In 1891, B. T. A. Evetts published three black diorite artefacts from the British Museum: a Middle Babylonian kudurru fragment, a Gudea door socket, and a piece of a mortar dedicated by Eanatum to the goddess Nanshe. All three were found together in the ruins of some old London houses, and Evetts speculates that they were possibly brought to London in the seventeenth century by merchants who shipped them from Basra either as ballast or as objects of curiosity.
The Eanatum fragment (Plate IV) is what remains of a mortar whose bowl was approximately 39 cm in diameter. Two inscribed sides, at right angles to the top surface into which the bowl of the mortar is sunk, and at slightly wider than right angles to each other, are partially preserved. These sides are not perfectly plane, but undulate slightly, and are polished, as is the top and the bowl. The rounded edges separating the two inscribed sides from each other and from the top are unpolished, and may have been so in antiquity, or the originally polished surface of the edges may have eroded from friction, as did part of col. i of side IV along the top edge.
The reconstruction of the original that most readily suggests itself is a parallelepiped, with the bowl resembling a rough circle inscribed in a parallelogram, and four sides formed by the downward projection of the parallelogram, two of which are the partially preserved inscribed sides. Presumably, the other two sides would have been inscribed as well. The inscription is arranged in five columns per side, running parallel to the top edge. Beneath the fifth column on each preserved side, the surface is polished but uninscribed, and there is 3–5 cm of polished blank surface between the inscribed columns and the edge that separates the two preserved sides.