Guennol lioness
The Guennol lioness is a 8.26 centimeter proto-Elamite limestone statuette, created around 3000 BC. Chr.
The piece was excavated around 1930 near Baghdad, possibly in the Susa temple at Tell Agreb . This is noteworthy as the Proto-Elamites and Elamites lived more in what is now western Iran .
The name can be misunderstood in two ways, Guennol is not the place where it was found, but the Welsh translation of the name Martin , which belonged to the collector Alastair Bradley Martin for a long time . The mythical creature depicted is not a lion, but a kind of demon with a female lion head.
Alastair Bradley Martin had owned the statue since 1948 and it was on display at the Brooklyn Museum . The figure has been the most expensive antique of all time since 2007 when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York. Fourteen to eighteen million US dollars had been estimated, but an unknown bidder won the bid at 57 million.
Until 2010 the statuette was the most expensive sculpture ever sold, but was then surpassed in price by Alberto Giacometti's L'Homme qui marche I.