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Gudea, Prince of Lagash, known as the Architect with a Plan
Unknown · c. 2120-2110 BC
Gudea ruled the Sumerian state of Lagash for about twenty years in the period after the Akkadian empire collapsed, and he presented himself not as a conqueror but as a builder and a pious servant of the gods. More than thirty statues of him survive, an extraordinary number for any ancient ruler, most of them dedicated inside the temple of Ningirsu at Girsu that he rebuilt. This one, known to scholars as Statue B, shows him seated with a drawing board on his knees, and it doubles as the dedication text for that very building project.
The stone is diorite, imported from Magan in the Gulf region, brutally hard and prized precisely because it would outlast softer local limestone. The sculptor polished it to a dark sheen and simplified the body into calm geometric masses, the shoulders broad, the arms folded in the attitude of prayer, the enormous eyes and heavy brows conveying attentiveness rather than portraiture. On the tablet resting on his lap, look closely for the incised ground plan of a walled temple with its towered gateways, together with a ruler marked in units and a stylus. Long columns of Sumerian cuneiform cover the robe, describing the temple, its furnishings and its cost.
Ernest de Sarzec excavated it at Tello between 1877 and 1881, in the same campaigns that produced the Stele of the Vultures, and its arrival in Paris helped establish Sumerian civilisation as a subject of study. The graduated rule carved on the tablet is one of the earliest surviving metrological instruments depicted in art, and architectural historians have used it to reconstruct the Sumerian cubit.
Did You Know? The scale rule carved beside the temple plan is detailed enough that scholars have used it to work out the length of the Sumerian unit of measurement.
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