Guest Lecturer
Trudy S. Kawami, PhD
Director of Research at the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation 
 

The middle of the third millennium BCE (about 2500 BCE) in southern Mesopotamia saw the rise of an elite class who oversaw the religious and governmental affairs of the numerous city states of the region. These educated, literate bureaucrats were in many ways like the merchants of Renaissance Italy and the burghers of 17th Century Netherlands—in that they liked images of themselves. In Mesopotamia these managers, who could be male or female, dedicated small stone statues of themselves in temples, ostensibly as testaments of their piety. Accompanying inscriptions give us a glimpse of the vibrant personalities who commissioned the sculptures.