It is a simple, almost comical, terracotta mask depicting a smiling face that wouldn’t be out of place in contemporary yellow.

It is also almost 7000 years old, quite possibly the oldest mask of any kind in the world.

So why haven’t you heard of it? Why is it on display in a hold-in-the-wall museum? It’s not even the good museum in itss city, but rather a hole-in-the-wall museum dedicated to its founder’s crackpot theories on biblical originalism.

Perhaps it has something to do with the first person that wore the mask, and how the same grim fate they wove for themselves befalls all who have ever worn it.

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