Bull Calf Polemount (c. 2700 BCE): Art, History and Details

Bull Calf Polemount (c. 2700 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Like most Mesopotamian sculptures in the round, this small bull was an object of worship in a temple. Its eyes, the triangle on the forehead, and the stripes in the rope were originally embellished with contrasting colored stones, or bone. The inlays are lost, but the sculpture itself is one of the very few original cult statues that have survived.

Object facts

• Title: Bull Calf Polemount
• Date: c. 2700 BCE
• Culture: Sumerian, Iraq
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: basalt
• Dimensions: Overall: 7.7 x 5.1 x 13.1 cm (3 1/16 x 2 x 5 3/16 in.)
• Collection: Near Eastern Art
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1970.61

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cooney, John D. “A Medley of Bulls.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 58, no. 1 (January 1971): 10–19.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1991.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.