The Ancient Art and Intimate Craft of Artificial Eyes
Eye makers for millennia have been trying to re-create the expressionist power of the human body’s most complex and emotionally meaningful visible organ.
By: Dan Roche
A↑
A↓ Off
Bright
Dark
Blues
Gray BeeLine Reader uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently.
Four thousand years ago, a woman had a very fancy artificial eye she probably wore while she was alive. It was possibly made of natural tar and animal fat or maybe bitumen paste; it had a gilded surface and a central circle where the iris would be, with lines radiating outward, sunlike. Gold wires inside the eye imitated capillaries. Archaeologists discovered this item in 2006 during an excavation of Shahr-e Sukhteh, otherwise known as the Burnt City, in what is now southeastern Iran. The woman had been six feet tall and around 30 years old when she died. The prosthetic was in her left eye socket.
... continue reading