Fig 45.--Portion of a plaque of Ur-Ninâ, King of Lagash (Shirpurla), sculptured with representations of his sons and the high officials of his court.--Déc., pl. 2 ter, No. 1; in the Imperial Ottoman Museum.
Another of Ur-Ninâ's plaques is not completely preserved, for the right half is wanting upon which was the figure, or possibly two figures, of the king. On the portion that has been recovered are sculptured two rows of figures, both facing the right. The first in the lower row is Anita, the cup-bearer; then comes a high official named Banar; then Akurgal, distinguished by the title of "son," and on the extreme left Namazua, the scribe. Of the four figures preserved in the upper row, the two central ones are Lugal-ezen and Muninnikurta, both of whom bear the title of "son," as on the largest of the three plaques. The reading of the names upon the figures on the right and left is uncertain, but they are probably intended for officials of the court. The one on the left of the line is of some interest, for he carries a staff upon his left shoulder from which hangs a bag. We may perhaps regard him as the royal chamberlain, who controlled the supplies of the palace; or his duty may have been to look after the provisions and accommodation for the court, should the king ever undertake a journey from one city to another.[48]
While Ur-Ninâ's sons upon the smaller plaques are all roughly of the same size, we have noted that the similar figures upon the largest plaque vary slightly in height. It has been suggested that the intention of the sculptor was to indicate the difference in age between the brothers, and in consequence it has been argued that Akurgal, who succeeded Ur-Ninâ upon the throne of Lagash, was his fifth, and not his eldest, son. This inference has further been employed to suggest that after Ur-Ninâ's death there may have followed a period of weakness within the state of Lagash, due to disunion among his sons; and during the supposed struggle for the succession it is conjectured that the city may have been distracted by internal conflicts, and, in consequence, was unable to maintain her independence as a city-state, which she only succeeded in recovering in the reign of Eannatum, the son and successor of Akurgal.[49] But a brief examination of the theory will show that there is little to be said for it, and it is probable that the slight difference in the height of the figures is fortuitous and unconnected with their respective ages. It may be admitted that a good deal depends upon the sex of Lidda, who, on the largest plaque, faces the standing figure of Ur-Ninâ. If this is intended for a son of the king, his richer clothing marks him out as the crown-prince; but, even so, we may suppose that Akurgal was Ur-Ninâ's second son, and that he succeeded to the throne in consequence of Lidda having predeceased his father. But reasons have already been adduced for believing that Lidda was a daughter, not a son, of Ur-Ninâ. In that case Akurgal occupies the place of honour among his brothers in standing nearest the king. He is further differentiated from them by the cup which he carries; in fact, he here appears as cup-bearer to Lidda, the office performed by Anita and Saguntug for the king.
That the crown-prince should be here represented as attending his sister may appear strange, but, in view of our imperfect knowledge of this early period, the suggestion should not be dismissed solely on that account. Indeed, the class of temple votaries, who enjoyed a high social position under the Semitic kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon, probably had its counterpart at the centres of Sumerian worship in still earlier times; and there is evidence that at the time of the First Dynasty, the order included members of the royal house. Moreover, tablets dating from the close of Ur-Ninâ's dynasty show the important part which women played in the social and official life of the early Sumerians.[50] Thus it is possible that Ur-Ninâ's daughter held high rank or office in the temple hierarchy, and her presence on the plaque may have reference to some special ceremony, or act of dedication, in which it was her privilege to take the leading part after the king, or to be his chief assistant. In such circumstances it would not be unnatural for her eldest brother to attend her. In both the other compositions Lidda is absent, and Akurgal occupies the place of honour. In the one he stands on a line with the king immediately behind the royal cup-bearer, and he is the only royal son who is specifically labelled as such; in the other he is again on a line with the king, separated from Anita, the cup-bearer, by a high officer of state, and followed by the royal scribe. In these scenes he is clearly set in the most favoured position, and, if Lidda was not his sister but the crown-prince, it would be hard to explain the latter's absence, except on the supposition that his death had occurred before the smaller plaques were made. But the texts upon all three plaques record the building of Ningirsu's temple, and they thus appear to have been prepared for the same occasion, which gives additional weight to the suggestion that Lidda was a daughter of Ur-Ninâ, and that Akurgal was his eldest son.
But, whether Akurgal was Ur-Ninâ's eldest son or not, the evidence of at least the smaller of the two complete plaques would seem to show that he was recognized as crown-prince during the lifetime of his father, and we may infer that he was Ur-Ninâ's immediate successor. For an estimate of his reign we must depend on references made to him by his two sons. It has already been mentioned that the early part of the text engraved upon the Stele of the Vultures appears to have given an account of the relations between Lagash and Umma during the reigns preceding that of Eannatum,[51] and in a badly preserved passage in the second column we find a reference to Akurgal, the son of Ur-Ninâ. The context is broken, but "the men of Umma" and "the city of Lagash" are mentioned almost immediately before the name of Akurgal,[52] and it would appear that Eannatum here refers to a conflict which took place between the two cities during the former's reign. It should be noted that upon his Cone[53] Entemena makes no mention of any war at this period, and, as in the case of Ur-Ninâ's reign, his silence might be interpreted as an indication of unbroken peace. But the narratives may be reconciled on the supposition either that the conflict in the reign of Akurgal was of no great importance, or that it did not concern the fertile plain of Gu-edin. It must be remembered that the text upon the Cone of Entemena was composed after the stirring times of Eannatum, Entemena's uncle, and the successes won by that monarch against Umma were naturally of far greater importance in his eyes than the lesser conflicts of his predecessors. It is true that he describes the still earlier intervention of Mesilim in the affairs of Lagash and Umma, but this is because the actual stele or boundary-stone set up by Mesilim was removed by the men of Umma in Eannatum's reign, an act which provoked the war. The story of Mesilim's intervention, which resulted in the setting up of the boundary-stone, thus forms a natural introduction to the record of Eannatum's campaign; and the fact that these two events closely follow one another in Entemena's text is not inconsistent with a less important conflict being recorded by the Stele of the Vultures as having taken place in the reign of Akurgal.
The only other evidence with regard to the achievements of Akurgal is furnished by the titles ascribed to him by his two sons. Upon the Stele of the Vultures,[54] Eannatum describes him as "king" of Lagash, and from this passage alone it might be inferred that he was as successful as his father Ur-Ninâ in maintaining the independence of his city. But in other texts upon foundation-stones, bricks, and a small column, Eannatum describes him only as "patesi," as also does his other son Enannatum I. It should be noted that in the majority of his inscriptions Eannatum claims for himself the title of patesi, and at the end of one of them, in which he has enumerated a long list of his own conquests, he exclaims, "He (i.e. Eannatum) is the son of Akurgal, the patesi of Lagash, and his grandfather is Ur-Ninâ, the patesi of Lagash."[55] That he should term Ur-Ninâ "patesi" does not accord with that ruler's own texts, but, if Eannatum himself had been merely a patesi at the beginning of his reign, and his father had also been one before him, he may well have overlooked the more ambitious title to which his grandfather had laid claim, especially as this omission would enhance the splendour of his own achievements. It is also possible that at this time the distinction between the two titles was not so strictly drawn as in the later periods, and that an alteration in them did not always mark a corresponding political change.[56] However this may be, the subsequent conflicts of Eannatum suggest that Lagash had failed to maintain her freedom. We may assume that the North had once more interfered in the affairs of Sumer, and that Kish had put an end to the comparative independence which the city had enjoyed during Ur-Ninâ's reign.