A statue made never to be seen
Most statues want an audience. This one was buried. Foundation figures were placed under the walls of a temple while it was being built, and once the walls rose nobody was supposed to see them again. They are about the length of a school ruler, around 30 cm. The best-known type shows a king lifting a basket of earth above his head with both hands, his body tapering below the waist into a long spike, with a few lines of cuneiform on the peg naming the god, the temple and the king who built it.
The idea is close to a signature under the floor. The figure fixed the moment construction began and kept the king’s piety on record in the ground, where only the god would know it was there. Its message is simple: this house belongs to the god, and this king built it properly.
The kings of Ur and their baskets
The basket-bearer belongs above all to the Third Dynasty of Ur, around 2100 BCE. Ur-Namma, the founder of the dynasty and builder of the great ziggurat of Ur, left figures of this kind inscribed for a temple of the goddess Inanna. On the one in the Metropolitan Museum the king is beardless and his head is shaved, the look of a priest or a labourer more than a monarch. His son Shulgi did the same at Nippur, and another of his figures was found under the temple of the goddess Nimintabba at Ur. Both were cast solid in copper or copper alloy.
Why the basket? Texts of the period describe a ceremony of the first brick, in which the ruler himself moulded the first brick of the new temple and carried earth to the site. Carrying the basket made the king a worker on the god’s building site, and that humility was the basis of his right to rule in the god’s name. The image is older than the dynasty: around 2550 to 2500 BCE, Ur-Nanshe, ruler of Lagash, had himself carved on a stone plaque carrying a basket of bricks on his head at the founding of a temple, with his family around him.
Gudea’s kneeling gods
Gudea of Lagash, who ruled around 2120 BCE, describes the first-brick ceremony at length in the two clay cylinders that tell how he rebuilt the temple of Ningirsu. His own foundation figures show a different image: a kneeling god in a horned crown, gripping a huge peg and driving it into the ground. It works like a tent peg on a cosmic scale, pinning the building to the earth. In his diorite statues Gudea appears as the pious builder, one of them with the plan of a temple on his lap, while underground the god himself is at work.
Boxes under the walls
Excavated deposits show how carefully the figures were placed. Builders made a small box of baked bricks under a wall, at a corner or by a doorway, and laid inside it the copper figure and a stone tablet inscribed with the dedication. At Gudea’s temple in Girsu the figures were wrapped in cloth, probably linen, and laid on their side. The boxes were sealed and the walls built on top.
The archaeologist Christina Tsouparopoulou describes these deposits as writing with a restricted audience: texts placed where almost nobody would ever read them. The figures were never worshipped. They were dedications, built into the bones of the temple.
A pose that came back
Around 668 to 655 BCE the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal had himself carved on a small stone stela carrying a basket on his head, to record his restoration of Esagila, the temple of Marduk in Babylon. The British Museum’s curators suggest that the builders had found old Sumerian foundation figures during the work and copied their pose, borrowing the authority of a past more than a thousand years old.
Where to see them
The Metropolitan Museum in New York owns the figures of Ur-Namma and Shulgi, though they are not always on display. The Louvre in Paris has Gudea’s kneeling gods and the plaque of Ur-Nanshe, and the British Museum in London has Ashurbanipal’s stela and more foundation deposits. Many figures reached museums through the art market without a record of where they were found, which is why the excavated ones matter so much. Check each museum’s online collection to see what is on view.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Foundation figure of Ur-Namma holding a basket” (47.49) and “Foundation figure of king Shulgi of Ur, carrying a basket” (59.41.1).
- British Museum, collection record for the stela of Ashurbanipal carrying a basket, 668-655 BCE.
- Musée du Louvre, perforated plaque of Ur-Nanshe and foundation figurines of Gudea from Tello.
- R. S. Ellis, Foundation Deposits in Ancient Mesopotamia (1968).
- C. Tsouparopoulou, “Hidden messages under the temple: Foundation deposits and the restricted presence of writing in 3rd millennium BCE Mesopotamia” (2014).
- Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, “The building of Ningirsu’s temple” (Gudea cylinders A and B).
