The Burney Relief (also known as the Queen of the Night relief) is a Mesopotamian terracotta plaque in high relief of the Isin-Larsa period or Old-Babylonian period, depicting a winged, nude, goddess-like figure with bird's talons, flanked by owls, and perched upon two lions.
The relief is housed in the British Museum in London, which has dated it between 1800 and 1750 BCE. It originates from southern Mesopotamia, but the exact find-site is unknown. Displaying distinctive iconography, high relief and relatively large size (49.5 cm high), the object is a rare survival from the period.
The authenticity has been questioned from its first appearance in the 1930s. The dating, the identity of the main figure, and other aspects of the work have provoked much discussion among scholars, though a religious subject is generally agreed.
Provenance Initially in the possession of a Syrian dealer, who may have acquired the plaque in southern Iraq in 1924, the relief was deposited at the British Museum in London and analysed by Dr. H.J. Plenderleith in 1933. However, the Museum declined to purchase it in 1935, whereupon the plaque passed to the London antique dealer Sidney Burney; it subsequently became known as the "Burney Relief".Frankfort 1937. The relief was first brought to public attention with a full-page reproduction in The Illustrated London News, in 1936.Davis 1936. From Burney, it passed to the collection of Norman Colville, after whose death in 1974 it was acquired by the Japanese collector Goro Sakamoto at auction. British authorities, however, denied him an export licence. The piece was loaned to the British Museum for display between 1980 and 1991 (then registered as "Loan 1238"), and in 2003 the relief was purchased by the Museum for the sum of £1,500,000 as part of its 250th anniversary celebrations. The Museum also renamed the plaque the "Queen of the Night Relief".Collon 2003. Since then, the object has toured museums around Britain.
Its original provenance remains unknown. The relief was not archaeologically excavated, and thus there is no further information about where it came from, or in which context it was discovered. An interpretation of the relief thus relies on stylistic comparisons with other objects for which the date and place of origin have been established, on an analysis of the iconography, and on the interpretation of textual sources from Mesopotamian mythology and religion.
Description Detailed descriptions were published by Henri Frankfort (1936), by Pauline Albenda (2005),Albenda 2005. and in a monograph by Dominique Collon (2003), former curator at the British Museum, where the plaque is now housed. The composition as a whole is unique among works of art from Mesopotamia, even though many elements have interesting counterparts in other images from that time.
Physical aspect
The relief is a terracotta (fired clay) plaque, large, thick, with the head of the figure projecting from the surface. To manufacture the relief, clay with small calcareous inclusions was mixed with chaff; visible folds and fissures suggest the material was quite stiff when being worked.Collon 2003, 13. The British Museum's Department of Scientific Research reports, "it would seem likely that the whole plaque was moulded" with subsequent modelling of some details and addition of others, such as the rod-and-ring symbols, the tresses of hair and the eyes of the owls.quoted in Collon 2007b The relief was then burnished and polished, and further details were incised with a pointed tool. Firing burned out the chaff, leaving characteristic voids and the pitted surface now visible; Curtis and Collon believe the surface would have appeared smoothed by ochre paint in antiquity.Curtis 1996
In its dimensions, the unique plaque is larger than the mass-produced terracotta plaques – popular art or devotional items – of which many were excavated in house ruins of the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods.Such plaques are about in their longest dimension. Cf. the plaque AO 6501 at the Louvre, the plaque BM WA 1994-10-1, 1 at the British Museum, or an actual mould: BM WA 1910-11-12, 4, also at the British Museum (Curtis 1996)
Overall, the relief is in excellent condition. It was originally received in three pieces and some fragments by the British Museum; after repair, some cracks are still apparent, in particular a triangular piece missing on the right edge, but the main features of the deity and the animals are intact. The figure's face has damage to its left side, the left side of the nose and the neck region. The headdress has some damage to its front and right hand side, but the overall shape can be inferred from symmetry. Half of the necklace is missing and the symbol of the figure held in her right hand; the owls' beaks are lost and a piece of a lion's tail. A comparison of images from 1936 and 2005 shows that some modern damage has been sustained as well: the right hand side of the crown has now lost its top tier, at the lower left corner a piece of the mountain patterning has chipped off, and the owl has lost its right-side toes.cf. Davis 1936; Collon 2005 However, in all major aspects, the relief has survived intact for more than 3,500 years.
