Kondonskaya Nefertiti

Ceramic sculpture, found in 1963 by A. Okladnikov, a scientist from Novosibirsk Akademgorodok, during the excavations of an ancient settlement, located in the modern village of Kondon (Khabarovsk territory, 80 km from Komsomolsk-on-Amur).

Also known as "Condon Venus", "Amur Venus"and" Amur Nefertiti". The exhibit belongs to the Neolithic period and dates back to the third Millennium BC. It is kept in the Museum Of Institute of archeology and Ethnography SB RAS.

Okladnikov described his discovery as follows: "the mist of the centuries is not just a generalized ethnic image of the woman of the ancient people, but rather a portrait of Her. Neolithic sculptor with an amazing sense of reality and sincere warmth conveyed in the clay features of a certain human face. The first thing that catches the eye of the viewer is, of course, a gently outlined wide oval of the face with the usual wide and convex cheekbones for Mongoloids. Then tiny chin and tiny, remarkably convex, elongated forward lips. The nose is as remarkable, narrow and long as that of the North American Indians. Exaggerated narrow and long eyes in the form of arcuate slits, deeply cut in soft plastic clay. Perhaps the most unexpected thing in the Condon statuette is a slight tilt of the head and a thin fragile neck forward to the viewer. He immediately reminded us of something as close as far away. Is not the famous Egyptian Queen? At the same hour she had received from students raskopschikov name Amur Nefertiti!»

The sculpture immediately became widely known, because it had no analogues in the cultural heritage of the peoples of the Neolithic Amur region and did not fit into modern ideas about their culture. Colleagues even accused archaeologists of falsification, but some time later similar objects were found-the head and torso of female sculptors from the island of Suchu (250 km from the first discovery) and the head of a female sculpture in the settlement of Hummy (120 km from the first discovery).