What Not to Do When Examining an Ancient Portrait

By Tatiana Dubin

I sit before many layers of incomprehensibility: a PDF of a scanned photograph of a reconstructed disk-shaped portrait of a woman. A mouthful, a brainful, an eye full of severed limbs and glued alabaster. Forming an image of a straight-spined woman with an elegant wide-rimmed bonnet, the tallest figure in the frame. Thus, the most important person in the frame, meaning the room. A room where she is standing between naked men pouring libations. Libations meaning she’s pious. A pious woman with a sad stilted face, a ridiculous fluffy dress and no feet. 

One scholar claims that her nose is “sharply aquiline” and her features “intent and intelligent.” Another scholar says she’s a blank slate, a tabula rasa, that reflects whatever we wish to see. Both are true. Anything you see is true, because she is a woman who was etched into a disk 4300 years ago and all referents have been lost to time. A disk that might as well have been lost to time, and will be smashed over & over again through time, until she too comes undone, is mutilated & exposed. [Mutilated multitudes—]. [Multitudes mutilated—]. 


Come sit next to me—I didn’t mean to scare you! There’s nothing obviously dangerous about her portrait. To the naked eye, it brings to mind a Christmas ornament, which brings to mind her name, Enheduanna, which can be translated any number of ways, including “Ornament of the Heavens,” a pretty thing papered in gold that you can hang on your tongue to help you seem interesting at cocktail parties, like a woman with original things to say, new ground to break. It’s okay if you stop here, take in the mutability of her portrait & her cheerful name and run for the parties.  

We might agree that the most contemporary thing about her portrait is her right arm, raised in a greeting—hello there!—that appears jovial but also seductive, maybe a bit manipulative; that lures you in just to smack you over the head. If you think you felt a hand slap your forehead, I would remind you not to get ahead of yourself. She lived 4,300 years ago and there is no way for you to have reached through time with so little effort. It takes concentration, commitment, a lifetime of trying to cross such thresholds. I would remind you that she was born at the beginning of history, and you were born at its end. Her image should appear to you as hopelessly stylized, hopelessly out of fashion. The moment you begin to enter her image is the moment time folds in on itself / you fold in on yourself, and the world you worked so hard to build [your husband, your children, your homemade dinners—] comes to a crashing [smashing—] end. But it’s too late. I can see it in your eyes: you’re hooked. 


Her eyes are drawn with particular precision. Thick rings of kohl embolden her gaze. She gazes towards some unknown point beyond her frame, and you’d like to follow her there. Beyond this room, into a time that marks the beginning of time. But you prove too lazy to truly follow her. Your phone rings and she suddenly doesn’t matter. You are erratic, toggling in and out of focus. You grow irritable. Starving. The gulf between you and her widens as you chew your processed dinner, as you fall asleep to TV. It’s clear: your eyes are plastered in the present just like hers are plastered in the past. 


Yet you persist and try harder. Proving me wrong! You immerse yourself in context. Day after day, reading obscure books to get a sense of Mesopotamian culture & language & the flood prone landscape & natural resources & linguistic philosophy. You begin gazing into the distance. You begin asking good questions. Who is Enheduanna? What is the relationship between Enheduanna and her portrait? Is Enheduanna a sign or a woman? Well, her portrait is made of alabaster, chemically identical to eggshells, seashells, snailshells. Alabaster: the shell that lets us move through space and time without falling apart. 


Definitions help you rationalize your travels & situate yourself in the task ahead:  

“To gaze” is an alien act, an alienating action, something only alienated people do. It is a verb without an etymology, rootless, changing meanings at will. It means constantly shifting to get a better view, a visual selfishness, positioning yourself neither here nor there: on a threshold. A dangerous place to be, one that exposes your deepest desires → “Threshold” as signaling a boundary only to imply its crossing. An example of a threshold is an alabaster disk, a vessel through which to travel through time → 

You grow bold enough to jump inside a flat land with raging rivers that have since changed their courses, with a tiered temple that has since collapsed, inhabited by a woman who has since been smashed—

+++

So who is she? If her mouth wasn’t broken, she’d tell you she’s the most esteemed religious official in the land, the High Priestess of the Moon God, hailing from the holiest city of the Akkadian Empire. She might brag, boast that she’s history’s first poet, then start sputtering adjectives—righteous, brilliant, radiant-hearted, highly-driven—descriptors that will stay in your head for weeks. If she thinks you’re smart, she’ll start chanting full verses, crowd favorites like teeth can shatter flint [5 lines missing] and divine impetuous wild cow [2 lines missing]. She too only has access to fragmented versions of her poems, so it’ll sound like there’s bad reception. At times, you might just hear the desperate sounds of someone buried alive. She won’t sound as impressive as you thought she would, but stick with her. It isn’t easy to communicate after so many years in isolation. 

