Having been precede the Uruk and the Jemet Nasr periods (circa 4000-2900BC), Early Dynastic Mesopotamia has always been featured with its elaborately executed stone sculptures and stone vessels. Most of the alabaster and marble stone vessels or containers dating to the Early Dynastic, were sensitively carved in a simple, and yet elegant shape, decorated with naturistically rendered zoomorphic ornamentations. These prominent characters of the Early Dynastic stone vessels thus create an enchanting appeal merely by their shapes and the stones’ originally creamy and translucent textures. The iconography of a similarly shaped stone vessel first occurred on an elaborately inlaid panel depicting a funerary banqueting scene, excavated from an Early Dynastic III royal tomb at Ur cemetery. On it, a walking lion with human hands, carries a paralleled stone pouring vessel. Stone pouring vessels of this class, seemed to have remained absent until the Early Dynastic IIIA period, and are believed to have been used as a ritual vessel at Sumerian and Akkadian funerary libation occasions. Alabaster vessels of this type, with a wider variety in shapes and decorations, might have been attributed to the subsequent Akkadian dynasty.
