The Ancient Art and Intimate Craft of Artificial Eyes

Summary

The Ancient Art and Intimate Craft of Artificial EyesEye makers for millennia have been trying to re-create the expressionist power of the human body’s most complex and emotionally meaningful visible organ.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.An even older eye was found in a skeleton in Spain. This one was estimated to be 7,000 years old. However, it could not have been worn comfortably and was placed backward in the socket, probably after the man’s death.Eye makers for millennia, then, have been trying to re-create the expressionist power of the human body’s most complex and emotionally meaningful visible organ.Histories of artificial eyes tend to start with the ancient Egyptians and recount how they were pretty good at making eyes for people to be mummified — they “removed the eyes of the dead, poured wax or plaster into the orbits, and then inserted precious stones to simulate the iris,” according to one history — but not all that sophisticated in their techniques for the living: an eye-size piece of clay painted to look like an eye and then secured over the socket with a piece of flesh-colored cloth. Those histories usually jump over centuries — to the mid-1500s — before describing any real progress, particularly in the design of an ocular prosthetic meant to fit into the socket rather than in front of it.“You can find third-generat...