Size-rank hierarchy and relative placement further indicate that the Early Dynastic
“naked priest” is the city ruler himself. The libator on the Ur plaque (Figure 11. 2 ) stands
at the center of each register and is significantly taller than the other figures. The same
strategies mark the exalted status of the Mesopotamian ruler on the upper register of
the “battle” side of the Standard of Ur (Winter 2008 : 80 – 81 ). On side B of the Stele of
the Vultures (Figure 11. 3 ), the “naked priest” appears in the third register rather than
at the top, but he is much larger than the workers on the left, and, like Eannatum
elsewhere on the stele, he acts alone. According to the norms of Mesopotamian royal
art, we would expect Eannatum’s position to gravitate toward the center, starting from
the far left at the bottom to the middle of the top register. Disturbed by the apparent
flouting of this convention, some art historians have been unconvinced of the accuracy
of the reconstruction of the middle registers of Side B (Suter 2000 : 215 ). However, as
indicated by the diagramed reconstruction drawing (Figure 11. 3 ), the artistic con-
vention holds true if the “naked priest” is Eannatum himself since this posits two royals
of the same size in the two middle registers, one above the other, halfway between the
royal figures in the top and bottom registers.^1
Although the Uruk IV/III corpora offer no image of a palm vase libation, we can
track the ritual into the fourth millennium through the ritual equipment. The artifacts
least likely to change over time are either strictly utilitarian or possess a form fixed by
religious function. The pedestal vase could not have been utilitarian. It is made from
a rare commodity in southern Iraq, and it was always discarded in the vicinity of
temples. Stone vases of undetermined shape are also closely associated with Sumerian
kingship. The earliest royal inscriptions appear on fragments of stone vessels gifted to
temples, and, as Postgate ( 1992 : 262 – 263 ) remarks, “these were acts with overtly polit-
ical overtones, since the act of making this formal offering constituted a claim to
hegemony, and the acquiescence of the temple personnel in accepting it must have
been an acknowledgement of it.”
It is difficult to compare the vessels gifted by Sumerian royals with the visual
evidence because stone vessels have been published only for their inscription or
decoration, with little attention to form or seriation (Potts 1989 : 143 ; Moorey 1994 : 36 ).
The visual record indicates a distinctive typology for the biconical vase from the fourth
to the early second millennia, consisting of a signature flared rim, waist, and a pedestal
base. These characteristics were conserved over many centuries, resulting in a vessel
whose proportions shifted incrementally, always toward a lower center of gravity.
Biconical vases were also paired. Rather than imagining Inanna babbling in the so-
called “plural of ecstasy” (Paul 1995 ), the plurality of her speech in the context of the
Inanna-Dumuzi hymns (for example, “gal 4 – la-me” “our vulvas”) can be explained more
simply: Inanna uses the plural because in the ritual she has two bodies, namely, the
twin vases. The fluctuation of Inanna’s first-person speech between Emegir and Emesal
in the same songs, dialects of Sumerian that some scholars have interpreted as gender-
differentiated (see discussion in Rubio 2001 ), indicates that Inanna’s “bodies” were male
and female.
The earliest pedestal vases come from the Eanna precinct at Uruk. These range from
sturdy undecorated vessels, perhaps the oldest of this type, to the most famous
exemplar, the Uruk Vase and its twin. The Uruk Vase, which depicts twin pedestal vases
in its top register, is not just a literal self-portrait. It is also functionally and con-
ceptually self-referential because it portrays the idea of the Sacred Marriage on the very
–– The Sumerian sacred marriage ––