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Inanna Adored: The Uruk Vase
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 The Uruk (Warka) vase, before being badly broken during the looting of the Iraqi National Museum during the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Alabaster, or limestone? Height over 3 feet (105 cm). Sumerian, c 3100 BC. Photo © hamadiraq,com Thou foster child of silence and slow time.... What men or gods are these? .... Who are these coming to the sacrifice?" Keats was singing praises to a Grecian funeral vase. But had this stone Sumerian vase not still lain buried from men's eyes, he could have done worse than worship this one. This carved alabaster vase, nearly 40 inches tall, was so prized even in ancient times that when some clumsy priest dropped and broke it, the shattered cream-colored stone pieces were fastened back together with copper rivets. Five thousand years old, it was found in a treasure trove at Uruk, the world's first city. Not only is it the most interesting object ever found there; it is one of the most remarkable and revealing objects found on earth that speaks of civilizations before the invention of writing. For this ritual vase gives us our first real look at the way pre-historic man entered the presence of his gods. Used in the cult worship of Uruk's fertility goddess, Inanna, "Queen of Heaven," the vase shows a procession in her honor. A long parade of naked priests winds their way up three tiers of friezes, returning first fruits to their source: animals and other good things to eat to sacrifice to the goddess. The goddess herself stands at the top: robed, long-haired, and crowned with what appears to be the horned hat or head-dress that denotes a supreme deity. Not only may this be the first place where this divine sign appears; this may also be the first representation of the goddess in human form. Over this and similar scenes much ink is spilled in trying to decide whether this figure is the goddess "in person" or her priestess, her "representative," or even her "impersonation." One would do better questioning a Christian whether Jesus was "God in person" or just his "rep" or even his "impersonation." To those who made and used the Uruk vase, such distinctions were probably meaningless - mere metaphysical quibbles for which they could not care a jot - not one iota. Inanna, then, stands here before her standards: the pair of ring-tied reed bundles that stood before her temple; reed-poles that stood (and still do!) as door posts or roof supports in reed houses of that region for thousands of years; and whose picture-symbols later stood in cuneiform writing for the goddess herself. Before her a naked priest offers her a basket of first-fruits, while behind him a priest-king (missing except for the bottom of his net skirt; but see the splendid drawing below for this and other details) stands before the goddess. Will he impersonate Dumuzi, her mortal lover and bridegroom, who must die so that his blood and seed may renew life's cycle in the spring? Behind Inanna's holy poles, inside her temple, stands a sacrificial ram; and on its back or up behind it, mounted on a throne or altar, stand two skirted priests or minor deities, sacrificing. Still further back, within the temple or its precinct, in a storeroom, we see Inanna's returns from former first-fruits blessed by her fertility: baskets and dishes overflowing with fruit and vegetables, and bread; two tall libation vases shaped like the vase here they are carved on; and pots shaped like a goat and lion. Up front, Inanna is being handed a big basket of fresh fruit and other goodies by the first of an endless line of worshipful admirers and naked, shaven men - led by a naked priest who leads a long parade of similarly purified worshippers around the vase's middle register or frieze. In the rhythmic repetition of this parade, most of these men bear baskets of fruit and vegetables and grain. These priests would bring fresh fruit in season, or delicious dried apricots and cherries, peaches, apples, figs, pomegranates, medlars, cherries and mulberries; quinces, lemons, citrons; and always dates, dates, dates! Especially the prized dates from Dilmun, the Garden of Paradise. Sexy, too, would be hearts of palm: the male tip from the "date-cabbage." The vegetables might include cabbages, lettuces, and cucumbers; lentils, peas and beans; and jars of grains and fresh unleavened breads in discs, fresh-baked and griddled from barley, wheat, millet and rye, in cakes and pastries. And bins stuffed with cream, honey and Dilmun dates; or soaked in sesame oil, milk, and fruit. One priest carries a vase of oil, grape wine or prize barley beer - a vase equipped, like himself, with a handy spout. Others, not depicted, would bear alabaster vases like the one before us, filled with milk. No doubt most viewers will have seen naked men before. But few will have seen a naked priest, let alone a whole platoon of them parading around in public. In the ancient near East, it seems, cleanliness really was close to godliness. Until the priest was shaven and shorn, all over his body, and scrubbed surgically clean, he was not pure enough to enter the presence of his god, or queen. (Not to mention that, sans robe or hair, he would be little tempted while en route to secrete upon his person some small percentage of the loot.) Herodotus tells us the Egyptians made their priests shave their entire bodies three times a week, and viewed with horror the unclean barbarian, the bearded Greek - while the Bible tells that the Israelites abominated the shaving and clipping of hair by the pagan Babylonians! Imagine, then, a platoon of naked Ghandhis, marching to Inanna's shrine. Down the two-tiered lower register, the long procession of beings who owe the goddess life finally ends, as it begins, with the animals and plants. First come the sacrificial sheep, well-fattened up on milk and barley. Ram-ewe, ram-ewe, ram-ewe, they come and go, in rhythmic alternating pairs around the vase - just like the sacred grain and tree below, where ears of barley alternate with date-palm trunks. Beneath the plants, and underlying all that lives, there undulates the primal course: the stream of life-giving sweet water that springs up from the primal Absu, the Abyss. And so the great libation vase displays the food chain as the great chain of being, the cosmic hierarchy. In ascending order of importance (shown by size), it shows the cosmic scale or ladder, the great tree of life, as it winds up around the cosmic mountain. Like its ziggurat, the temple-tower it represents, Uruk's vase stands for the three-tiered universe of air, earth, and water: Heaven, Earth and Underworld - all three ruled by the sky gods at the top, who are fed and served by man, just as man is fed and served in turn by the animals and plants below him in the scale of things.  Spread-out drawing of the Uruk Vase. Lighter area is a reconstruction. © nielsenhayden.com |
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~ Table of Contents ~
TYCHE & OEDIPUS
Adonis & Aphrodite Fatal Boar Hunts, Fatal Loves: Meleager & Adonis A Valentine for Camille Flammarion The Met returns its Euphronios vase! Camille Flammarion: Romantic Astronomer The Fountains of Enceladus The Eye of God Is Ganymede the Boy from Marathon Bay? THE ANCIENT OLYMPIEIA FESTIVAL AT ATHENS Which satyr would you choose... The Marathon Boy and the Satyr Contrapossto from Praxiteles to Rubens and Playboy The Afternoon of a Faun The Dancing Satyr - A Lost Bronze of Praxiteles? Hermes, The Liar Who Invented the Lyre Inanna, Queen of Uruk Apollo Sauroktonos, or How the Romans Killed the Lizard-Killer Jacob's Ladder Inanna and the Harrowing of Hell Lilith: Wild Demon of Sex and Death DUMUZI FEEDS INANNA'S SHEEP The Sun God in his Dragon Boat A Stairway to Heaven: The Ziggurat at Ur Lassalle's Post-Modern Male Torso Brancusi's Torsos: Pure Platonic Forms? Brancusi on Men and Women: Take the Tate Test? Four Gods Greet the Rising Sun God Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo Culsu & Vanth Lead the Dead into Hades Aita, the Etruscan Hades Socrates' Apology: The Background A FATEFUL CHARIOT RACE: The STORY of PELOPS and OENOMAUS |
