Gilgamesh Standing on the Head of Humbaba
Unknown · Isin-Larsa or Old Babylonian period, first half of the second millennium BC
A slender terracotta plaque, seventeen centimetres tall, shows a bearded man in a headdress and a short kilt standing upright, holding an object that can no longer be identified. Beneath his feet is a base shaped like a grotesque mask with a grimacing face: the head of Humbaba, the monster of the cedar forest. The figure is read as the hero Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who with his companion Enkidu killed Humbaba in one of the central episodes of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The relief was pressed from a single mould and is complete.
Humbaba's face, with its wrinkled features that look like coiled intestines, was a popular protective image in Babylonian houses, and plaques showing his defeat carried the same power. The identification of the standing man as Gilgamesh is conventional rather than proven, since nothing is inscribed, but the pairing of hero and severed head matches the story that scribes were copying in the same period. The plaque is thought to come from Eshnunna, modern Tell Asmar, and was purchased by the museum in 1930.
Did You Know? Humbaba's grimacing face was compared by the Babylonians themselves to a sheep's coiled intestines, and diviners used its image as an omen.
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