Carved from a small limestone monolith, this statuette is certainly one of the first three-dimensional images of elephant in Near Eastern art; moreover, these large mammals were rarely represented in the rich animal iconography of this prominent culture.
The statuette depicts a standing man, with a mask, which characterizes him as an actor. He is dressed in a large cloak. As it is usually the case at that time for terracotta examples, our figurine was molded in two parts, the front and the back.
This face certainly represents a male figure; it shows some of the distinctive features of the Greek-Roman images known as “grotesque”, such as the big aquiline and pointed nose, the strongly marked, frowning eyebrows and the wrinkled forehead.