Temple/Herd

Mesopotamian Visions of Animal Community in the Early Third Millennium BCE

Abstract

This paper reconsiders a group of Mesopotamian cylinder seals depicting ungulate animals beside a paneled facade or doorway, conventionally known as the “temple and herd” seals. Although previous scholarship has frequently emphasized these seal images’ links to the animal byre scenes of Late Uruk glyptic, and has accordingly highlighted the continuity in portrayals of domestic animal abundance that render the temple as a virtual or literal “cattlepen,” a closer examination of the temple/herd genre reveals sharp discontinuities and divergences from their Uruk precedents, both in the species and ages of animals depicted and in the relations between the animals and the human-built structure. These divergences undercut the common blanket characterization of early Mesopotamian animal imagery as a celebration of values of domesticity and enclosure. The Early Dynastic evidence for temples’ ritual and symbolic engagements with the types of animals most frequently depicted in the temple/herd seals (especially gazelles and deer) points to the roles of these animals in expanding temples’ imagined communities outside of the real sphere of human control, rather than to the expansion of such control through practices and imagery of domestication.