Fragmento de una estela de Ur Nammu de Ur divinizado

Fragment of “Ur-Nammu” stele, ca. 2097–2080 B.C.; Ur III, reign of Ur-Nammu. Mesopotamia, Ur. Pink-buff limestone; H. 105 cm (39 5/8 in.); W. 71.8 cm (28 1/4 in.); Thickness 11 cm (4 3/8 in.). University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia CBS 16676.14.

In the 1920s the University of Pennsylvania and British Museum expedition to Ur, led by Sir Leonard Woolley, discovered the remains of a tall royal stele that had once stood in a courtyard just below the ziggurat terrace and seemed to honor Ur-Namma, founder of Ur’s Third Dynasty. Broken into hundreds of pieces, the stele was once more than ten feet high with five registers of relief scenes on each side. The scenes illustrate various aspects of kingship, in part metaphorically, in part literally. On this fragment the king, whose head is missing, pours a libation into a small tree standing in a vessel set before a seated god wearing a heavy crown with four horns and the typical divine robe made of rows of tufts. The god extends his right hand holding a short staff and a coil made of five strands of rope with dangling ends looped up. In the lower register a bald servant at far right, helps a king carry building tools hung over an axe on his shoulder with a basket for making clay mortar and a collapsed plough for digging the earth to make mud bricks. A ceremony to make the first brick for a building is known from texts.