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The Authenticity of a Sumerian Statue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Munir Y. Taha
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Extract

In 1951 the Directorate General of Antiquities in Baghdad acquired a limestone statue of apparently Sumerian date. The dealer from whom the purchase was made claimed that he had found the statue at Tell Aswad, an ancient mound situated on the left bank of the Euphrates some 24 km. to the north-west of Ramadi. Shortly afterwards a team was dispatched by the Directorate to examine the mound and in the course of executing small trial trenches near the surface of the mound encountered structures of plano-convex mud-brickwork. In view of certain peculiarities in the style and proportions of the Tell Aswad statue doubts were voiced among members of the Directorate as to its genuineness, and in consequence approaches were made to various eminent archaeologists and art historians with a view to eliciting their professional opinions concerning it. On the basis of photographs supplied by the Directorate the consensus of opinion among the experts was that the statue showed certain stylistic differences from hitherto known Sumerian statuary which by themselves at least were not sufficient to mark the piece as definitely genuine or definitely false.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1973 , pp. 151 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1973

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References

1 “Some Opinions about an Unidentified Statue”, Sumer 7 (1951), 73–78Google Scholar.

2 It is worth noting here that calcareous tufa takes an appreciable period of time to form.

3 Parrot, A., Mission archéologique de Mari I, Plate XXXIII no. 173, and p. 78Google Scholar. Mari is situated about 224 km. north-west of Tell Aswad.

4 For example the Sumerian statues which have been discovered in recent years in the Inanna Temple at Nippur. Their delicacy of execution sets them above the products of the other Sumerian schools of the south, while their general style and contours are different from the statues that have been found in the north.

5 That comparison between early Mesopotamian works in stone and in metal is often difficult we readily acknowledge. However, in the present instance, we feel obliged to draw attention to the eyebrows of our Tell Aswad statue and those of the head of “Sargon” from Nineveh, firstly for the way in which they project above the nose, and secondly for the way in which they join to form a “V”.

It is true that the opinion has recently been expressed that the “Sargon” head is of Neo-Assyrian workmanship, but even if this were so it must surely have been modelled on an old Akkadian original.

6 Alternatively, it is conceivable that this statue from Tell Aswad belongs to the early Akkadian period, or post-Early Dynastic IIIb, though some may think such a suggestion hasty in the present state of our knowledge.