Ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Sumer, city of Lagash, Neo-Sumerian period, reign of Gudea of Lagash, ca. 2144 to 2124 BCE. A nice pair of hand-built clay foundation cones with tapering conical bodies and discoid heads. The body of each cone is inscribed with 12 columns of cuneiform script formed just prior to being placed inside of a kiln. Clay nails like these are also referred to as dedication pegs or funerary pegs; they were inscribed, baked, and stuck into walls made of mudbrick to mark ownership either by a god or a ruler. These dedications sometimes include stories or boasts about the rulers they describe and are some of our earliest sources of written royal history. When translated these cones read, "For Ningirsu, the mighty warrior of Enlil, Gudea, governor of Lagash, who built the Eninnu (temple) of Ningirsu, (also) built his Epa, the temple of seven sectors." Size of largest: 4.64" L x 2.36" W (11.8 cm x 6 cm)

Cuneiform script is one of the oldest known writing systems in the world, made using a reed as a stylus and scratching wedge-shaped marks onto clay tablets. Early cuneiform was pictographic, but in the 3rd millennium BCE it shifted to the more abstract form you see here. These cuneiform objects are some of the roughly 2 million known from this culture; of these, between 30,000 and 100,000 have been translated. The earliest translations came in 1836 from the work of French scholar Eugene Burnouf and, by the 1850's, multiple scholars were able to produce similar translations, meaning the language had been deciphered.

Provenance: East Coast collection, New York Gallery, New York City, New York, USA, acquired before 2010

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#138553

Both cones have chips and nicks to bodies and heads, with encrustations on heads and within some cuneiform characters, and softening to some cuneiform characters. Nice preservation to most cuneiform characters.