Dr. Melissa Eppihimer joined a conservator and two scientific researchers to publish a technical study of a Mesopotamian copper sculpture in the journal Heritage Science. Her previous research on the royal sculpture’s origins (published in the Metropolitan Museum Journal in 2022) laid the foundation for a new investigation using high-energy X-ray computed tomography.
The findings reveal details of how artists and metalworkers created this large-scale, lost-wax, hollow-core copper sculpture. The sculpture is a rare surviving example of a major category of ancient Mesopotamian art that was still in its infancy during the third millennium BCE when the statue was produced. The CT scanning, which occurred at the Swiss Empa facility in Zurich, Switzerland, helped the study's authors assess how the sculpture's makers understood the challenges of this emergent production method and how they worked to overcome those challenges.
Read the full article in Heritage Science.