Disease, demons and masks in the Iron Age Mediterranean

ABSTRACT

This article first addresses the issue of defining ancient masks and briefly explores masking cultures in the Iron Age Mediterranean, then emphasizes the role that Carthage appears to have played in both maintaining and renewing the Levantine disguised traditions. Among the newly invented masks of Carthage, it focuses on and reviews a small group of masks and amulets portraying black African twisted faces and dating to between the seventh and mid-sixth century BC. These masks support the existence of wooden prototypes and currently provide the earliest evidence of black African imagery used for ritual purposes. Based on their features and compelling parallels, it is argued that their iconography was inspired by facial paralysis and they should be interpreted as images of a demon used in curing rituals.

KEYWORDS:

• Iron Age
• Phoenicians
• Carthage
• black Africans
• masks
• demons
• facial paralysis

Acknowledgments

This paper is part of a wider study on masks in the ancient Mediterranean which started as postdoctoral research financially supported by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and the DAAD - Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. I would like to thank Jacopo Bonetto and Roald Docter for providing me with the original photos and drawings of the masks from Nora and Hamburg University’s excavations at Carthage, Piero Bartoloni for his photos of the amulets, Douglas Yaney for the photos of the Makua mask and Mark Dickerson of the Pitt Rivers Museum. I am much indebted to Jean-Baptiste Humbert for sharing information on his excavations at the citadel of Rabbath-Ammon and to Eric Gubel and Thomas Schäfer for useful references. I would also like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adriano Orsingher

Adriano Orsingher is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Biblical Archaeology at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany). His research focuses on the ancient Mediterranean, in particular on the islands of Sicily and Cyprus. He is especially interested in colonial situations, bordering regions, cross-cultural interactions, movements of people and material culture, through lenses of postcolonial theory, agency and gender.