The statuette nobody can find
Look up Eannatum’s votive statuette and the same description keeps coming back: a small limestone figure of the ruler with clasped hands and wide eyes, found by French excavators at Tello, ancient Girsu, and now in the Louvre. An earlier version of this page repeated it.
Checked against the sources, the object vanishes. The Louvre’s online collection lists objects of Eannatum, the stele and several inscribed bricks from Girsu, and no statue. None of the editions of his inscriptions or the excavation reports consulted for this page mentions one. The photograph that usually goes with the story shows a worshipper from the Tell Asmar hoard, made for a temple more than 300 km north of Lagash.
So we don’t know what a statue of Eannatum looked like, or whether one survives. What we can verify is still worth knowing.
What survives of Eannatum
Eannatum ruled Lagash, one of the Sumerian city-states of southern Iraq, around 2450 BCE. His best-known monument is the Stele of the Vultures, carved for his victory over the neighbouring city of Umma. On one face he leads a tight phalanx of soldiers and rides a chariot. It is the only image that can be tied to him with certainty, and it shows a war leader, with no clasped hands in sight.
The rest is writing. Bricks and other inscribed objects from Girsu give his titles, his campaigns and his building works, always as done at the command of Ningirsu, the god of Lagash. The ruler they describe wanted to be seen as the god’s chosen agent, the same idea a worshipper statue would have expressed.
Why clasped hands?
The part of the story that holds up is the gesture. Between about 2900 and 2350 BCE, Sumerians placed statues of themselves in temples to stand before the god in their place. Most show a man or woman standing or seated, hands clasped in front of the chest, eyes wide open. Attention and humility in one pose: the statue kept its donor in prayer when the donor had gone home.
The best-known group is the Tell Asmar hoard: twelve statues, ten men and two women, found in 1933 to 1934 buried together beside the altar of the Square Temple of the god Abu at Eshnunna, in the Diyala region of Iraq. They are carved mostly in gypsum, with eyes of shell and black limestone set in bitumen, and they are now divided between the ISAC Museum in Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.
A finer example is in the Louvre: Ebih-Il, an official of Mari in Syria, found by André Parrot in the temple of Ishtar in 1934. Carved in translucent gypsum alabaster and 52.5 cm high, he sits on a wicker stool in a fleece skirt, hands clasped, his eyes inlaid with shell, schist and lapis lazuli. An inscription on his shoulder dedicates him to Ishtar. Most people who picture “Eannatum’s statuette” are, without knowing it, picturing something like this.
Rulers of Lagash in stone
Eannatum’s own family gives the closest match. The British Museum has a small stone plaque of his brother and successor Enannatum, made around 2420 BCE and probably from Girsu. He stands with his hands folded in worship, and a cuneiform label in front of his face names him as ruler of Lagash. A peg through the hole in the centre once fixed the plaque to a temple wall.
A generation later comes a statue of Enmetena (also spelled Entemena), Enannatum’s son: a headless figure of dark stone found at Ur, inscribed with his name and the words “Enlil loves Enmetena”. It was stolen from the Iraq Museum in 2003, turned up in New York and went back to Iraq in 2010. For complete portraits of a Lagash ruler you have to wait for the diorite statues of Gudea, around 2120 BCE, which keep the clasped hands and give them a stone meant to last.
How to check a claim like this
A real ancient object has something like an identity card. It usually has a museum inventory number, a find spot or at least a purchase record, and often an inscription that names its owner. A “statue of” a famous ruler with none of these deserves caution, however often it is repeated online. For a wider picture of Sumerian art, start from objects you can locate.
Where to see them
The Stele of the Vultures and Ebih-Il are both in the Louvre in Paris, in the Near Eastern Antiquities galleries. The plaque of Enannatum is in the British Museum in London, and statues from the Tell Asmar hoard are in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the ISAC Museum in Chicago. Check gallery openings before you go.
Sources
- Musée du Louvre, collection records for objects of Eannatum (Stele of the Vultures; inscribed bricks AO 352 B, AO 353, AO 354) and for the statue of Ebih-Il (AO 17551).
- British Museum, collection record for the stone plaque of Enannatum, ruler of Lagash.
- D. R. Frayne, Presargonic Period (2700-2350 BC), RIME 1 (2008).
- H. Frankfort, Sculpture of the Third Millennium B.C. from Tell Asmar and Khafajah, OIP 44 (1939); ISAC, “Tell Asmar Statue Hoard”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Early Dynastic Sculpture, 2900-2350 B.C.” (Heilbrunn Timeline essay).
- NPR, “Looted Iraqi Relics Return Home” (8 September 2010).
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