Stand-ins for the faithful
Suppose you could leave a copy of yourself in a place of worship, praying while you got on with your life. That is what these statues were. A votive statue, from the Latin votum, “vow” or “offering”, is a figure dedicated to a god in a temple. In Sumer it stood in for its donor. The Metropolitan Museum describes the job of one from Tell Asmar plainly: to pray perpetually on behalf of the person it represented.
The body language fits the job. Hands are clasped at the chest, shoulders squared, feet planted. Men often wear a fleece skirt and long hair and beard; women a draped robe. Many carry an inscription giving the donor’s name, the god’s name and the reason, usually “for his life” or “for her life”. The statue was a contract in stone: my attention, permanently, in exchange for your favour.
Eyes made of shell and stone
Those eyes were built as much as carved. Craftsmen cut white shell for the whites of the eyes, set black limestone or, for richer patrons, lapis lazuli for the pupils, and fixed it all in bitumen, a natural tar. The sockets were carved large and deep to take the inlay. The rest of the figure could be simple; the eyes could not.
Why does it work so well, even on us? Human eyes are unusual among primates: the white of the eye is large and clearly visible around a dark iris. In 1997 the Japanese researchers Hiromi Kobayashi and Shiro Kohshima argued in Nature that this contrast evolved to make it easy to see where someone is looking. The Sumerian sculptors pushed exactly that signal to the maximum: brilliant white around a jet-black pupil. In a dim temple lit by oil lamps, the gaze reads from across the room, and it reads as attention.
The Tell Asmar hoard
The best-known group comes from Eshnunna, modern Tell Asmar, in the Diyala region east of Baghdad. In 1933 to 1934 the Iraq Expedition of the University of Chicago found twelve statues, ten men and two women, buried together under the floor beside the altar of the Square Temple of the god Abu. They range from small figures to one about 72 cm tall.
The two largest puzzled the excavators. The archaeologist Henri Frankfort first read them as the god Abu and a mother goddess, because of their size and their even more enormous eyes. Most scholars now see them as worshippers too, simply richer ones: in a temple full of stand-ins, size could reflect what the donor could afford. The burial itself was respectful. When statues were damaged or replaced, throwing them out was not an option, so they were laid to rest inside the god’s house. The art historian Jean Evans describes this as the last stage in a statue’s “life”: made, dedicated, displayed, and finally buried.
A fancier version: Ebih-Il
The same idea could be made very luxurious. At Mari, in Syria, the official Ebih-Il, his title given as superintendent, had himself carved seated on a wicker stool in translucent alabaster, with eyes of shell and schist and irises of lapis lazuli. Now in the Louvre, he shows that patrons paid extra for their eyes to be seen.
A habit that lasted
The worshipper statue has deep roots. Centuries earlier, at Uruk’s great temples, offerings and images already filled the precinct of Inanna. And it had a long future. Rulers of Lagash kept the clasped hands: no statue of Eannatum can be identified with certainty, but his brother Enannatum appears in worship on a stone plaque. A few generations later Gudea placed many statues of himself in temples, carved in hard diorite, hands still folded, eyes still open.
Where to see them
Statues from the Tell Asmar hoard are divided between the ISAC Museum in Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Ebih-Il is in the Louvre in Paris, and the British Museum in London has other worshipper statues from early Sumerian temples. Check gallery openings before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Standing male worshiper” (40.156); “Early Dynastic Sculpture, 2900-2350 B.C.” (Heilbrunn Timeline essay, 2004).
- H. Frankfort, Sculpture of the Third Millennium B.C. from Tell Asmar and Khafajah, OIP 44 (1939).
- J. M. Evans, The Lives of Sumerian Sculpture: An Archaeology of the Early Dynastic Temple (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- Musée du Louvre, “Ebih-Il, superintendent of Mari” (AO 17551).
- H. Kobayashi and S. Kohshima, “Unique morphology of the human eye”, Nature 387 (1997).
- D. R. Frayne, Presargonic Period (2700-2350 BC), RIME 1 (2008).
