This is an exceedingly unusual thing to find at all, exceptionally important in stone. If you think about these early pieces, the nature of the tools and technique tends to dictate form. That is to say that the appearance of things made of clay tends to betray the fact they’ve been pulled and pinched by fingers, while things made of stone have forms described by the marks left by abrasives worked with cables and straps or drills. In this case, the craftsman has taken some pains to make the form follow the appearance one might expect to find in clay, apparently imitating a clay prototype. You’ll find this to some degree in Tel Halaf figures, where the very rare stone ones share certain compositional aspects of the terracottas that inspired their production, but the tools still very much dictate the style. In this case however, one can almost discern fingers pressing in the shape of the head, a hand squeezing the shape of the body. (Antiquarium)
