Memi And Sabu Sculpture Analysis

In this essay, I will compare and contrast two statues of different time periods and cultures. The first statue is Gudea, from the Neo-Sumerian Period. This 41 cm high sculpture is made out of Diorite and dates back to 2090 B.C Mesopotamia. The second sculpture is The Royal Acquaintances Memi and Sabu, from the Old Kingdom period. This 62 cm high sculpture dates back to 2575–2465 B.C. It was found in the western cemetery in Memphite in Egypt and is made out of limestone and paint. The two sculptures were made in very different historical settings. The sculpture of Gudea was commissioned by Gudea himself. He was the ruler of the city-state of Lagash in southern Mesopotamia - South-Eastern Iraq - (ACME, n.d.) during the Third Dynasty of Ur, which is right after the fall of the Akkadian empire and is known as the Neo-Sumerian period (Neo-Sumerian, n.d.). Gudea rebuilds all the great temples of Lagash and placed a number of statues of himself within them. The inscription on the statue reads “Gudea, the man who built the temple; may his life be long“ (Neo-Sumerian, n.d.). The sculpture …show more content…
Both Memi and Sabu are friendly and are looking out at the viewer. Since the inscription read ‘the royal acquaintances’ the original owners of this sculpture were among the privileged and rich during that period. The Egyptians often “surrounded themselves with beautiful objects to enhance their lives in this world” (Mcallister, 2012) but few would have been able to afford to commission such a sculpture and it would have been a prized object in any home. Statues like this one, also had a religious aspect and were often times placed in the tomb with the deceased so that the “spirit of the deceased could use such a statue as a home and enter it in order to benefit from gifts of food that were brought to the offering chapel of the tomb” (Sculpture,