"No less worthy of attention is The British Museum's Queen of the Night. 5 by Christopher Hirst, entitled "A close encounter with a Babylonian babe", 20 March 2004 "The Museum recently snapped up this deific wild child - her downward pointing wings indicate underworld associations - for £1.5m. The Independent Magazine, editorial on p. The Scotsman, 20 March 2004, entitled "Queen of the Night comes into the light" (Susan Mansfield) The Guardian, 9 March 2004 (Maeve Kennedy) Web and newspaper articles relating to this object after its acquisition by the British Museum include: Other evidence for early 2nd millennium BC painted clay sculptures from Mesopotamia include a head in the National Museum in Copenhagen. It might be added that large fired clay sculptures of deities and guardian figures were relatively common in southern and central Mesopotamia. The object is not from Ur, but most likely to come from the final period of occupation at Tello (ancient Girsu), where mass-produced fired clay plaques showing the same female figure have been found, and attesting that this relief was part of a wider iconography and probably not unique. Frances Carey, then Head of National Programmes in the Museum, penned the following limmerick and on the basis of this, the object in question became known as 'The Queen of the Night'. The story of her renaming is that there was a desire to give it a distinctive title, and one that would replace the now misleading one of the Burney relief. The term "Queen of the Night" has also been previously applied to a character in Mozart's "Magic Flute", for which David Hockney did Egyptianising sets for in the 1978 Glyndebourne production features in a song by Whitney Houston, and is the name of at least one species of night-blooming orchid cactus, the Epiphyllum oxypetallum. This motif, curiously, also recurs on reproduction Roman terracotta lamps sold in western Turkey (of which there is one example in the registered ANE Ephemera collection) as well as in popular modern western cults. Jakob-Rost et al., 'Das Vorderasiatische Museum', Berlin 1992 = inv. The shape and basic composition of a large central figure flanked by a pair of small figures is reminiscent of a gypsum plaque attributed an early 2nd millennium date and found at Assur in 1910 (cf. The dark areas on the background all contained carbon rather than bitumen as previously assumed. It is probable that gypsum was used as a white pigment in some areas although the possibility that it is present as the result of efflorescence from salts contained in ground water cannot be firmly excluded. Curator's comments Scientific analysis of the pigments reveals extensive use of red ochre on the body of the main female figure.
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