Key facts
- Material
- Wood
- Height
- 2.8 m (possibly more than 5m originally)
- Created
- c. 11,500 years ago
- Discovered
- 24 January 1890, Perm Governorate , Russia
- Present location
- Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore ( Yekaterinburg , Sverdlovsk , Russia )
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- sculpture
- Country
- Russia
- Movement
- prehistoric art
- Image
- Shigir Idol (May 2024) - 1.jpg
Show 4 more facts
- inception
- 9500-00-00
- time of discovery or invention
- 1890-00-00
- Commons category
- Shigir Idol
- discoverer or inventor
- Josef Szombathy
via Wikidata · CC0
~6 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Shigir Sculpture, or Shigir Idol (Russian: Шигирский идол), is the oldest known wooden sculpture. It is estimated to have been carved c. 11,500 years ago, or during the early Holocene period, and is twice as old as Egypt's Great Pyramid. The wood it was carved from is approximately 12,000 years old.
It was discovered in 1890 in a Russian peat bog, and is displayed in the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Shigir Idol” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.