Plan of a House or Temple
Unknown · Neo-Sumerian period, c. 2250-2000 BC
A clay tablet eleven centimetres high carries an architect's drawing: the plan of a building with rooms arranged around a courtyard, each space labelled with its measurements in cuneiform. The lines are ruled straight and the walls are shown in plan, so a builder could have set it out on the ground. Whether the building was a private house or a small sanctuary is not certain, but the dimensioned layout is the same kind of document a modern architect would produce. Notice how thick the walls are in proportion to the rooms, a feature of mud-brick construction that kept interiors cool.
The tablet comes from Tello, the ancient city of Girsu in southern Iraq, from the mound known as the tell of the tablets, and dates to the end of the third millennium before our era, the age of Gudea and the Third Dynasty of Ur. Plans of this kind survive in some numbers from the period, including the famous one held on the lap of one of Gudea's statues. This example was acquired by the Louvre in 1881 following Ernest de Sarzec's excavations at the site.
Did You Know? A statue of Gudea in the Louvre holds a temple plan on its knees; this tablet is the everyday version of that same architect's drawing.
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