Statue of Queen Napir-Asu
Unknown · Reign of Untash-Napirisha, c. 1340-1300 BC
A headless queen stands with her hands folded over her belly, the fingers laced in a gesture of calm devotion. She is Napir-Asu, wife of Untash-Napirisha, the king who ruled Elam in the fourteenth century BC and built the great ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil. Look at the dress: short sleeves, a border of dotted circles, a skirt that flares at the hem into wavy fringes. A shawl is pinned at the shoulder with a palmette-shaped clasp, and she wears four bracelets and a ring. Below a band of triangles, cross-hatching and slanting lines on the front of the skirt runs an inscription in Elamite.
The inscription is a curse. Whoever damages the statue, erases her name or carries it off is to be struck down by the great gods of Susa: Napirisha, Kiririsha, Inshushinak and Beltiya. The figure was cast with a solid copper core inside a bronze shell and weighs about seventeen hundred and fifty kilograms, one of the heaviest metal statues to survive from the ancient Near East. French excavators found it in the temple of Ninhursag on the acropolis of Susa, and it came to the Louvre through the division of finds that followed the dig.
Did You Know? Despite the curse threatening anyone who would harm her, the statue lost its head and one arm long before it reached Paris.
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