1 jan 3000 ano antes da era comum - Warka Vase

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DID NIMROD BUILD THE TOWER OF BABEL ? by Gerard Gertoux

This cult scene in which the Priest-King intervenes has been interpreted in different ways because of the complete lack of context. In Late Uruk texts the Priest-King (EN “Lord”) occurs solely as a “chief of administration”. He obviously was the head of the operations for which writing was invented and, by extension, the head of this first agrarian state. In images, the ruler is, in contrast to the female officiant of Inanna (“Lady of Heaven”), neither directly associated with Inanna’s standard, nor is he shown in priestly functions. His concurrences with Inanna’s standard are restricted to images that express his role as provider of the Late Uruk state, namely the Uruk Vase, the much-abridged versions of this image in glyptic, and a few additional seal images that depict him associated with the cultivation and storage of grain or with animal husbandry; Inanna’s standard never occurs in hunting or war scenes. Based on visual conventions deduced from an analysis of Late Uruk imagery, the two protagonists of the Uruk Vase represent the ruler and an elite woman linked to Inanna. Our notion of priesthood is imprinted by the institutions of the monotheistic religions that prevail today, whereas in pantheistic Mesopotamia the boundaries between priesthood and officialdom were blurred. The woman on the Uruk Vase may as well have represented a queen, because queens are prominently depicted next to their husbands in the Early Dynastic period, and their especially close relationship with Inanna is attested to in Ur III texts (Suter: 2014, 545-568).

Studies of the scenes depicted on the Warka Vase have shown that several pictograms were in fact logograms, several of which have been identified as the first signs of archaic Sumerian writing12. The role of the ‘word form’ in the evolution of writing is still widely debated. The earliest known writing systems evolved or were invented around 3000 BCE both in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Warka Vase resembles in many aspects the Palette of Narmer because several pictograms are symbols of writing. For example, the EN sign “Lord” (below) almost certainly depicts the so-called “tray with bowls” and the MUŠ3 sign, the “ring post with streamers”, probably depicts an essential element of a “roller door” and very early is also a sign for the Lady of Heaven (Selz: 2022, 213-249). The Sumerian sign EN, meaning “Lord”, was read en in Sumerian, bēlum in Akkadian and ba‘al in Hebrew.

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