Burney Relief
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.
Burney Relief / Queen of the Night
Clay
Height: 49.5 cm (19.5 in)
Width: 37 cm (15 in)
Thickness: 4.8 cm (1.9 in)
19th-18th century BCE
Made in Babylonia
Room 56, British Museum, London
Loan 1238
The relief is displayed 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. Apart from its distinctive iconography, the piece is noted for its high relief and relatively large size making it a very rare survival from the period. The authenticity of the object has been questioned from its first appearance in the 1930s, but opinion has generally moved in its favour over the subsequent decades.
Provenance[edit]
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".[1] The relief was first brought to public attention with a full-page reproduction in The Illustrated London News, in 1936.[2] From Burney, it passed to the collection of Norman Colville, after whose death it was acquired at auction by the Japanese collector Goro Sakamoto. British authorities, however, denied him an export licence. The piece was loaned to the British Museum for display between 1980 and 1991, 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".[3] 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.[4]
An example of elaborate Sumerian sculpture: the "Ram in a Thicket", excavated in the royal cemetery of Ur by Leonard Woolley and dated to about 2600–2400 BCE. Wood, gold leaf, lapis lazuli and shell. British Museum, ME 122200.
The only other surviving large image from the time: top part of the Code of Hammurabi, c. 1760 BCE. Hammurabi before the sun-god Shamash. Note the four-tiered, horned headdress, the rod-and-ring symbol and the mountain-range pattern beneath Shamash' feet. Black basalt. Louvre, Sb 8.
A typical representation of a 3rd millennium BCE Mesopotamian worshipper, Eshnunna, about 2700 BCE. Alabaster. Metropolitan Museum of Art 40.156.
Deity representation on Assyrian relief. Blessing genie, about 716 BCE. Relief from the palace of Sargon II. Louvre AO 19865
Authenticity[edit]
The 1936 London Illustrated News feature had "no doubt of the authenticity" of the object which had "been subjected to exhaustive chemical examination" and showed traces of bitumen "dried out in a way which is only possible in the course of many centuries".[2] But stylistic doubts were published only a few months later by D. Opitz who noted the "absolutely unique" nature of the owls with no comparables in all of Babylonian figurative artefacts.[44] In a back-to-back article, E. Douglas Van Buren examined examples of Sumerian [sic] art, which had been excavated and provenanced and she presented examples: Ishtar with two lions, the Louvre plaque (AO 6501) of a nude, bird-footed goddess standing on two Ibexes[45] and similar plaques, and even a small haematite owl, although the owl is an isolated piece and not in an iconographical context.
A year later Frankfort (1937) acknowledged Van Buren's examples, added some of his own and concluded "that the relief is genuine". Opitz (1937) concurred with this opinion, but reasserted that the iconography is not consistent with other examples, especially regarding the rod-and-ring symbol. These symbols were the focus of a communication by Pauline Albenda (1970) who again questioned the relief's authenticity. Subsequently, the British Museum performed thermoluminescence dating which was consistent with the relief being fired in antiquity; but the method is imprecise when samples of the surrounding soil are not available for estimation of background radiation levels. A rebuttal to Albenda by Curtis and Collon (1996) published the scientific analysis; the British Museum was sufficiently convinced of the relief to purchase it in 2003. The discourse continued however: in her extensive reanalysis of stylistic features, Albenda once again called the relief "a pastiche of artistic features" and "continue[d] to be unconvinced of its antiquity".[46]
Her arguments were rebutted in a rejoinder by Collon (2007), noting in particular that the whole relief was created in one unit, i.e. there is no possibility that a modern figure or parts of one might have been added to an antique background; she also reviewed the iconographic links to provenanced pieces. In concluding Collon states: "[Edith Porada] believed that, with time, a forgery would look worse and worse, whereas a genuine object would grow better and better. [...] Over the years [the Queen of the Night] has indeed grown better and better, and more and more interesting. For me she is a real work of art of the Old Babylonian period."
In 2008/9 the relief was included in exhibitions on Babylon at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the Louvre in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.[47]