
This musician has been playing his xylophone for more than 250 years. Among the oldest woodcarvings in these galleries, it was created by the Dogon people from Mali, who have a very old art tradition. Its dry surface and lack of a thick crust of offerings suggest that it was not used as an altarpiece, as many Dogon figures are. Instead, it was probably made as a reference to migrations long ago, when the ancestors of the Dogon left the Mali Empire around the 14th century.