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Pierced Boulder with a Coiled Serpent
Unknown · Awan dynasty, reign of Puzur-Inshushinak, c. 2100 BC
A rounded boulder of limestone, roughly half a metre high and pierced through the middle, is wrapped by a serpent carved in relief. The snake's body coils around the stone and its head rises near the top, so that the whole object reads as a snake curled around a hole. Along the surface runs an inscription in Linear Elamite, the native script of Susa, naming the ruler Puzur-Inshushinak. The hole suggests the stone served a practical purpose, perhaps as a socket for a pole or a fitting in a sanctuary, but its exact function remains uncertain.
Serpents were powerful symbols at Susa, linked to the underworld, to water and to protection, and they recur on Elamite monuments for two thousand years. Puzur-Inshushinak, who ruled around 2100 before our era, filled the acropolis of Susa with inscribed monuments in Linear Elamite and Akkadian to proclaim his independence from the Akkadian empire; this boulder is one of them, and its text is among the small corpus that scholars have used to work on the script. It was excavated on the acropolis by the French mission and came to the Louvre through the partage of finds.
Did You Know? The inscription is in Linear Elamite, a script that remained a puzzle for more than a century after this stone was dug up.
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