Of this earlier period, that of the “patesi,” or priest kings, some very wonderful records have been discovered by M. de Sarzec at Tel-Loh. The group of mounds of which Tel-Loh is the chief, is the site of a very ancient city in southern Mesopotamia, the ancient Zirgul, or Sirgulla. It is situated between the Tigris and Euphrates, near the junction of the former river with the Shat-el-Hic, a small river which flows southwesterly to the Euphrates, connecting the waters of these two great rivers.
The mound of Tel-Loh, “The Mound of the Idol,” formed part of the royal quarter of the ancient city, rising at this point forty feet above the plain.
It was in this locality that, in 1880-1881, M. de Sarzec, French consul at Bagdad, who was carrying on excavations in this region under the direction of the French government, came upon ten statues in the ruins of a very ancient structure.
This proved to be the royal residence of an ancient king of Zirgul, the patesi, or priest-king Gudea, whose date is fixed by various authorities at about 4800 B. C.
The statues were nearly life size, and all were headless. Two heads soon after were found in the ruins, one of them turbaned and the other uncovered and shaved, supposed to represent the king as priest.
The type of feature reproduced in these finely sculptured heads is unmistakably Turanian, of the Tartar branch of this great family, while the turban, another characteristic indication in costume, might serve for a copy in sculpture of the head dress worn by some living representative of this race in central Asia at the present day.
All these statues were inscribed; nine of them with memorials of Gudea, and the tenth of Urbahu, an earlier king who ruled in Zirgul before Gudea.
The ruins of his palace were found by M. de Sarzec below the palace of Gudea, and also the foundations of an ancient pyramid temple first erected by Urbahu and rebuilt by Gudea.
The inscriptions were in very archaic cuneiform and were incised upon the robes of the figures. Upon the principal statue of Gudea were inscribed three hundred and thirty-six lines of writing, divided into nine columns. About one hundred and thirty characters are used, and these texts represent the longest of the ancient cuneiform writings found.
The material of the statues is a peculiar variety of granite, a dark green diorite, one of the hardest of stones. This was nowhere to be found in Mesopotamia. So far as known, it only appears in the peninsula of Sinai.