To progress beyond this point, further than biographical facts and quoted poetry, you must learn a few conceptual things. She is an unknowable woman, so don’t ask her personal questions. She lingers in the space between what is meant and what is said, in the failed attempt to cross a threshold, and in the moment you fall flat on your face / her face. She is resuscitated not via excavation, but by accepting her fragmentation—and her essential untranslatability. 

Untranslatability leads to extreme loneliness, so she will eventually decide to confide in you, reach through time—no, not to touch your hand—but to make herself heard. She is lulled by your sweet-smelling curly hair & gentle sweaty fingers zooming in and out of her face. Alabaster dissipates in water, so her profile begins unclenching under your fingers. You have no time to think—instantly, she unleashes her monologue, and this time her voice comes in spastic whispering bursts like you’d hear in a Beckett play, a sound that nearly shatters the screen—

[She cried] tears of beer; [she was] stripped my crown, [a man] entered my temple, someone destroyed me. [Middle figure] head lost: [left arm ] mutilated and [lower portion of] dress lost: [ arms and apparently head in profile but body full face. Figure is clothed in flounced kaunakas skirt, 6 tiers of flounces showing. ] Dress [ covered upper arm but left forearm ] exposed. [Left hand rests on chest, right arm held upright and ] hand lost. 


She repeats this story too many times to count, less haggard each time, and you grow impatient; wonder what this has to do with her portrait, with anything. She sounds like a crazy person on the street. What portrait? she cries. What street? When you tell her she’s flanked by naked men, she looks at you like you’re the crazy one. / You are crazy. You are the crazy one. Crown stripped—! tears stripped—! entered stripped—! stripped destroyed entered—! entered entered—! Mutilated and hand—! /

Hours go by before you regain composure, and she is happy she rattled you. Her voice has smoothed by now, and she begins speaking to you like an old friend, lucid and rambling. She explains that back when this happened, she didn’t have the language to tell you what he did to her. She tells you that there’s no word for rape in Sumerian. That she had to learn English to express herself properly.

You are deeply confused. You did all this research to enter her world, not for her to suddenly blur the boundaries. You remind her that you weren’t there back then, that she couldn’t have spoken to you all those years ago. “If I had been there, I would have saved you,” you say, trying to reassure her and establish a sense of place.

But she has no sense of space, no handle on time, no idea what you’re talking about. You couldn’t even save yourself, she leers, and again you know she’s right / you see yourself reflected in her glossy reflection / soaked in sweat, you sob tears of glue, trapping yourself in this timeless lonely alabaster place where you grasp what she meant / meant that time isn’t an excuse for anything / you should have / could have / been there for her / you should have / would have / cradled her / you should have plucked her out from that [1 line missing] scene but it’s too late / —. 

because grief turns itself inwards, to a childhood self, grief for a girl not unlike yourself pinned to a bed & 

I didn’t cry then [tears of beer;] watching him play [stripped my crown,], my body [entered my temple, someone destroyed me.] a puppet [head lost: left arm mutilated] a self I thought lost: [ arms and apparently head in profile but body full face. Figure is clothed in flounced kaunakas skirt, 6 tiers of flounces showing.  ] yet found in someone else’s surface [ covered upper arm but left forearm ] exposed. [Left hand rests on chest, right arm held upright and  

] in the moment: something radical / 
in retrospect: a concept without a word, a dangling Signified, impossible to express 
/ all that that Signified
I thought lost! then found!
lost then found!

hand lost found tied to that bed found! forever,

so no feet / no hands either, 
cannot run / crawl away, 
stuck in lost found / lost found grief.


You become angry. Anger as a tool to burst this frame and exit. To think distancing things, to gaze at her like she’s an alien again. It’s been 4,300 years, and she’s not over it already? But she’s fluid enough to read your mind. It’s been eleven years, and you’re not over it already? she squawks back at you, because she suddenly becomes a bird. A bird with a busted mouth, so when she screams, sound comes jagged as stones hurling from cliffs into millions of pieces, but high-pitched enough to travel at the speed of light → such that you are enlightened & blinded in the same moment [her portrait sharpens into life and you can see her fragmenting—] [because an ungraspable woman wants to be grasped but not in that way—]. She spoke to you because she thought you would help her, but you instrumentalized her instead. You crashed your desire and trauma into her voice and look what you did—

She is back inside the alabaster. 

+++

You are back on the outside. I would advise you to stay! Stay gliding in the temperate realm of externalities. It’s fun, and her portrait is larger than you would expect: diameter = 25.6 cm, the same size as a healthy dinner plate; or, it turns out, my vanity mirror, lots of space to move things around, experiment with various facial expressions. My obsession with her is also larger than you would expect, the size of an alabaster disk I sit before…