museum in Mexico City there is at least one vast vitrine packed with ancient terracotta figurines (seen on a visit a few years ago, but unfortunately not photographed).

Over in Japan, the Dogū figures from the early Jōmon culture rival the Syrian and Cypriot figures for their strangeness. More or less highly decorated, and often with large coffee-bean eyes, like snow goggles, and always wonderfully symmetrical.

Like almost all of this strange realm of earthy homunculi, little is known about why they were made — whether they were revered sacred objects, or children’s toys.

The stylistic similarity of all these figurine traditions over long periods of time suggest they were made in workshops, perhaps by specialists, who may or may not have been seen as artists. We will never know.

What we can be certain of is the window they open onto the past, encapsulating lost moments in time far better than larger, more official objects. They seem less expressions of power than of everyday life.

Also certain is that they were made on the whole in the world spreading east from ancient Greece, where figures known as ‘psi’ and ‘phi’ appear during the first millennium (so called as they look like the corresponding letters in the Greek alphabet).

Numerous origin myths tell of the creation of life from clay — from Adam in the Hebrew Bible, formed of red clay, to Prometheus, forming the human race from wet earth to spite the other gods.

In ancient Egypt the creator god Khnum chose clay as his preferred material, as did the life-giving divinities of the Yoruba and Songye people in Africa.

From the earliest moment of civilisation, clay figures were made in their hundreds of thousands, millions even, to populate a newly-humanised world, as if mirroring the ancient myths of human origin.

We might walk past them in museums, seeing them as of little significance — space fillers. I’ve noticed over the years that some curators take great care in their arrangement, setting up dramatic scenes, or larger group displays, responding to the lively, strange, and often vulnerable feeling around these little people.

It would be fascinating to devote an exhibition to these little beings. They tell an alternative story of the spread of human civilisation, seen from their lowly, yet more revealingly honest point of view.

An exhibition, but perhaps also something capturing the spectacle and excitement of this new world of clay-based life.

A musical? East Side Story?….

East Side Story (1:31) was made for the seventh Everything Worth Saving art lecture, “Civilisation and its Discontents”, held on the 25th March 2025 at Snape Maltings, Suffolk, UK.