It was in this locality that, in 1880-1881, M. de Sarzec, French consul at Bagdad, who was carrying on excavations in this region under the direction of the French government, came upon ten statues in the ruins of a very ancient structure. This proved to be the royal residence of an ancient king of Zirgul, the patesi, or priest-king Gudea, whose date is fixed by various authorities at about 4800 B. C. The statues were nearly life size, and all were headless. Two heads soon after were found in the ruins, one of them turbaned and the other uncovered and shaved, supposed to represent the king as priest. The type of feature reproduced in these finely sculptured heads is unmistakably Turanian, of the Tartar branch of this great family, while the turban, another characteristic indication in costume, might serve for a copy in sculpture of the head dress worn by some living representative of this race in central Asia at the present day. All these statues were inscribed; nine of them with memorials of Gudea, and the tenth of Urbahu, an earlier king who ruled in Zirgul before Gudea. The ruins of his palace were found by M. de Sarzec below the palace of Gudea, and also the foundations of an ancient pyramid temple first erected by Urbahu and rebuilt by Gudea. The inscriptions were in very archaic cuneiform and were incised upon the robes of the figures. Upon the principal statue of Gudea were inscribed three hundred and thirty-six lines of writing, divided into nine columns. About one hundred and thirty characters are used, and these texts represent the longest of the ancient cuneiform writings found. The material of the statues is a peculiar variety of granite, a dark green diorite, one of the hardest of stones. This was nowhere to be found in Mesopotamia. So far as known, it only appears in the peninsula of Sinai. Again, the facility and skill in the manipulation of the material has indicated that the tools used for the work must have been of the hardest metals. They are supposed to have been of the hardest bronze. But this presupposes an amazing antiquity for the practice of metallurgy. The replies to the question, from whence the bronze? are now abundant, and come from a variety of sources, but the testimony from the inscriptions of the statues is the most direct and ample, opening before us a commercial intercourse between nations and people of these regions scarcely suspected of such very remote dates. There are indications that even in these early days tin from Cornwall was exported to these far off regions. The inscriptions relate chiefly to the building of a pyramid temple by Urbahu, and on the Gudea statues to the rebuilding of the temple by this later prince. Referring constantly to himself as patesi, or priest-king, he says that for this purpose his God, Nin-Girsu, has opened the way for him “from the sea of the highlands,”—the Persian Gulf—“to the upper sea,” the Mediterranean.