Mesopotamia witnessed a long tradition of private individuals commissioning objects inscribed with dedicatory formulae and depositing them in temples and other sacred places. These objects could include the name of the individual, his or her profession, familial relationships, and other personal information. The act of inscription and dedication thus materialised the individual’s social being and perpetuated the individual’s memory for time immemorial. There are, however, instances in which this information was altered or transformed after the initial act of inscription or deposition. Though rare, this practice demonstrates how personal memory was not immutable or fixed but could be reformulated depending on who was responsible for altering the inscribed object and the ways in which it was altered. By analysing inscribed dedication objects against a larger material backdrop of cylinder seals, a type of inscribed object also owned by private individuals, this chapter will explore how personal memory was constructed, transformed, and sometimes even disrupted.
The initial combined act of inscription and dedication did not constitute the only relationship between human, object, and divine recipient, but rather formed one social/temporal dimension for an object that continued to ‘make memories’ beyond that of the original act.1
1 This research was conducted as part of the project ‘Memories for Life: Materiality and Memory of Ancient Near Eastern Inscribed Private Objects’, funded by the Swedish Research Council Grant No 2016-02028.
The team of the Memories for Life project includes: PI Jakob Andersson (Uppsala); Joint PI Christina Tsouparopoulou (Cambridge); Postdoctoral research associates: Nancy Highcock (Cambridge), Rune Rattenborg (Uppsala), Seraina Nett (Uppsala); research assistants: Silvia Ferreri (Cambridge), Philippa Browne (Cambridge), Nils Melin Kronsell (Uppsala) and Russell Clark (Cambridge). The Memories for Life Project is currently compiling a database of all known inscribed objects dedication by non-royal persons between the third and first millennia in Mesopotamia. This database will be made available
Introduction
As in many religious traditions, the practice of offering or dedicating manufactured objects to the divine and depositing them in sacred places such as temples, private chapels, shrines, and other sacred places has a long and rich history in both so-called
‘private’ and royal worship practices of the ancient Near East. In Mesopotamia, a rich variety of object types was offered with certain categories of material culture such as vessels, statues, and weapons being particularly popular. Such objects, most often referred to as ‘votive’ objects in the literature, were dedicated by people from different social categories,2 and although the majority were uninscribed, the focus of scholarly attention has been on inscribed objects dedicated by rulers and other elites, as the individuals represented by these objects are identifiable from the inscription itself. Furthermore, it is known from contemporary documentary sources that in addition to manufactured objects, perishable items such as foodstuffs, liquids and textiles were also dedicated to deities: these types of dedications are of course generally missing from the archaeological record, leaving objects made from stone, ceramic, and metal behind.
In Mesopotamia, generally defined as encompassing the region connected to the Tigris and Euphrates River systems (Fig. 3.1), evidence for this practice dates to the late fourth millennium and continues for the remainder of Mesopotamian religious history, although the overall practice is better represented in certain periods due to a combination of modern archaeological excavation history and ancient local and chronological shifts in praxis (Highcock and Tsouparopoulou, 2020). The earliest dedicated objects were, of course, not inscribed, and comprised sculpted stone animals and ritual vessels found buried in the Level III Eanna Temple in Uruk. It has been argued that the bodies of the animals rendered in stone signal the ‘transfiguration of the votive offering of a real animal for sacrifice into the eternalised form of a gift for all time’ (Bahrani 2017, 51). Such dedicated objects were thus able to generate a
as the ‘Cuneiform Inscriptions of Private Individuals’ project on the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC) online platform in 2021.
The author would like to particularly thank Christina Tsouparopoulou for her guidance on this paper which was first presented at the CREWS conference at Cambridge in March, 2019 and to Rune Rattenborg for the use of his map. My deepest gratitude to Philippa Steele, Philip Boyes, and my fellow speakers and participants for generating such a stimulating event. I am especially thankful to Philip Boyes for his unflagging work as the editor of this volume. The anonymous reviewer provided constructive and much-appreciated feedback which has greatly improved the paper. All mistakes are my own.
A full analysis of the object types, materials, craft-techniques, iconography, contexts and aspects of the inscriptions (palaeography, placement, language, social connections, etc) is beyond the purview of this paper but several studies addressing these issues are currently in preparation by current members of the Memories for Life team.
