A newly discovered statue of a curly-haired man gripping a spear and a sheath of wheat once guarded the upper citadel of an ancient kingdom’s capital. The enormous sculpture, which is intact from about the waist up, stands almost 5 feet tall, suggesting that its full height with legs would have been between 11 and 13 feet. Alongside the statue, archaeologists found another carving, a semicircular column base bearing the images of a sphinx and a winged bull.
The pieces date back to about 1000 B.C. to 738 B.C. and belong to the Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Patina in what is now southeastern Turkey. They were found at what would have been a gate to the upper citadel of the capital, Kunulua. The Neo-Hittites were a group of civilizations that arose along the eastern Mediterranean after the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1000 B.C. When the statues were carved, the area was emerging from the Bronze Age and entering into the Iron Age.