Relief Fragment with a God
Unknown · Middle or Neo-Elamite period, c. 1500-539 BC
On this small chip of limestone, less than ten centimetres wide, a god can be recognised by his horned tiara, the headdress that marked divinity across Mesopotamia and Elam. Little else survives: the fragment is broken on all sides, and the figure's body and whatever he faced are lost. The carving is in low relief, the surface smooth and pale.
The museum dates the piece broadly, to the Middle or Neo-Elamite period, somewhere between fifteen hundred and five hundred and thirty nine BC, possibly around the reign of Shilhak-Inshushinak in the twelfth century BC. Horned crowns with several tiers of horns identified the greatest gods, and fragments like this one usually come from stelae or wall reliefs showing a king before a deity. Found at Susa by the French mission, it entered the Louvre through the division of finds. It is displayed with other small reliefs so that the shared conventions of Elamite religious imagery can be compared.
Did You Know? Horns on a headdress were the ancient Near Eastern way of saying that a figure is a god, and even a fragment this small keeps the message.
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