Plaque Fragment with Intertwined Serpents
Unknown · c. 2700-2300 BC
Two serpents coil around each other on this fragment of chlorite, their heads turned to face one another with open mouths. The plaque once had a handle, and only part of it survives, but the carving is deep and confident, with the scales and the twisting bodies rendered in crisp relief. The museum suggests it may have served as a weight, though its exact use is unknown.
The soft green-grey chlorite and the snake imagery point to south-eastern Iran in the third millennium BC, between about twenty seven hundred and twenty three hundred BC. Workshops in the Halil River valley, around modern Jiroft, carved thousands of vessels, plaques and weights in this stone, decorated with a repertoire of intertwined snakes, scorpions, felines and mythical heroes. Their products travelled as far as Mesopotamia and the Gulf. Snakes twined together may have symbolised fertility or the union of opposing powers. The Louvre purchased the plaque in nineteen eighty six.
Did You Know? Chlorite is soft enough to carve with copper tools, which is one reason it became the favourite stone of these workshops.
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