2 Unfortunately, it is often difficult to ascertain the social status or gender of those dedicated uninscribed objects and even those with inscriptions do not always provide further information on the various social categories to which one may belong. However, we should not assume that only those of elite social status or belonging to certain professions were able to dedicate objects.
continuous, ritualised form of communication that allowed the object to exist beyond the initial act of dedication. However, as these objects were presumably buried after their active ritual use had expired, these early objects already demonstrate how dedicated objects and/or temple paraphernalia did not necessarily function in the same manner for time immemorial. In this particular case, the objects were not discarded beyond the temple, but were perhaps properly decommissioned in a ritually charged space.
The objects’ lives took on new forms and the removal and burial of such objects, although still within the sacred space of the temple, complicates this picture of dedicated objects as functioning in the same manner for perpetuity. Moreover, dedicated objects are not always easy to identify in the archaeological record as the cultic nature of depositions cannot always be determined from object type, context, or assemblage (Osborne 2004, 2–4). As evidenced by later examples of the third and second millennia, some discussed below, dedicated objects have been found redeposited, reused, and in various conditions in different contexts within the temple.
Ur III texts indicate the recycling of temple objects and melting down of metal objects for reuse (Evans 2012, 139). Evans has even postulated that gypsum sculptures may have been burned and powdered to repurpose as plaster (2012, 137–143, particularly 137, 139). In other instances, it is clear that dedicated objects were moved elsewhere by later temple personnel. Such is the case at Ur where dedicated objects from the third and early second millennia were moved from the Ningal and Nanna Temples to Fig. 3.1. Map of Mesopotamia with sites mentioned in the text and general quantities of known inscribed objects dedicated by private individuals. Map by Rune Rattenborg and provided courtesy of the Memories for Life Project, all rights reserved.
a special storage building called the Ganunmaḫ during the Kassite period (Schmitt 2019, 88–90). The lives of dedicated objects in ancient Mesopotamia were dynamic: as archaeological contexts demonstrate they could take on any number of trajectories after their initial dedication and diverse practices existed across space and time.
A preliminary examination of objects inscribed by non-royal, or private, individuals adds further complexity to the diverse lives of dedicated objects. The addition of an inscription to such objects, as first known in the third millennium, offers another dimension through which one can explore how messages to divinities were transformed over time. As noted below, the inscription adds further information about the dedicant including their name as well as other identity markers such as profession and kinship relations. Although uninscribed objects would have also been chosen for their particular type, material, level of craftsmanship, and the place of deposition for its level of access and deity, inscriptions provide an extra layer of information about the personal choices and identities of the dedicant. In this way, ‘mentioning the donor, the recipient, and the rationale for dedication often serve as “missing links” between object-driven and text-based analysis of ritual performance, economy, and social routines’ (Evans and Roßberger 2019, 8). One such social routine was the alteration of the inscription on dedicated stone objects. Though rare in the case of private inscriptions, such transformation of the material text indicates another way in which these objects could take on new meanings beyond their original conception and deposition.
Stone was a popular material with both royal and private individuals3 when dedicating inscribed objects. As Susan Pollock has described in relation to the advent of writing-on-stone in the Early Dynastic Period (early–mid-third millennium BC).
All of these inscriptions in stone can be understood as gestures toward a future that went beyond that of writing on clay tablets. In this respect, the material (stone), the visual and the written contents worked hand-in-hand. Objects such as stelae and sculpture may have been intended to stand in the temple or in a public place; in the case of seals, they might be taken with a person to the grave. (Pollock 2016, 285)
In addition to their perceived longevity, stones (and stone-emulating vitreous materials), also derived their importance from an array of ascribed meanings related to various material properties, place of origin, and time and skill used to transform it from a raw material to finished objects (Schuster-Brandis 2008; Amrhein 2020). Harder, dark stones such as diorite were favoured for statuary by royal donors from the Early Dynastic through Akkadian periods whereas lighter-coloured, softer stones seem to be favoured by private individuals for their own representations (Evans 2012, 126 and references therein). Gypsum was available locally in both southern and northern Mesopotamia and its local provenience may have contributed to its lower-value, and thus accessibility, to non-royal people (Moorey 1994, 125; Evans 2012, 126). The relative
3 Of the 603 inscribed objects dedicated by non-royal individuals currently collected in the Memories for Life project database, 483, or 81% are made from stone (including semi-precious stones).
softness of gypsum may also have necessitated less expensive artisans although data on how private people bought and commissioned statues and other objects is lacking.
