A war over a strip of farmland
Around 2450 BCE southern Mesopotamia was a patchwork of city-states, each with its own god, king and canals. Lagash and its neighbour Umma fought for generations over the Gu’edena, “the edge of the plain”, a stretch of irrigated fields on the border between them. In a land where every field depended on canals, a border was a matter of water and grain.
Eannatum of Lagash won one round of that war and set up a carved slab in Girsu, the religious centre of his state, to say so. Its modern name comes from its most famous detail: vultures flying off with human heads in their beaks. The original was a single slab about 1.8 m high and 1.3 m wide, yet only 11 cm thick, carved on both faces and filled with a long Sumerian inscription.
The god’s side
On one face, Ningirsu, the god of Lagash, fills the space. He is far larger than any human, and he holds a great net crammed with naked enemies, one of whom he strikes on the head with a mace. The net is closed at the top by a lion-headed eagle, Ningirsu’s emblem. Behind him stands a goddess, whom many scholars identify as Ninhursag, though the fragment is too damaged to be sure.
The net is a picture of the oath that ends the inscription. The men of Umma swear by several great gods not to cross the border again, and each god’s net awaits them if they break their word.
The king’s side
The other face reads like a strip cartoon, in registers, horizontal bands stacked one above another. In one, Eannatum leads a tight phalanx of soldiers with helmets, rectangular shields and long spears, marching over the bodies of the enemy. In another he rides a chariot at the head of lighter troops. Lower down, the dead of Lagash are laid in a burial mound, with offerings, and at the top the vultures carry off the heads of the fallen of Umma.
The phalanx is a neat piece of design. The sculptor carved a few faces and many overlapping shields and spear points, and the eye fills in the rest, so a handful of figures reads as a whole army. The inscription is no more literal than the picture. It counts the enemy dead at 3,600, which sounds precise until you know that the Sumerians counted in sixties: 3,600 is 60 × 60, their standard large round number, closer to “a huge number” than to a body count.
Why tell the war twice?
Both faces describe the same victory, from two points of view. On the human side, soldiers march, a king commands and the dead are buried. On the divine side, the god of Lagash has already caught the enemy. Read together, the two faces say that Ningirsu decided the outcome and Eannatum carried it out, so the border that followed was the god’s will and breaking it was sacrilege.
The stele is carved in low relief, with the inscription running in the spaces between scenes, and size shows rank: god, then king, then soldiers. The art historian Irene Winter counted it among the first works to tell a real historical event in pictures. Lagash kept the habit of public stone: three centuries later its ruler Gudea filled its temples with statues of hard diorite, and Babylon later put a whole body of law on Hammurabi’s law stele.
Seven fragments
The slab was broken in antiquity. French excavations at Tello, ancient Girsu, led by the diplomat Ernest de Sarzec, turned up the first fragments in 1881, and more came in later seasons. Seven pieces are known today, all in the Louvre. They preserve only part of the stone, but enough of both faces to reconstruct the layout.
Where to see it
The fragments are displayed together in the Louvre’s Near Eastern Antiquities galleries in Paris, near other finds from Tello, including statues of Gudea. Galleries sometimes close for works, so check the Louvre website before you go.
Sources
- Musée du Louvre, “Stèle de victoire d’Eannatum, roi de Lagash, dite Stèle des Vautours” (AO 50).
- Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, RIME 1.09.03.01, “Vulture Stele” (P431075); ETCSRI, Q001056.
- I. J. Winter, “After the Battle is Over: The Stele of the Vultures and the Beginning of Historical Narrative in the Art of the Ancient Near East” (1985).
- J. S. Cooper, Reconstructing History from Ancient Inscriptions: The Lagash-Umma Border Conflict (1983).
- Archaeology Magazine, “Cuneiform Warfare” (May/June 2016).
