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Vaughn Emerson Crawford, Prudence Oliver Harper, Oscar White Muscarella & Beatrice Elizabeth Bodenstein

1966 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide to the Collections, Ancient Near Eastern Art.
New York.
Webpage

     This book represents a guide to the Near Eastern collection of the MET, including artefacts from the Early Anatolian to the Sasanian periods (i.e., ca. 6500 BC-651 AD).
     As for Urkesh, the guide presents the well-known, lion-shaped bronze foundation peg dating to ca. 2200 BC, portraying a snarling lion holding a tablet carrying an inscription in Hurrian of Tiš-atal, endan [i.e. 'king'] of Urkesh, dedicating a temple to Nergal [currently interpreted as the local polyad god Kumarbi]. The curators underline how “although attributed to the Hurrians, people who played only a minor role in III millennium Mesopotamia, this piece parallels the art of Akkad in it stirring realism” (pp. 10-11; cf. fig. 15 on p. 11).

[M. De Pietri – July 2019]