Traces of red pigment still remain on the figure's body that was originally painted red overall. The feathers of her wings and the owls' feathers were also colored red, alternating with black and white. By Raman spectroscopy the red pigment is identified as red ochre, the black pigment, amorphous carbon ("lamp black") and the white pigment gypsum.Collon 2007b. Black pigment is also found on the background of the plaque, the hair and eyebrows, and on the lions' manes.cf. the color-scheme reconstruction on the The pubic triangle and the areola appear accentuated with red pigment but were not separately painted black. The lions' bodies were painted white. The British Museum curators assume that the horns of the headdress and part of the necklace were originally colored yellow, just as they are on a very similar clay figure from Ur.According to the British Museum, this figure – of which only the upper part is preserved – presumably represents the sun-god Shamash (cf. details of 1931,1010.2) They surmise that the bracelets and rod-and-ring symbols might also have been painted yellow. However, no traces of yellow pigment now remain on the relief.
The female figure
The nude female figure is realistically sculpted in high-relief. Her eyes, beneath distinct, joined eyebrows, are hollow, presumably to accept some inlaying material – a feature common in stone, alabaster, and bronze sculptures of the time,cf. the Male Worshiper and Standing Female Figure in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art but not seen in other Mesopotamian clay sculptures. Her full lips are slightly upturned at the corners. She is adorned with a four-tiered headdress of horns, topped by a disk. Her head is framed by two braids of hair, with the bulk of her hair in a bun in the back and two wedge-shaped braids extending onto her breasts.
The stylized treatment of her hair could represent a ceremonial wig. She wears a single broad necklace, composed of squares that are structured with horizontal and vertical lines, possibly depicting beads, four to each square. This necklace is virtually identical to the necklace of the god found at Ur, except that the latter's necklace has three lines to a square. Around both wrists she wears bracelets which appear composed of three rings. Both hands are symmetrically lifted up, palms turned towards the viewer and detailed with visible life-, head- and heart-lines, holding two rod-and-ring symbols of which only the one in the left hand is still well preserved. Two wings with clearly defined, stylized feathers in three registers extend down from above her shoulders. The feathers in the top register are shown as overlapping scales (coverts), the lower two registers have long, staggered flight feathers that appear drawn with a ruler and end in a convex trailing edge. The feathers have smooth surfaces; no barbs were drawn. The wings are similar but not entirely symmetrical, differing both in the number of the flight feathersThe right wing has eight flight feathers, the left wing has seven. and in the details of the coloring scheme.The lower register of the right wing breaks the white-red-black pattern of the other three registers with a white-black-red-black-white sequence.
Her wings are spread to a triangular shape but not fully extended. The breasts are full and high, but without separately modelled nipples. Her body has been sculpted with attention to naturalistic detail: the deep navel, structured abdomen, "softly modeled pubic area",Albenda (2005) notes "a tiny vertical indentation" but Collon (2007b) clarifies that this is merely a missing flake over a repaired fracture. the recurve of the outline of the hips beneath the iliac crest, and the bony structure of the legs with distinct knee caps all suggest "an artistic skill that is almost certainly derived from observed study". A spur-like protrusion, fold, or tuft extends from her calves just below the knee, which Collon interprets as dewclaws. Below the shin, the figure's legs change into those of a bird. The bird-feet are detailed,cf. image of the foot of an Indian falcon with three long, well-separated toes of approximately equal length. Lines have been scratched into the surface of the ankle and toes to depict the scutes, and all visible toes have prominent talons. Her toes are extended down, without perspective foreshortening; they do not appear to rest upon a ground line and thus give the figure an impression of being dissociated from the background, as if hovering.
The animals and background
The two lions have a male mane, patterned with dense, short lines; the manes continue beneath the body.D. Opitz (1936) interprets this mane pattern as depicting the indigenous Barbary lion. D. Collon prefers an interpretation as the related Asiatic lion and notes that a skin in the Natural History Museum in London shows the distinctive whorl in the mane that is often represented in Mesopotamian art (Collon 2005, 34), but also in Egyptian art (cf. Tutanhkamun headrest). Distinctly patterned tufts of hair grow from the lion's ears and on their shoulders, emanating from a central disk-shaped whorl. They lie prone; their heads are sculpted with attention to detail, but with a degree of artistic liberty in their form, e.g., regarding their rounded shapes. Both lions look towards the viewer, and both have their mouths closed.
The owls shown are recognizable, but not sculpted naturalistically: the shape of the beak, the length of the legs, and details of plumage deviate from those of the owls that are indigenous to the region.Iraq's indigenous owls without ear-tufts include the Barn owl (Tyto alba) – this is the owl that D. Collon believes to be represented in the relief (Collon 2005, 36) – the Little owl (Athene noctua lilith) and the Tawny owl (Strix aluco). Their plumage is colored like the deity's wings in red, black and white; it is bilaterally similar but not perfectly symmetrical. Both owls have one more feather on the right-hand side of their plumage than on the left-hand side. The legs, feet and talons are red.
The group is placed on a pattern of scales, painted black. This is the way mountain ranges were commonly symbolized in Mesopotamian art.
Context
Date and place of origin