V.—Sumerian Origins and Racial Characteristics

Abstract

In 1901 Léon Heuzey wrote in his Catalogue des Antiquites chaldeennes that we possessed at that time only one complete statuette of early Sumerian art. He referred to the remarkable marble figurine of a priest or priest-king excavated at Lagash and published on plate 6 bis oi Découvertes en Chaldée. Although this object, of unusual height for a statuette in the early period (it is about 18 inches high), came from the hand of the sculptor with the details of the skirt unfinished, its artistic merits are so great that it must be placed at the end of the period, probably as late as Urukagina, priest-king of Lagash about 2900 B.C. The arms of this figure are finely delineated and free from the body. The head and features are delicately cut and the neck is of normal length (fig. 1). In earlier statuary the neck is always unnaturally short and the whole figure has a squat appearance. Here, too, the execution of the eyes is of a new school, the eyeball being cut in the stone itself, whereas the earlier artists cut a deep socket and inset the eye with a ball of nacre or shell by means of bitumen. De Sarzec the excavator of Lagash had, however, the good fortune to purchase a statuette from an Arab of Chattra in the vicinity of Telloh, the site of ancient Lagash. It is the figure of a woman, and the appearance is so squat, the execution so rude, and the details so archaic, that it henceforth served as the standard specimen of early Sumerian sculpture. The balls have fallen from the eye-sockets. She wears a heavy woollen garment, with false frills, the costume already known from bas-reliefs and shell etchings as the early national dress of the Sumerians. On the earliest bas-reliefs, this petticoat is usually worked plain from the hips to the knees, and the lower part ends in a flounce of parallel tassels. These represent locks of wool, and on the primitive designs the tassels simply end in a point and are not scalloped as on other monuments published here (see fig. 2). In the case of male figures the body is nude from the waist upward. The dress consists of nothing but this woollen petticoat, which Heuzey calls a kaunakes. But the woollen garment worn by women is longer and is hung from the left shoulder, so as to cover the left breast.