Investiture of Zimri-Lim, Wall Painting from the Palace of Mari
Unknown · Amorite period, c. 1780-1760 BC
Across a wide panel of painted plaster, nearly two and a half metres long, a king receives the emblems of his power from a goddess. The central scene sits inside a frame that may represent a temple: in the lower compartment two goddesses hold vases from which streams of water spring, and in the upper compartment the king stands before the goddess Ishtar, armed and with one foot planted on a lion, her attribute animal. She holds out to him a rod and a ring, the symbols of kingship. Two more goddesses raise their hands in intercession behind them. Around the building the painter set a garden of tall palms and stylised trees, guardian spirits, and fantastic animals with wings and horns. A blue bird flies through the branches.
The palette is limited to earth colours, red, ochre, black and white, with touches of blue, and the figures are drawn in flat outline with no shading, in the manner of the seal engravers of the period. Look at the streams flowing from the vases: they carry small fish, a sign of abundance, and they link the goddesses to the fertility of the river valley on which Mari depended. The palm trees are climbed by tiny figures harvesting dates. The painting decorated the wall of the great courtyard, court 106, that led to the throne room, so every visitor to the king passed beneath it.
Mari lay on the middle Euphrates in present-day Syria, a trading city whose last palace, with some three hundred rooms, was a wonder of its age. Zimri-Lim ruled there until about 1760 before our era, when his former ally Hammurabi of Babylon captured and burned the city. The collapse of the mud-brick walls sealed the painting under debris, which is why so fragile a work survived. André Parrot's French mission uncovered it in the nineteen thirties and it came to the Louvre through the partage of finds. The image of a god handing rod and ring to a king is the same one carved at the top of the Code of Hammurabi nearby.
Did You Know? Hammurabi's sack of Mari, the disaster that ended Zimri-Lim's reign, is also what preserved his painting: the collapsed walls buried it for nearly four thousand years.
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