Fish-shaped jug

The fish jug, made of moulded sides joined together, is part of a “fountain” vase: it has a small circular opening at the mouth and an attachment for a water channel beneath the belly. The morphological elements of the animal are suggested by a large circular eye at the front, two semicircular gills, small fins, scales rendered by semicircular incisions, and a fan-shaped tail. Terracotta figurines were very common in Mesopotamia, which has little stone but considerable amounts of clay. This find was discovered in 1965 during the excavation campaign of the Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino a Seleucia, Iraq, in this case at the Tell ‘Umayr ziggurat.