The Fascinating Kingdom of Mari (2)

Remnants of kitchen equipment were found as they had been abandoned, with scraps of cheese or bread still on the floor, and containers for olive oil or water, and clay utensils. Classrooms still revealed signs that the royal children had studied there. An archive concealed sixteen hundred separate tablets describing the king’s accounting and finances. The library, probably one of the most complete ever unearthed, contained an astonishing twenty thousand tablets, a record as orderly as it was extensive, for it documents the history and dynasties of a region that stretched from Persia to Palestine.

Offerings were found on the altars of the temples, or in the tombs, as elsewhere in Syria: bits of silk, wool or cotton cloth preserved thanks to the dryness of the desert. Statuary, ritual pottery, jewelry, votive offerings, all managed to survive Hamurabi’s onslaught. Even the eroded and rounded remains of the pre-Sargon quarter, with its Akkadian ruins, can still be determined.

Excavations in the Temple of Ishtar verify the successive periods of construction. The temple’s upper level, which corresponds to that destroyed by Hamurabi, refers to the Third Dynasty of Ur, but beneath it lie the ruins of a pre-Sargonite temple presumably destroyed by Eannadu, King of Lagash, in 2850 B.C. The third temple consisted of a single hall, surrounded by a patio with a portico and six columns. The fourth temple, built before 3000 B.C. and consecrated to a “virile goddess”, revealed a number of votive figurines, cylinder seals, and spikes to hold the stone blocks of the foundations in place. Despite the looting of centuries, vandalism and the destruction or mutilation of the sculptures in the name of one or another faith, the temples, especially Ishtar’s, represent cults with great religious impact over the widest range and diversity of societies, and the longest period of time. Yet for all its superimposition of cults and structures, after the last, vindictive Babylonian campaign, Mari’s splendor finally faded and was never revived.

There was no more grandeur, no more study or innovation in art or learning. No one was curious enough to scratch around the palace in search of the remains of a glorious past, that archaeology would later uncover, like the bronze lions from the entrance to the Temple of Dagan, crushed under the debris. Idols from the Period of the Princes (Shakkanakku), those governors of a foreign power with their palace on the temple mount, vanished under the fallen walls. The ripe fertility goddesses, the solemn priests in attitudes of piety, the kings, public officials, effigies, in stone, alabaster, gypsum, fresco, like the facts and the dates and the names on all the tablets attributed to the library of the last king, even the posture of the dead in their tombs, had to wait until the mid-twentieth century in order to reveal something of the lives and the customs of the people who inhabited the three hundred rooms, yet their legacy is richly evoked in curious relics.

From the eighteenth century before Christ is the figure identified with the governor Ishtup-Ilum, with his Assyrian beard and Chinese style robes. From the same period is a fertility goddess, later identified with Artemisa and her cult in Ephesus. Allegorical or mythological is the “eagle with the head of a lion”, of lapis lazuli, gold, bitumen and copper, dated around 2500 B.C. It was used as a pendant and was associated with the cult of Anzu, of the Sumerian deity Ningirsu, from the city of Lagash.

There is the girl, dating from the Third Millennium, perhaps a priestess, known as “the songstress”, one of Mari’s most famous finds. Her typical skirt, or kaunakÈ, was confected of tufts of goat hair, stylized by the anonymous artist. She sits cross-legged on an enigmatic throne or bench, scored on one side, with scales on the other. Her hands no longer exist but the broken remains indicate she held them, in ritual piety, clutched at her breast.

Her elbows, in the typically Sumerian style, are thin and pointed. Of a related period, c. 2600 to 2350 B.C., is the seated figure of a woman sculpted from crystallized gypsum. She is possibly a representation of Ishtar –in fact, she was found in Ishtar’s temple-and she sits enveloped by her burgeoning kaunakÈ. Her elaborate hairstyle and long shawl, actually a tapestry also confected of tufts of goat hair, are symbolic of her rank. The bench on which she sits is inscribed with royal insignia.

The priestly Ur-Nanshe appeared in many forms, and is to be found in a number of museums. His representations are solemn, imbued with dignity, yet somehow the endearing contours of the body, inside the outrageous kaunakÈ, the pointed elbows, the strong chin, the enigmatic halfsmile, give him an immediacy unlikely in art from so remote a

period. A votive figure from the temple of Ninni-Zaza, c. 2600 to 2350 B.C., with his voluminous kaunakÈ, long beard, the stylized eyebrows and the black outline around shell-and-jet eyes – curiously similar to the eyes on the moai of Easter Island– bears an inscription, attributed to Shibum, or Shamagan, King of Mari, praising the personage of the elusive god-king known as Ninni-Zaza, and with it, confirming the grandeur and the majesty of the mysterious Mesopotamian kingdom, now ruined and bare, but that shimmered then from the pinnacle that overlooked its canals, by the winding blue-green river: “He who contemplates a Land- Without-End, governed by the King of the World; it is he who humbly extends this offering to the divine Ninni-Zaza”.

Haifaa Mafalani