Talk: Textual and Material Perspectives on a Cuneiform Inscribed Statue from the Late Bronze Age

One of the most famous cuneiform royal inscriptions in the ancient Near East is the so-called Statue of Idrimi inscription, which was discovered by Sir Leonard Woolley in 1939 in a Late Bronze Age stratum at the site of Tell Atchana, ancient Alalah. In this lecture, Dr. Jake Lauinger will adopt both textual and material perspectives on the inscribed statue to argue, among other things: that we should understand the statue to be inscribed with two inscriptions, not one, as commonly thought; that the statue had a prior life as an uninscribed statue before the inscriptions were added; and that probably no one would have been able to read the inscriptions in antiquity (and, in fact, that was part of the point). The lecture will conclude with some final speculations as to how an ancient audience might nonetheless have been familiar with story of Idrimi’s life that was inscribed on the statue.

This talk is part of the Ancient Near East lecture series.