Head of a Woman Wearing a Polos
Unknown · Early Dynastic III B period, c. 2500-2400 BC
A woman's face in pale alabaster looks out from under a tall cylindrical headdress, the polos, which marks her as a goddess or a woman of high rank. Her hair is incised in fine lines framing the forehead and cheeks. The eyebrows and eyes were inlaid; the pupils have gone, but the white shell of the eyes and the dark bitumen that held them are still there, giving the face its wide unblinking stare. Small holes at the ears once held earrings, and traces of bitumen along the right side show where the headdress was fixed. The nose and chin are chipped.
The head was found in 1935 outside the temple of Ishtar at Mari, near the door, during the excavations led by André Parrot on the middle Euphrates in present-day Syria. Mari's temples held dozens of statues of worshippers and possibly of deities, placed there to pray on behalf of their owners. Inlaid eyes of shell and bitumen are typical of Sumerian and Syrian sculpture of the mid third millennium before our era. The head came to the Louvre in the partage of finds from the 1935 season.
Did You Know? Everything the sculptor could not carve, the eyes, the earrings and the join of the headdress, was fixed with bitumen, the natural tar that Mesopotamia used as glue.
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