Julianna 
Shahr e Sukhteh, c. 2900 BCE
They say the first thing you notice is her gaze. No, wait, not her gaze, her eyes. Actually, her golden eye.
How could you not?
Not the living eye, dark and watchful, but the other one. The one that caught the light like a slick of oil on water, black as tar and threaded with gold that burned when the sun struck it.
A false eye. A made thing. Yet somehow more arresting than any eye that had ever drawn breath behind it. If you looked too long, you saw yourself trapped inside it, small and reflected and unable to look away.
That was the power she held.
At 6ft Tall, She Would Have Been An Apparition.
She was tall. Disturbingly tall. Reconstructions place her close to six feet, a figure that would have risen above the crowds like a pillar of bone and silk. She stood out both in beauty and her eyes. She was young and entrancing.
Her hair, found in preserved fragments clinging to her skull, had been long and straight, the kind of hair that swayed like black water when she turned. She wore jewellery. She wore status. She wore that impossible, glittering eye.
The eye that flashed the sunlight back at you like golden shards of light.
She Was Wealthy, Too
And she had money. Serious money. The kind of wealth that bought you access to the most skilled hands in the ancient world.
Archaeologists pulled her from the dust of Shahr e Sukhteh in 2006, from a grave that had waited nearly five thousand years to give up its secrets. This was no backwater. She had lain sleeping for thousands of years. But her eye was still perfect, although dull now.
Here Was Innovation And Medical Sophistication
The Burnt City was a crucible of innovation, a place where the boundaries of what humans could do to the human body were being rewritten in bone and blood. Evidence from the site reveals a startling level of medical sophistication.
Skulls show signs of successful cranial surgery, the kind of delicate trepanation that required steady hands and intimate knowledge of anatomy.
Practitioners here understood the human form with a precision that would not be matched for millennia. This was where you came if you had the means and the wound to match.
She had both. Clearly.
And still, what they found in her skull made the excavation team fall silent.
Nestled in her left socket was the oldest known artificial eye in human history. Not glass but something more unusual.
A hardened core of bitumen paste and animal fat, polished until it threw back light like a mirror. Into that black surface, someone had pressed hair-thin wires of real gold, forming an iris that blazed like a dying star. This would have made her eyes glisten. It would make her eyes alive and capture attention.
Around the rim, tiny holes showed where threads had once laced through tissue, stitching the eye to the raw edges of her socket.
This Eye Was Pure Artistry
This was no crude plug to fill an absence. This was artistry commissioned by wealth and executed by masters. Craftsmen and healers must have worked in concert, the ones who understood materials and the ones who understood flesh, collaborating to create something that had never existed before.
Under magnification, the inner surface told its own story. Scrape marks. Wear patterns. The evidence of years pressed against bone and lid.
Whatever took her sight, she answered it with defiance. She refused the veil, the shadow, the quiet corner where the damaged are expected to fade. Instead, she paid for the finest minds in a city of brilliant minds, and she made herself more visible. More beautiful. More impossible to ignore.
A Copper Mirror Followed Her In Death
When they found her, she was not alone in death as she had not been alone in life. Her grave held twenty-five pottery vessels, a copper mirror, ten precious beads of lapis lazuli and turquoise, the remains of a leather bag and a woven basket.
The mirror might have shown that she enjoyed her own reflection and that others recognised her beauty. They had found it necessary enough to bury her with it.
She had been wrapped in a shroud, textile fragments still clinging to bone. Even in her burial, she was treated as someone who mattered. Someone who commanded attention. Someone who refused to be forgotten.
The microscopic evidence confirms what the heart already knows. The socket bore clear imprints of the golden thread. This eye had been worn, adjusted, and lived with. It had pressed against her flesh day after day, year after year.
She had felt it there, foreign and familiar all at once. She had turned her head and felt the weight of it move. She had seen people’s faces change when they looked at her, seen them try not to stare and fail.
When she moved through the Burnt City, heads turned. Not in pity. Not in revulsion. In awe.
Five thousand years later, we are still turning.
