the agrarian state, crop and animal husbandry, the labour force carrying the products
of the economy and, in the culminating scene on the top register, the encounter of the
ruler, of whom only a foot and the corner of his kilt are left, with the goddess Inana
or her representative before her temple, the gateposts of which are identical with the
cuneiform sign for her name.^3 The repetition of barley and flax, rams and ewes, and
product-carriers can be read as a cultural rhetoric of abundance (Winter 2007 ). The
ruler takes the surplus harvest to the temple for storage and, if we can infer from later
images depicting encounters of a king with a deity, petitions for and receives divine
blessings for continued prosperity. The servant following behind the ruler supports
what looks like a textile, perhaps a garment, which the ruler may have offered as an
additional gift to the goddess.^4
It is generally assumed that the encounter refers to a sacred marriage between ruler
and goddess. Although we lack evidence for a ritual, royal inscriptions and poems from
the Early Dynastic period on allude to a marriage that was to annually re-establish the
mutual obligations between people and gods and thus guarantee continued prosperity
on earth (Cooper 1993 ).^5 The most likely occasion for a public event celebrating this
marriage would have been a New Year’s festival, since the beginning of the year
coincided with the harvest.^6 Regardless of whether the Uruk Vase was meant to repre-
sent a sacred marriage or not, the underlying message of this most extensive visual
narrative of the Late Uruk period was that prosperity depended on the ruler due to his
relationship with the gods. He was the provider of his people as well as of the gods
whom he fed. In addition, the allusive encounter with the female may have evoked his
role as procreator.
Seals depict much abbreviated versions of this scene reduced to the two protagonists
(Braun-Holzinger 2007 : pls 10 – 11 ); grain sheaves in their hands and eventual storage
jars leave no doubt about the context of harvest and agricultural surplus. Together with
the vase, they are the only Late Uruk images in which an elite woman stands out as
prominently as the ruler. Whether she was the goddess or a queen, her role was appar-
ently confined to procreation. Further motifs on seals visualise the ruler as provider
(ibid.: pls 11 , 14 – 15 ): boat and land processions show him as sponsor of cult festivals,
while his feeding the domesticated animals of Inana’s temple with branches of rosettes,
a symbol of the goddess, underline his close relationship with the goddess. His best pre-
served statue (ibid.: pl. 3 ) was apparently an icon of this latter motif: the position of
arms and hands is the same, only the branches the ruler once held are now broken off.
From the Early Dynastic to the Ur III period, the ruler’s role as provider centred on
temple building, as recorded in endless royal inscriptions and depicted on door plaques
and stelae. This was the most crucial part of maintaining the cult, since temples were
the gods’ abodes without which they would leave the city and withdraw their pro-
tection. Texts, such as Gudea’s Cylinder Inscriptions (ETCSL 2. 1. 7 ), demonstrate that
temple building was presented as a royal prerogative that required divine sanction and
was rewarded with divine blessing, namely, the bestowal of a long life on the ruler and
prosperity for his people (Hurowitz 1992 ).
The stelae of Ur-Nanshe depict the ruler before the enthroned deity for whom he
built the temple, which, by analogy with the stelae of Gudea and Ur-Namma, can be
understood as expressing just this message. The more detailed image on the al-Hiba
Stela includes, in addition to Ur-Nanshe and his cupbearer, three male officials and,
in a self-contained scene, his wife and daughter seated facing each other and holding
–– Kings and queens ––