The Terracotta Plaques from Kish and Hursagkalama, c. 1850 to 1650 B.C.

Abstract

The small moulded terracotta plaques made in Mesopotamia in the first three or four centuries of the second millennium B.C. provide a unique, if often enigmatic, corpus of evidence for the popular iconography of the period. They embrace scenes of myth, ritual and daily life unmatched in glyptic save during the Akkadian period, and then only on artefacts which their quality suggests were common currency only among the upper classes. Three major studies have so far been devoted to these plaques, the most recent, that by Barrelet, still in progress. Single volumes have covered the terracottas of Nippur and Uruk, whilst those found in excavations at many other sites are scattered through the literature. Barrelet has provided an excellent, fully illustrated survey of the terracottas from de Genouillac's excavations at Kish in 1912 now in the Louvre (the majority of those which he preserved), but the extensive collection recorded by the Oxford—Field Museum (Chicago) Expedition (O.F.M.E.) of 1923–33 remains largely unpublished and is now divided between Baghdad, Chicago and Oxford. This paper seeks to publish as economically as possible the repertory of motifs found at Kish, paying particular attention to recorded findspots and the popularity of the motif elsewhere. This information seems particularly important in any attempt to unravel the social significance of these objects, to which no explicit documentary references are yet known. The links between the religious iconography of these plaques and Old Babylonian glyptic has long been apparent; but in addition to the stereotyped combinations of deities and their attributes, which are common to the two, the plaques offer a quite fresh range of scenes.

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