Gudea and the Master of Lions: Philological Notes on the Louvre Dish AO 153

The sculpted dish from Tello, of which the Louvre fragment AO 153 was part,1 was inscribed along its circumference with a dedicatory inscription in Sumerian. Unfortunately, only a very small portion of the original text is preserved (see Fig. 1); it reads: [. . .]du-a / nam-ti-la-ne-se / a mu-n[a-ru], “[. . . he] who built [. . . ,] has [presented it] for his own life.” The first excavators of Tello attributed the object in question to the reign of Sulge (“Shulgi”),2 and an