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DUMUZI FEEDS INANNA'S SHEEP

This clay printout from a carved marble cylinder seal is an elegant variation on one of the oldest and most persistent images in Mesopotamia: two symmetrically placed goats or sheep nibbling on a sacred tree between them.

Here we see the priest-king of Uruk in a net skirt or kilt, in his sacred role as Dumuzi, the divine shepherd and hunter. He is feeding the sacred sheep of the goddess Inanna, who is represented on each side of the scene by her cuneiform symbol and "standard": a ring-topped bundle of reeds that stood outside her temple.

Another symbol of Inanna is an 8-pointed star or 8-petalled rosette, shown here in the flowers being nibbled by the horned and maned sacred rams that Dumuzi is feeding from the flowering trees or vines whose branches he holds.

By gripping the trees or vines so closely to his chest, Dumuzi shows that the spirit of life and fertility he embodies as a vegetation god springs from his own body, which dies each summer in the hot, dry season and revives when the fall rains start the New Year - celebrated in the festival of the "sacred marriage" between Dumuzi and Inanna.

The symmetry of this design was broken only by placing in the foreground the two barrel-like objects (sacrificial basins or altars?), one of which was damaged on the marble cylinder seal? Also breaking the symmetry in the printout are the sacrificial lamb and two libation vases, pehaps of milk, on the left - only one of which, plus the front of the lamb, are visible in this photo (which was cropped). The lamb and the vases suggest the food and drink (milk or water) that not only sustain life, but may even restore it, like the "food and water" that Enki sends to restore life to Inanna in the Underworld.

To create more symmetry, we could have trimmed off what remains of the sacrifices, a scene missing entirely from most photos of this image - perhaps from obsessions with symmetry greater even than that of the Sumerians? A more faithful reproduction, but still more or less symmetrical, could be made by continuing to roll the cylinder seal until the scene of the lamb and the vases emerges again on the right side - a method one sees often in rolled-out prints on clay from such cylinder seals. Though not perfectly symmetrical, the doubled image would have been cheaper than carving two images, one a reversed or mirror image of the other, and needing also a larger cylinder. Either way, one might say, something gets sacrificed?

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