Rearing Goat with a Flowering Plant from the Great Death Pit at Ur
By STAN PARCHIN
September 1, 2010
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| Mesopotamian, Early Dynastic IIIA (ca. 2550-2400 B.C.). Rearing Goat with a Flowering Plant. Gold, silver, lapis lazuli, copper alloy, shell, red limestone and bitumen. H. 42.6 cm (16.75 in.). Mesopotamia, Ur, PG 1237, Great Death Pit. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. |
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| Mesopotamian, Early Dynastic IIIA (ca. 2550-2400 B.C.). Rearing Goat with a Flowering Plant (profile). Gold, silver, lapis lazuli, copper alloy, shell, red limestone and bitumen. H. 42.6 cm (16.75 in.). Mesopotamia, Ur, PG 1237, Great Death Pit. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. |
Rearing Goat with a Flowering Plant (ca. 2550-2400 B.C.) and its companion were discovered by archaeologist C. Leonard Woolley in the Great Death Pit at the Royal Cemetery of Ur. Both stunning Sumerian sculptures were originally called Ram Caught in a Thicket because of the Old Testament's apt imagery related to the intended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, his father (Genesis 22:13). Each fragile statue has since been identified as a goat standing upright and rearing on its hind legs up against a blossoming tree, dispelling any Biblical allusions.
Statue's Form and Function
Glistening gold covers the goat's face and legs. A copper alloy is used for its ears. The horns, beard, eyebrows, pupils, eyelids, forehead's locks of hair and fleece on the animal’s shoulders and chest are made of imported lapis lazuli. The beast’s underside is silver. The whites of its eyes and rest of the body fleece are finely crafted from shell. Individual tufts are attached to the goat's frame with bitumen. The composite sculpture is highly colored, a magnificent visual effect favored by Sumerian artists when they created objects for temples and graves of the elite.
The iconic statue's wooden base features four thin silver panels set into its rectangular sides. Shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli pieces, arranged in a mosaic diaper pattern, cover its top surface. The flowering plant's gold foil and wood stem, set into the base, is crowned with a single vertical leaf. A pair of branches separates into four smaller shoots. Two leaves and two floral rosettes that survived the artifact's painstakingly careful excavation are facing forward.
Woolley correctly insisted that the Rearing Goats are best understood as applied art and not as freestanding sculpture. They formed the base of a stand. Its upper section, probably a small tray or tabletop, was not preserved. The gold-covered posts that emerge from the back of each goat's neck supported the missing component. A piece of furniture designed as such was illustrated on an Early Dynastic cylinder seal in Berlin's Vorderasiatisches Museum.
Symbolism of Goat and Plant
In the 3rd Millennium B.C., the combined image of a goat and flowering tree is a sophisticated symbolic illustration of the Sumerians' basic needs and interests, namely animal fertility and floral fecundity. The erect posture a goat assumes when it reaches for a tree's succulent foliage to consume is also its procreative stance. Highly stylized, the plant against which the sculpture's animal leans bears little resemblance to any known flora in southern Mesopotamia. Its rosettes are associated with Inanna, the complex goddess of both love and war. The leaves possibly represent flowers on the ends of branches, simplified buds or fruit. Rearing Goat with a Flowering Plant reflects the Sumerians' dependence on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers' inundation to sustain the ancient civilization's precarious existence.
Conservation
Despite the fact that both Rearing Goats were uncovered badly crushed, Woolley was able to reconstruct both sculptures. Expert conservators at The University of Pennsylvania Museum cleaned its statue in the late 1990s for a special exhibition with an extensive itinerary. They reassembled the antiquity with a few changes. The modifications were based upon intensive study of the object in a single expedition photograph and internal evidence that surfaced when the work was dismantled. The goat's front hooves now rest on the tree's properly angled branches. And the plant's gold components are rearranged in the right order.
The goat's badly corroded silver underside gives no indication of the animal's gender. However, the penis sheath and gold-covered testicles of the British Museum's statue are evident, leading scholars to conclude that its American counterpart is also male.
"Rearing Goat with a Flowering Plant" is on view in the long-term installation "Iraq's Ancient Past: Rediscovering Ur's Royal Cemetery" at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Sources
Aruz, Joan and Wallenfels, Ronald (eds.), et al. Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus (exh. cat.). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003, 32, 121-122.
Zettler, Richard L. and Lee Horne (eds.), et al. Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur (exh. cat.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1998, 49-50, 61-62.