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Discovery of Statues in Lagash Lagash was one of the oldest cities in Sumer and Babylonia. Today it is represented by a long line of ruin mounds, which are rather low, now known as Tello al-Hiba in Iraq. Located northwest of the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and east of the ancient city of Uruk, it is positioned on the dry bed of an ancient canal, approximately 10 miles north of the modern town of Shatra.# The ruins of Lagash were discovered in 1877 by Ernest de Sarzec, a Frenchman, who was allowed by the Montefich chief, Nasir Pasha, to excavate the site at his pleasure in the territories under the governing of Nasir Pasha. Ernest de Sarzec continued excavations at this site with various interludes, at first on his own account and later as a representative of the French government, until his death in 1901. The smaller mounds had apparently been comprised mostly of storage houses, in which vessels, weapons, sculptures, and other objects that were used by the administration of palace and temple. However, the primary excavations were made in two larger mounds, which later were found to be the site of the temple known as E-Ninnu, a shrine to the patron god of Lagash, Nin-girsu. The temple had long been destroyed and a fortification was built on what remained of the temple, during the Seleucid period. It was underneath this fortification that numerous statues of Gudea were discovered, which make up the heart of the Babylonian collection at the Louvre Museum#. Overall the statues had been damaged, some decapitated and others broken in various ways, having been put into the foundation of the new fortification. Also in this section came a mixture of fragments of basic artifacts including various objects made from bronze and stone, of high artistic excellence. Some of these objects have been dated to the earliest Sumerian period enabling historians to trace Babylonian art and it’s history to a date some hundreds years prior. Excavations in the other mound resulted in the uncovering of the remains of various buildings. In these outlying buildings de Sarzec discovered about thirty thousand inscribed clay tablets, the record archives of the temple. The tablets contained the business records, the nature of its property, the methods used to cultivate the land, methods on herding its animals, and its commercial and industrial dealings. The ancie... ... A shaped frame. Works cited: Cooper, Jerrold. Reviews of Gudea and His Dynasty by Dietz Otto Edzard. The Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 119, No. 4. (Oct-Dec 1999): pg 699-701. Edzard, Dietz Otto. Gudea and His Dynasty. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Hallo, William W. and Simpson, William Kelly. The Ancient Near East: A History. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., 1971. Hansen, Donald P. “New Votive Plaques from Nippur,'; in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3. (Jul., 1963). pg 145-166. Howorth, Henry H. “The Later Rulers of Shirpurla or Lagash,'; in The English Historical Review, Vol. 17, No. 66. pg. 209-234. England, 1902 Olmstead, A. T. “The Babylonian Empire,'; in the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Jan., 1919). pg 65-100 Unknown. “A photogrammatic study of three Gudea statues,'; in The Journal of the American Oriental Society. pg 660. 1990 Encyclopedia.org Lagash. Louvre Museum. Seated statue of Gudea, prince of Lagash. UMBC of Maryland. Gudea and the Kritios Boy Wikipedia. Lagash. WorldHistory.com. Gudea and Statues of Gudea.