Power in Miniature: Elite Identity in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia

 by Mary Harrsch © 2025

These striking pendants that I photographed at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago—crafted from lapis lazuli, silver, and carnelian—were found in a hoard at Tell Asmar (ancient Eshnunna) in the Diyala River Valley and date to the Early Dynastic Period (ca. 2900–2300 BCE). Though small in scale, they open a vivid window onto a world defined by competition, prestige, and long-distance connections.

These Early Dynastic pendants from Tell Asmar combine imported lapis lazuli with silver and carnelian, transforming personal adornment into a statement of power, protection, and elite status within a competitive world of Mesopotamian city-states (ca. 2900–2300 BCE). Photographed at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago by Mary Harrsch.

My research revealed Early Dynastic Mesopotamia was not yet a unified land, but a mosaic of independent city-states, each ruled by its own elite families and governed through a delicate balance of palace authority, temple institutions, and divine sanction. Eshnunna occupied a strategic position between southern Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, allowing its rulers and elites to control trade routes that brought rare materials—such as lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and carnelian from the east—into the city.

The animal-headed pendants seen here, including bulls and felines, were not merely decorative. In Early Dynastic visual culture, such imagery conveyed power, protection, fertility, and divine favor. Bulls evoked strength and abundance; predatory animals suggested authority and aggression—qualities essential for elites navigating a volatile political landscape marked by frequent rivalry and warfare between neighboring cities.

Personal adornment in this period functioned as a form of portable identity. Wearing precious imported materials signaled access to trade networks, high social rank, and proximity to religious or administrative power. That these objects were discovered together in a hoard suggests a moment of crisis—perhaps political upheaval or violent conflict—when valuables were concealed for safekeeping and never retrieved.

These pendants belong to the final centuries of the city-state system, just before the rise of large territorial empires such as that of Sargon of Akkad. They capture a moment when power in Mesopotamia was intensely local, highly competitive, and expressed through piety, warfare, and display—on the body as much as in monumental architecture.

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