Objects, Agency, and the Mesopotamian Temple: Materializing Cultic Practice in the Third Millennium BC

When queen Baranamtara of Early Dynastic Lagash traveled to the city of Nina during the malt-eating festival of the goddess Nanshe, she made a series of offerings to cult objects. Among these were dates and oil offered for the “eight statues” of the temple. The offerings to eight anonymous statues would suggest that objects could be tended regardless of the identity of the statue’s donor. Instead of being solely a dedicatory object, statues also became autonomous through the religious context of the temple and, in turn, they shaped devotional acts. Through a variety of archaeological and textual evidence, it is possible to localize the Early Dynastic dedication in relation to the ritual practice of those who visited temples rather than solely in relation to the divine who inhabited it. The concept of materiality comes into play here: as a material, physical form, Early Dynastic temple statues mediated social interactions among the realms of living, deceased, and divine. But Early Dynastic dedicatory practices also were manipulated by temple ideologies. The rise of domestic devotion at the end of the third millennium BC irrevocably altered the visual terrain of the Mesopotamian temple. When a shift occurred in the relationship between human and divine, the authority of the temple eroded.

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