This beautiful head is a rare witness of the funerary sculpture of the Bura civilization in present Niger. Once positioned on top of cylindrical vessel, the refined facial details and sensitivity of this head place it among the masterpieces of the art from this lost culture. From the first millennium, Africa’s western Sahel - a vast region just south of the Sahara Desert that spans what is today Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger - was a cradle of civilizations that flourished as a nexus of global exchange with the development of the trans-Saharan trade routes. Home to the legendary empires of Ghana (300–1200), Mali (1230–1600), Songhay (1464–1591) and Segu (1712–1860), the succession of states—which in some cases covered a territory as vast as Western Europe—dawned, flourished and receded over the course of a thousand years. Their larger-than-life reputations have been the subject of an extensive body of literature by historians yet remain highly abstract in our visual imagination. This is partly because the region’s enormously rich material culture has largely fallen outside of historical and artistic frames of reference. In 2020, Alisa Lagamma, curator of Afican art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art corrected this injustice with her trailblazing exhibition “Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara”. This show examined this important and relatively unfamiliar artistic legacy, including a group of terracotta heads from the same cultural realm as the present, now known as Bura. Bura is an archeological site in southwest Niger located along the Niger River, bordering Mali. A hunter’s chance discovery in 1975 of two terracotta heads led a team from Niger’s University of Niamey to conduct further archaeological research, uncovering a necropolis at Bura-Asinda-Sikka in 1983 with more than six hundred overturned ceramic urns dating from 300 to 1700. Some of these urns contained human remains, while others had remains buried underneath. The Bura funerary vessels are generally ovoid and tubular in shape, and some are surmounted by figures or heads such as the present. Following the 1975 discovery and 1983 excavation of the Bura archeological site, and after a Bura-Asinda exhibition toured France in the 1990s, the ancient Bura terracotta statuettes became highly valued by collectors. The anthropomorphic heads of the ancient and medieval Bura culture have been sought for their unusual abstraction and simplification, the present among its most accomplished examples.