Diorite and other dark stones such as serpentine and steatite, on the other hand were sourced from far-off places (Moorey 1994, 28–29) and their dark lustre was high valued as it recalled the night sky (Amrhein 2020, 93 citing Winter 1999, 46). As will be demonstrated in the following examples, however, the perceived permanence and high value of stones did not always prevent these objects from being transformed through inscriptional alterations.
Whilst archaeological context can only provide some clues as to the function of temple objects, whether comprising a dedication or functioning as temple furniture or other paraphernalia, inscriptions can provide more definitive information on the function of the object through their specific dedicatory formulae. As Osborne has pointed out with regards to archaeological context, the terminology for such objects and assemblages is varied and in addition to dedications, one may find descriptions of votives, offerings, hoards and depositions with each label emphasising certain aspects of gift-giving on the importance of a vow fulfilled (Osborne 2004, 5). ‘Votive’ is the most common terminology used with regards to Mesopotamian dedicated objects although Andersson has argued for labelling inscribed objects as ‘commemorative’.
This term covers both objects given to benefit the donor him- or herself (votive) and those with an inscription which explicitly benefits a third party (dedicatory).
There are also numerous examples of objects bearing only the name of the potential donor and an offering formula or those with only the name of the deity so that the beneficiary is not entirely clear (Andersson 2016, 48).
For Andersson, the concept of commemoration also forefronts the life of the object beyond that of the human donor and emphasises the process of memorialisation that occurs beyond the singular act of dedication or deposition. As mentioned, self-commemoration through dedication was practised by both royal and non-royal individuals, and in addition to the types of stone and other materials used, there are also differences in the content and syntax of royal and so-called ‘private’ inscriptions (Andersson 2016). Moreover, Andersson notes that the inscriptions of private people are much less studied compared to royal inscriptions as they readily provide data concerning chronology, lineages, royal deeds, and geographic influence (2016, 50).
However, private inscriptions, though attributed to individuals about whom we know very little, can still illuminate religious practice, identity construction and personal commemoration for other members of Mesopotamian societies.
Andersson touches upon the practice of altering inscriptions and re-using privately dedicated objects though notes that it appears to be an ‘unusual’ practice (2016, 68).
Indeed, this is another area in which much more is known for royal dedications and other royally commissioned objects in which the fear of reuse, alteration, or destruction is apparent in protective clauses and curses. In addition, we have examples of such royal practices, including appropriating a probably private uninscribed statue for a royal dedication. In a fragmentary statue from the site of Susa, and now
in the Louvre (S82), which can be dated based on its style to the Early Dynastic IIIa period (ca 2500 BC). The inscription, however, dates to the Akkadian period some 250 years later and specifically to the reign of King Maništušu. It is dedicated to the local Elamite goddess Narundi on behalf of the king by the local vassal governor Ešpum (Spycket 1981, 73 and pl. 48; Gelb and Kienast 1994, 80; Frayne 1993, 81–82).
Ešpum must have recovered this uninscribed statue of a long-dead individual during temple clear-out or refurbishment and decided to re-activate and bind the statue to a new life through the act of inscribing his own name and filiation to the king into this stone representation of an unnamed man. The act of inscribing this uninscribed statue, retrieved and severed from its original context(s) of sacred function, thus reconfigures and revives its efficacy in a new setting. It should not be discounted that the antiquity of the object may have lent some value for its new dedicant, but the addition of the inscription illustrates that written message supersedes accurate visual representation of the agent involved.
The following discussion will explore related phenomena in privately dedicated objects as an initial and preliminary attempt to answer Andersson’s call for further analysis of private commemorative practice (2016, 50).
Private commemorative practice and memory-making
The first known objects to be inscribed and dedicated by private individuals date to the Early Dynastic Period I–II (2900–2700 BC; Andersson 2016, 51) and the practice flourishes in the latter half of same millennium (Early Dynastic Period IIIa–b). The earliest known inscribed dedicated objects are both fragmentary statues, one of unknown provenance in the British Museum (Braun-Holzinger 1991, 255; Reade 2000, 84–85; Marchesi and Marchetti 2011, 186; Westenholz 2014, 194–195) and the other from the Šara Temple at the site of Tell Agrab (Oriental Institute Museum A21488; Steible 1982, 199; Braun-Holzinger 1991, 242; Marchesi and Marchetti 2011, 29; no 1).
