Gudea's Temple

The Hebrew Bible makes God out to be an architect who likes to hand people detailed plans, notably for the Ark and Solomon's temple. This, it turns out, was another notion the Israelites inherited from the older civilizations of Mesopotamia. 

One of those who received such instructions was Gudea of Lagash, who is famous mainly because of the wonderful stone sculpture of him above, now in the Louvre. Notice that the king is praying, a pose he assumes in all his statues; clearly he wanted to be thought of as a pious man.

Here is another sculpture of Gudea, headless but with a lot of surviving text. The text on the sculpture records his encounter with the war god Ningursu:

In the dream was a man, who was as huge as heaven, as huge as earth. As to his upper part he was a god, as to his wings he was the Imdugud bird, as to his lower part he was the hurricane. At his right and left there crouched a lion. He commanded me to build a temple, but I did not fully understand him…A second hero was present. He had his arms bent and held a slab of lapis lazuli in his hands and set down thereon the ground-plan of the temple to be built. He put before me the hod, ceremonially purified, arranged the brick-mold for me, similarly purified, and fixed in it the ‘brick of decision of fate’.

Helpfully, Gudea had the plan carved on his statue; it is sitting in his lap.

And, says the statue text, Gudea did build the temple as instructed, shaping the first brick himself:

…poured luck-bringing water into the frame of the mold; While he did so drums were beaten. He smeared the mold with honey, best quality oil, fine best quality oil; He raised the holy hod, went to the mold, Gudea worked the mud in the mold, performed completely the proper rites, splendidly brought into being the brick for the temple.

Now news comes from the British Museum that a temple matching this plan and dating to the right period has been found in the Sumerian city of Girsu, a satellite of Lagash, complete with an inscription identifying it as a temple of Ningursu built by Gudea. I think that is part of the temple above, at least this picture accompanies multiple news stories about the temple discovery.

Dr Sebastien Rey, director of the British Museum’s project in Iraq, said: 

This shows that Gudea did indeed build a temple after being told to do so in a dream, and reveals that Sumerians were capable of scaling models up and down. The plan matches the temple site perfectly.

Which is really kind of amazing. Here we have a king who reigned for twenty years some time around 2100 BC – there are several different ways to interpret Sumerian dating – who left us a bunch of texts boasting about his temple building, including a plan he said a god gave him in a dream. That plan has been in a European museum for 140 years. And now we have uncovered the foundations of that very temple.

But here's something I wonder about. What if you were the architect who actually designed this temple, and instead of getting credit for your work you have to listen to your king telling everyone that a god gave him the plan in dream. How would you feel about that?