Texts, Images and the Texts, Images and the Architect: Representations of Architect: Representations of

Gudea and His Building Gudea and His Building ProjectsProjects

Gudea: “heroic power”?Gudea: “heroic power”?

• Gudea’s regnal year-formulae focus on his building projects and cultic activities.

• The inscriptions also seem to characterize Gudea primarily as an architect; he is even depicted holding an architect’s plan in two of his statues.

• This phenomenon is unique to this individual in Mesopotamian history: “it cannot be by chance that Gudea, and, to the best of our knowledge, only Gudea, had himself represented in the guise of an architect.”

• This is the main focus of Gudea’s self-portrayal.

Naram-Sin’s Victory SteleNaram-Sin’s Victory Stele

Statues of Gudea as ArchitectStatues of Gudea as Architect

Purpose:Purpose:

• To examine the self-portrayal of this king as architect, and explore the ways in which he attempts to construct and define his role as king, kingship ideology, and the space which he and the people he ruled inhabited, through both his statues and inscriptions.

Method:Method:

• Conscientious avoidance of a Foucaultian reduction simply to power relations.

• An assertion that these objects and texts are mere propaganda tools to legitimate the king’s power is overly simplistic; I hope to focus on the possibilities for the influence of Gudea's monuments and works on the lived experience of the space in which they were built, and their construction of the identity of a particular individual (see Meskell).

The EvidenceThe Evidence

• Statues B and F (“The Architect with a Plan”) and accompanying inscriptions

• Cylinders A and B

The QuestionThe Question

• How do the statues and inscriptions attempt to articulate contemporary kingship ideology while narrating Gudea’s structuring and re-structuring of the landscape around him?

The Bodily Experience of Space The Bodily Experience of Space

• If, as Winter rightly argues, the stylistic features of the Gudea statues were “deployed as signs, carrying definite and identifiable value,” that “visual attributes, no less than verbal epithets, thus function as part of a signaling code,” and finally, that “the statues at once articulate and constitute the right of Gudea to rule,” then why choose the guise of an architect rather than a warrior?

Bodily experienceBodily experience

• The effects of Gudea’s building projects would have physically altered the lived experiences of anyone who inhabited the city, worked on the buildings, or inherited them as part of his responsibility as king.

• According to a phenomenological theorization of the importance of space, Gudea’s temples are primary. As C. Tilley concisely summarizes Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective, “The body-subject is a mind physically embodied, a body and a mind which always encounters the world from a particular point of view in a particular context at a particular time and in a particular place, a physical subject in space-time.”

• In other words, Gudea’s construction of himself as architect and builder parallel his construction of the landscape of the ancient city of Girsu: by altering this space, every person who passes into the city is affected in a concrete and bodily way.