Ku-Baba, Kug-Bau in Sumerian, is the only female monarch on the Sumerian King List. “The hat on the statue most closely resembles a shepherd hat, the crown of a Sumerian king,” he writes. “When I first saw the statue, I believed it was a Sumerian priestess because she seems to be wearing a circular headband,” he writes, “.although for a priestess I thought she was a bit heavy-handed with the makeup.”įrom the eyes, Starr traveled back up to the head, where it became clear to him that it was no headband this statue was wearing–that it was a hat he’d never seen on a Sumerian woman before. What changed Starr’s mind was an alabaster statue at the Louvre from Girsu, with a little too much eye makeup to be just your run-of-the-mill Sumerian priestess, as he had initially believed. “I believed the reference was a sly mean-spirited joke by the scribe who wrote the King List.” “For a long time I doubted that Ku-Baba even existed,” he writes in the post. He also included a link to a new post on his website, in which he explains in detail how he arrived at the conclusion that Ku-Baba might have existed after all. “I had to revise my opinion,” he wrote to me in a surprise email. His response, which was basically doubt that she existed at all, left me feeling like I was at a dead end at the time, so I abandoned the idea of writing about her.įast forward to today, and Starr has changed his mind. Nonetheless, I wrote to Starr with the hope he would have some information about Ku-Baba, or at least a good source he could point me toward. It was as if I was just imagining this rather intriguing figure. A long while ago, I wanted to write about Ku-Baba, the only woman on the Sumerian King List. I went first to my go-to source on anything Sumerian, Sumerian Shakespeare, and found that Jerald Starr, the brain behind the site, had not mentioned Ku-Baba at all.
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