Andre Malraux said that an object of art belongs to his time, while a work of art belongs to eternity. There are a couple of sculptures in Romania we invite you to see and judge for yourself what category they best fit in.

At the Histoy Museum in Constanta, two ancient sculptures impress with their artistic, historical and symbolic values.

The first of these is the Thinker from Hamangia. It dates since the Middle Neolithic period (around 6000 B.C.) and it belonged to a culture bearing the same name, Hamangia (a village now called Baia, from Tulcea County, Dobrogea). The members of the community that settled in this area are said to have come from Anatolia. They weren’t too technologically advanced – they lived in almost burried huts, sometimes in caves and, usually, next to water sources. They used axes made of stone and even flint (which was already obsolete in other contemporary cultures) and bone-made tools. Metalworking was underdeveloped, compared to similar cultures and pottery was not very skilfully decorated. The Hamagia culture came to an end when they were assimilated at around 5000 B.C. by the more dynamic members of the Boian culture.

The Hamangia culture is best known for their funeral customs. They used to place skulls without mandibles and statuettes inside tombs. In such a burial site, the Thinker from Hamangia was found.

In fact, it was discovered at Cernavoda, in an archaelogical site from Sofia Hill, in 1956, but it was culturally associated to the Hamangia culture. The sculpture has a height of 11.5 cm and a lenght at shoulders of 7.5 cm and it represents a man sitting on a small chair, with his head supported by his hands. One can notice the exaggerated lenght of the neck and hands and that, despite the obvious stylized manner the statuette is crafted in, the rest of the body propoportions are extremely realistic – the fingers, eyes and backbone are rendered by incisions in the Terra Cotta the Thinker is made of.

The man-statuette has a pair. Another artifact (representing a woman) was discovered in another place than the first one and, although there is no proof these two are related, it is considered to be the Thinker’s obvious female counterpart. This statuette has the same characteristics as the male and, in addition, the hips are over extended, a known prehistorical symbol of fertility. Another difference is that the woman keeps both her hands on one knee.

The Thinker has become an universal icon. It can be found on stamps, T-shirts etc. and it has even been recently chosen to be one of the ten symbols to be sent into space, to make contact to alien civilizations. Others have come up with the theory that the Thinker’s geometrical proportions match those of Khuhu’s pyramid at Giseh; the fact that both the top of the Egyptian monument and that of the statuette’s head are flat (in order the receive cosmic energies) is an argument they also invoke.

Leaving aside all the scenarios that surround the Thinker from Hamangia, what impresses most is that, in the prehistoric period, usually connected to the fight of survival, rather than intellectual achievements, some of man’s important activities, like thinking, relaxing or dreaming are rendered with such an artistic mastery.T here are periods when the Thinker can be admired at the National History Museum in Bucharest.

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