A ruler who chose the hardest stone
Why would anyone pick one of the hardest stones available for a portrait? Gudea gives the answer himself. One of his statue inscriptions rules out silver, copper, tin and bronze for the image and asks for hard stone instead, a material nobody could melt down for its value or rework into something else. The statue was meant to stay what it was, in the temple, for good.
About 27 statues of Gudea are known, most of them found at Tello, ancient Girsu, the religious capital of Lagash. They show him seated or standing, hands clasped, face calm, his robe covered with cuneiform. Most are under life size.
What diorite is, and why it fights back
The name comes from the Greek diorizein, “to distinguish”, because you can tell its light and dark crystals apart. Diorite forms deep underground from slowly cooling molten rock, which makes it dense, speckled and very tough. On the Mohs scale of hardness it sits at about 6, while copper, the metal of Gudea’s tools, sits at about 3. A copper chisel simply skids off.
So the sculptors worked the way you would sand a piece of wood, only far more slowly. They pounded the block into shape with harder hammerstones, ground it with abrasive sand and polished it at length. The finished surface has a soft, even sheen, and the detail is surprisingly fine: the fringe of the robe, the muscles of the bare right arm, hundreds of tiny wedges of script.
Lagash after the empire
Gudea ruled in the decades after the fall of the Akkadian empire, when Lagash was again rich and independent. He called himself ensi, a title usually translated “ruler” or “governor”, and his inscriptions talk about almost nothing but temples. Above all he rebuilt the Eninnu, the temple of Ningirsu, the city’s chief god. In his own account Ningirsu ordered the work in a dream, and the goddess Nanshe explained what the dream meant.
Bringing diorite to Lagash fitted that programme. Magan lay far down the Gulf, and moving big blocks meant ships, money and trading partners. The stone announced piety and reach at the same time.
Statues with names and jobs
Each statue was an offering, carried into a particular temple and dedicated to a particular god, whom the inscription names. Each also had a name of its own, often a short prayer. One in the Metropolitan Museum in New York is called “Gudea, the man who built the temple, may his life be long”. Once installed, it stood before the god on Gudea’s behalf, in permanent prayer.
The pose comes from older Sumerian worshipper statues: clasped hands, steady gaze. Gudea’s versions are smoother and more naturalistic, with broad shoulders, a calm face and a body that looks strong but obedient. The same idea of the ruler as the gods’ servant and builder appears in the copper foundation figures buried under temple walls.
The architect with the plan
The best known of them all, statue B in the Louvre, shows Gudea seated with a tablet on his lap. On it is engraved the plan of a temple enclosure, with its walls, gates and buttresses, next to a measuring scale. He is presented as the architect of Ningirsu’s house, receiving the god’s design. The statue also carries the longest inscription of the whole group, a list of the timber, stone and metals brought from distant lands for the temple.
The habit of hard dark stone for royal messages lasted. Some four centuries later, Babylon set out its laws in basalt on Hammurabi’s law stele.
Where to see them
Most of the statues came to light at Tello in the French excavations led by the diplomat Ernest de Sarzec from 1877. Many lost their heads, but the inscriptions survived. The Louvre in Paris has the largest group, including statue B; others are in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the British Museum in London. Several others reached museums through the art trade without a known find spot, and the authenticity of a few is debated.
Sources
- Musée du Louvre, “Gudea, prince de Lagash, statue dite de l’architecte au plan” (AO 2).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Statue of Gudea, named ‘Gudea, the man who built the temple, may his life be long'” (59.2).
- D. O. Edzard, Gudea and His Dynasty, RIME 3/1 (1997).
- Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, “Architecte au plan”.
- Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, “The building of Ningirsu’s temple” (Gudea cylinders A and B).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art of the First Cities (2003).
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