Couvent Saint-Étienne, Jerusalem: 3 (2023-03-17)

Created by: Englund, Robert K.

Gudea in a Jerusalem collection.

The Lagash II governor Gudea left a notable record of Sumerian royal inscriptions from his reign in the middle of the 22nd century BC. Best known are the monumental inscriptions on diorite statues excavated in Iraq and found today in many national museums, most notably the Louvre, and two remarkable clay cylinders that contain, in the longest Sumerian text known, an account of the rebuilding of the temple complex of Ningirsu at Girsu called é-ninnu-anzu-babbar, “House of fifty: White thunderbird.” Beyond these substantial artifacts, the corpus of royal Gudea texts include numerous examples of smaller inscriptions on clay bricks and cones, and no small number of stone tablets. The cone depicted here from the Couvent Saint-Étienne, Jerusalem, is one of currently 1503 copies (and counting) of a short text commemorating the construction work on the Eninnu. The ultimate use of these cones is unclear; some were added to foundation deposits memorializing, like time capsules with their copies of Life magazine, Kennedy 50¢ coins and photos of long-dead mayors, the construction work itself, but one might imagine that they could have been passed out as commemorative mementos to important members of the governor’s court, and to temple administrators, who supported the cult of Ningirsu and, through it, the governor himself. The form of the cone was itself reminiscent of the cuneiform sign gag, pictographically a cone or nail used in construction, and as we might expect denoting the verb “to build” or “to erect”. Daniel A. Foxvog is leading an initiative through the CDLI to edit all Mesopotamian royal inscriptions, eventually to include literary score versions of texts found or suspected in multiple copies. We depict the cone here in the orientation of the ancients, upright, with lines of cuneiform read from top to bottom, and on the cone surface from right to left. CDLI entry: P431332

credit: Englund, Robert K.