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Abstract :
[en] The "death" of statues, the theme of this paper, must be studied while replacing the artefacts in a given time and place. In fact, when we think of the various ways in which “life” can be taken from a sculpture, we spontaneously think of iconoclasm. However, the variety of treatments that statues can undergo at the end of their "existence" is vast, and to understand the acts in question, it is essential to recontextualize the statue and the process that led to its discovery by archaeologists.
Thanks to a combination of textual, archaeological, and iconographic sources, it seems possible to reconstruct the environment in which the statues passed through all the stages of their "existence." However, as we seek to avoid the biases associated with the millennia separating us from our object of study, new problems arise: excessive comparisons with other contemporary societies, ethnological shortcuts, illustration of one type of source by another, and so on.
Through a corpus of varied sources informing us about the acts associated with the "death" of Mesopotamian statues from the 3rd to the 1st millennia BC, it is possible to confront all these issues. Without seeking to propose definitive solutions to them, their theorization through a state-of-the-art approach will aim to propose a methodological discussion.
