Statue of Ebih-Il, Steward of Mari
Unknown · c. 2400 BC
The smiling man on the wicker stool is Ebih-Il, an official of the city of Mari on the middle Euphrates who held the rank of nu-banda, usually translated as steward or superintendent. Statues like his were votive stand-ins: placed in a temple, hands clasped, they prayed on their owner's behalf for as long as the stone lasted, so that the donor enjoyed perpetual access to the god even while attending to business elsewhere. An inscription on the back identifies him and dedicates him to Ishtar.
He is carved from translucent gypsum alabaster, bare to the waist, wearing the kaunakes, a fleecy tufted skirt whose rows of locks the sculptor rendered with obsessive regularity. The shaved head and full beard follow Mari convention. What holds every visitor is the gaze: the eyes are inlaid, whites of shell and irises of lapis lazuli set in bitumen, and they still glitter with an alertness that four and a half thousand years has not dulled. Walk around to see how the shoulders and collarbones are modelled with real anatomical attention, and note the faint upward curve of the mouth, the so called archaic smile of Sumerian sculpture.
André Parrot's French mission found him on 23 January 1934 in Court 20 of the Temple of Ishtar at Tell Hariri in Syria, during the excavation season that first proved the site was Mari, a capital known until then only from cuneiform texts. He reached the Louvre under the partage arrangements of the period. Of the many worshipper statues recovered from Mari, his is the finest preserved, and he has become the informal face of the museum's Mesopotamian collection.
Did You Know? His lapis lazuli irises came from Afghanistan, roughly three thousand kilometres from Mari, a measure of how far Bronze Age trade routes reached.
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