[205] It has been thought that the inscriptions contain proof, that, during the period, to which this primitive art belongs, Sirtella was the capital of a small independent kingdom, while the title of Gudea (patési, or governor) would seem to show that in his time it formed part of a larger state. Gudea can only have been a great feudatory; his position must have been similar to the nome princes in Egypt. Heuzey, in the Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions for 18 August, 1882.
[206] A tenth statue of Gudea, very much mutilated, is not yet exhibited. There is also the lower part of a small seated statue, without inscription.
[207] The great seated statue that occupies the middle of the room is five feet three inches in height, and has no head. One of the standing statues is four feet eight inches high. The one figured in our Plate VI. is only four feet two inches. The small statue called the architect (Fig. 96) is three feet one inch. It will be seen that some of these figures are over, and some under, life-size; one only, if we allow for the head, will correspond with what we may call the height of a man.
[208] Letter from M. de Sarzec read to the Académie des Inscriptions on the 2nd December, 1881 (reprinted in Heuzey, Fouilles de Chaldée).
[209] On the knees of these seated figures we find the scale, the stylus and the plan of a fortified city that we explained on pages 327 and 328 of our first volume.
[210] Heuzey, Les Fouilles de Chaldée, p. 12.
[211] Some may be inclined to think that the bald head may once have been protected by a covering cut from a separate block. This idea was suggested to us by the existence in the British Museum of a kind of wig of black stone (Nimroud Gallery, case H). It is carved to imitate hair, and, in front, has a kind of crest, the whole being cut from one piece of stone. It may have been used to surmount a limestone figure, and the contrast between the light colour of the one material, and the blackness of the other would be neither unpleasant nor unfitting. In another case (A) of the same gallery, we find beards and wigs made some of glass, others of a sandy frit imitating lapis-lazuli. The use of these disconnected pieces must then have been very widespread. But we doubt whether the Tello head ever had such a covering, because that part of its surface which would in such a case have been hidden from sight, is finished with the same care as all the rest. If the artist had included a wig in his calculations, would he have taken the pains he did with the modelling and polishing of the cranium?
[212] In the sculptures representing the erection of Sennacherib’s palace, many of the workmen have their heads protected from the sun by a turban resembling that of the Tello statue. This can hardly be clearly seen in small scale reproductions (Vol. I. Figs. 151 and 152), but Layard gives two of these heads on the original scale, for the express purpose of calling attention to their singular head-dress (Monuments, series ii. plate 16).
[213] Here M. Heuzey answers M. Ménant, who thought he could discover in these two heads that the sculptor’s models had not been Semites, but belonged to the primitive race, of Turanians, no doubt, by whom the Chaldæan civilization was founded (Les Fouilles de M. de Sarzec en Mesopotamia, in the number for December, 1880, of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts).
[214] Heuzey, Les Fouilles, &c., p. ii.