Recent scholarship on dedicated/commemorative objects has built upon the strong foundations provided by scholars such as Braun-Holzinger (1991) and Steible (1982) to move beyond the collection and preliminary analysis of the inscriptional and material data and study these objects as complex nexuses of meaning both bound to the social beings they represented and as agents with extensive life histories in their own right. Through such studies, often referred to as object biographies, human and object histories are linked and transform together as they move through time and space (Gosden and Marshall 1999). The material turn in scholarship on ancient social relationships has been thoroughly discussed, evaluated, and reevaluated elsewhere (Pollock 2016, 277–281) and the recent work on dedicated, or votive, objects of the third and second millennia includes studies centred on particular temples and sites (Roßberger 2016; Evans and Roßberger 2019 and contributions therein, particularly Gries 2019; Verderame 2019; Cluzan 2019;
Evans 2019), object categories such as sculpture (Marchesi and Marchetti 2011; Evans
2012), ‘eye-stones’ (Müller-Kleiser 2016), seals (Roßberger 2016), and mace-heads (Muhle 2008). Other studies have sought to highlight aspects of a donor’s identity by examining the relationship between dedicatory practice and particular social categories like gender and profession (Asher-Greve 2006; Suter 2007, 2008, 2016, 2017; Evans 2012, particularly ch. 6; Paoletti 2016; Verderame 2019; Highcock and Tsouparopoulou 2020).
This discussion will focus on inscribed dedicated objects and the manipulation of those inscriptions in order to elucidate aspects of ancient identity construction.
How and why did individuals in ancient Mesopotamia change the inscriptional element of their dedication in order to reflect changes in their self-representation and self-commemoration? In addition to the targeted recipient deity, the inscription may contain a range of relevant information about the donor, including their name, and thus possible gender, their profession or title which can hint toward their social or wealth status, kinship relationships and connections to elites such as the local ruler. Whilst the inscription thus provides ‘extra’ information concerning the donor and their economic, social (including religious), and political networks, it cannot be divorced from the object itself. The inscription and object – its material, quality, manufacture techniques, form, and archaeological contexts – form a unified and multi-faceted message to the god(s) about the human donor.
Of course, dedicated/commemorative objects are not the only category of Mesopotamian private inscriptions. While royal inscribed objects can offer one avenue in which explore private inscriptional alteration and re-use, it is also worthwhile to compare private commemorative objects with objects originating in similar social milieux. Therefore, this exploration of the materiality of commemorative inscriptions is inspired and informed by the fact that we have a large body of evidence of re-carving and reusing inscribed objects in the object category of inscribed cylinder seals. While seals can be considered as practical objects, used in everyday transactions, they were often owned by individuals and tied to that individual’s authority or extension of self. Conversely, it is clear that seals were not irrevocably bound to their original owner, often passing into new hands unaltered or being altered to reflect changes in the identity of the owner. Such transformations are also present in private commemorative dedications, albeit rarer, and when discussed together, it becomes clear that seals can provide a model for how to further imagine the biographies of private inscribed objects and the types of practices to seek in the material itself. The re-use and alteration of seals can be easily explained through their very nature, but that of commemorative dedications is perhaps more surprising.
Private inscription and recarving
The reuse of seals has a long tradition in Mesopotamia as seals were passed across contemporaries or passed down through generations as heirlooms. as evidenced by the appearance of impressions dating from one era on artefacts dating to a later
period. The use of an Old Assyrian, Middle Assyrian, and Neo-Assyrian seal on the late seventh century BC Esarhaddon Succession Treaty is a famous example of this practice (Watanabe 1985; Lauinger 2012) but this practice also operated at lower and less public levels of society. During the early second millennium BC, for example, some merchants from the city of Aššur were actively using cylinder seals that once belonged to Ur III
period. The use of an Old Assyrian, Middle Assyrian, and Neo-Assyrian seal on the late seventh century BC Esarhaddon Succession Treaty is a famous example of this practice (Watanabe 1985; Lauinger 2012) but this practice also operated at lower and less public levels of society. During the early second millennium BC, for example, some merchants from the city of Aššur were actively using cylinder seals that once belonged to Ur III