Four Urartian Bulls' Heads

In this article we bring together for the first time four bronze bulls' heads of impressive size and weight which seem to form a series. One is in the collection of Mr. J. J. Emery, of Cincinnati, another is in the Fogg Museum, a third is in Cleveland (Plates XVII–XVIII), and the fourth (Plate XIX) is in the Louvre. In 1954 Mr. Emery generously lent his piece to the Fogg Museum for the exhibition of “Ancient Art in American Private Collections” and, through the good offices of Miss Dorothy G. Shepherd, the Trustees of the Cleveland Museum of Art consented to send the Cleveland bull's head for a brief period. Thus I was enabled to examine and compare three of the four heads of this series. For the piece in the Louvre, which I have not seen, I am making use of photographs and measurements supplied by A. Parrot. As R. D. Barnett was the first to point out to me, two bulls' heads of this kind were found in 1905 in the village of Guşçi, on Urmia Lake. An account of this discovery was given by “Atrpet” in the Armenian periodical Azgagrakan Handess, Revue Ethnographique publiée par la Société Ethnographique Arménienne, XXIII, Part 2, 1912, pp. 114–124.