The Queen of the Night: The Mysterious Burney Relief
The Queen of the Night (also known as the “Burney Relief”) is a high-relief terracotta plaque of baked clay, 19.4 inches (49.5 cm) high, 14.5 inches (37 cm) wide, with a thickness of 1.8 inches (4.8 cm), depicting a naked winged woman flanked by owls and standing on the backs of two lions. The piece originated in southern Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), most probably in Babylonia, during the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE), as it shares qualities in craftsmanship and technique with the famous diorite stele of Hammurabi’s laws and also with the piece known as The God of Ur from that same period.
The woman depicted in the relief is acknowledged to be a goddess as she wears the horned headdress of a deity and holds the sacred rod-and-ring symbol in her raised hands. Not only is the woman winged, but her legs taper to bird talons (which seem to grip the lion’s backs), and she is shown with a dew claw on her calves.
Along the base of the plaque runs a motif which represents mountains, indicating high ground. Who the winged woman is, however, has not been agreed upon, though scholars generally believe her to be either Inanna (Ishtar), Lilith, or Ereshkigal. The piece is presently part of the collection of the British Museum, Room 56, in London.
The Burney Relief’s History
In 1936, the Burney Relief was featured in the Illustrated London News, highlighting the collection of one Sydney Burney, who purchased the plaque after the British Museum passed on the offer to buy it. Since the piece was not archaeologically excavated but simply removed from Iraq sometime between the 1920s and 1930s, its origin and context are unknown. How the plaque arrived in London is also unknown, but it was in the possession of a Syrian antiquities dealer before coming to the attention of Sydney Burney.
Not much is known of Sydney Burney other than that he was a captain in the English Army during World War I (1914-18) and was president of the Antique Dealers Association in London. The plaque was broken in three pieces and some fragments when originally purchased, but, once repaired, it was found to be mostly intact.
The Burney Relief was analyzed in 1933 and authenticated in 1935 prior to the offer made to the British Museum. The plaque then changed hands twice before the British Museum finally acquired it in 2003 for the sum of 1,500,000 pounds, a considerably higher price than what was asked in 1935.
It was at this time that the piece known as the Burney Relief came to be called The Queen of the Night due to the dark black pigment of the plaque’s original background and the iconography (the downward-pointing wings, the talon feet, etc.) associating the female figure with the underworld. The name is therefore a modern, not an ancient, designation for the plaque. There is no way to know what the piece was originally called or what purpose it was created for.
⇒ The Queen of the Night: The Mysterious Burney Relief
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