Fragment of a Vase Decorated with a Scorpion
Unknown · Early Elamite period, c. 2400-2100 BC
A small piece of dark soft stone, seven centimetres long, keeps part of the wall of a vessel. Incised into its surface is a scorpion, seen from above with its legs spread and its tail curled, the way scorpions are drawn on seals and pottery throughout the ancient Near East. The lines are firm and simple, cut with a pointed tool into steatite, a stone that is easy to carve and takes a smooth finish. The rest of the vase is lost, so you are looking at a single motif from what was probably a repeating frieze of animals.
The fragment was excavated at Susa and dates to the second half of the third millennium before our era, when the city was closely tied to Mesopotamia and to the trade in carved stone vessels that ran across Iran towards the Gulf. Scorpions carried protective meaning in this world: they were associated with fertility and with warding off harm, and they appear on objects from the earliest painted pottery of Susa onward. The piece came to the Louvre through the partage of finds from the French excavations.
Did You Know? Scorpions were among the very first creatures painted on Susa's pottery, more than a thousand years before this vase was carved.
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