Marchetti, N. (2013). Mesopotamian Early Dynastic Statuary in Context. In K. Kaniuth, A. Lohnert, J. L. Miller, A. Otto, M. Roaf, & W. Sallaberger (Eds.), Tempel im Alten Orient. 7. Internationales Colloquium der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 11.-13. Oktober 2009, München (pp. 284–310). (original) (raw)
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Neo-Assyrian letters are a broad and interesting corpus of data to investigate how ancient Assyrians dealt with the manufacture of statues, the shaping of royal and divine effigies, and the final arrangement of sculptures. This paper aims to analyse the ritual and practical aspects of the making of images in the Neo-Assyrian period with reference to this corpus of letters, which reveals how Assyrian kings, officials and sculptors worked together for this purpose. It explores the role of the personnel involved, the process of the creation , and the final display of statues. Based on the interplay of texts and archaeological data, the study reveals the intense activity of making statues of gods and kings in Assyria, with the administration supervising both projects for new statues and the maintenance of already existing ones.
In respond ing to the visua l them e o f th e 3 rd ICAANE: "Re p resen tation des ideologi es ro y-ales et religieuses"/"Representations of Royal and Religious Id e ol o gies," I would lik e to take on the qu est ion of representation itsel f-n ot on ly th e fact o f, b ut th e power inhere nt in the vel) ' act of representation. In doing th is, I wo uld like to co ncent ra te on those instances in which th e two su b-sets-kings and go d s-the ro yal and the religi ous-actua lly co m e together, rather than remain-in g discreet classes of imagery. But before moving 10 substa nce, it is also imp ortant to n ote th at ano the r te rm in the th em e's titl e, the wo rd ideology, is probably one of the m o st over-used terms of ou r sc h olarly gene ratio n, a n d so also needs to b e clarified. Once used o n ly by Marxist historians, the term has finally p ercolat ed into "na tu ral" language to mean any belief system as represen ted , ver bally or visually. As I shall use it today, a definition o f "id e o logy" sho uld have several compo ne n ts, including th e co nscio us ac tivatio n a nd promulgation o f a co de d message o r m essages, origina ti ng fr om a defin abl e so u rc e, and design ed as a n e xp res-sive formulation with a mission: in short, a d esired co m m u n ica tio n act, gen erally (b u t o nly ge ne rally) emanating fro m an elite pow er structure and dire ct ed to a b road er, ofte n p opular, aud ience , with a view not only to narration, but to rationalization and per suasion. A gene ratio n ago, th e same th em e , "Representations of Royal and Religious Id eologies," would have been ca lle d simp ly "T he Iconogra phy of Kings a n d Gods ," and for some sc holarly o pe ra tions, th e two titl es co uld still be cons idere d syno nymo us. From the Ren aissance to th e 20th cen tury lega cy o f art historian, Erwin Panof sky (Ripa 159 3; Panofsky 1939, 195 5), "ico-nography" has b e e n co nsidered the key to m eaning in th e visual arts-the "what" of content , as distin ct fro m the "how" of style. The a n a lytical process o f uncovering meaning implicit in "iconogra phy"-the grap hing, or writing in , of meaning into imagery-required that one ha ve, in Pan ofsky's terms, a gove rn ing "text." That is, a text like the Gospels that would permit o ne to kn ow th at a pain ting like Leonardo d a Vinci's Last Supper was actu ally a reference to th at meal and n o o ther; o r tha t in Raphael's Marriage of th e Virgin , we are see ing n ot j ust any marriage, but th e vel)' union whose sig n i fica nce was directly related to the as-yet unoccupied and altar-less ch u rc h in the background. Once these d et erminations were made, the y could then be applied to other such images, creating clusters of like im ages, while the ac t of "do ing" icon ographical a nalysis was, in effect, th e d e-coding o f im ages accord ing to th e conve n tio nal "meanings" tha t la y behind the m .
From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics. Edited by Jennifer Y. Chi & Pedro Azara. Princeton University Press. Pp. 162-193, 2015
Pdf offprint available on request. Excerpt: "A clear barrier to understanding the function and context of Early Dynastic sculpture has been its early categorization in art-historical terms, and a failure to explore the social and cultural role of the statues within the context of ritual action and deposition, including the parts played by the individuals who donated the statues and those who visited temples and made offerings in their presence. The statues continue to live on within museums and in exhibits, and the meanings attributed to them, including their politicized significance, continue to evolve over time, influenced by archaeologists, museum curators, artists, and members of the public. The aesthetic or art-historical approach, with minimal object labeling and a desire to isolate the object for attentive looking, has tended to dominate the display of Early Dynastic statues in museums, including the Oriental Institute. While the reason for the increased presence of temple sculpture in the Early Dynastic period may have been related to an attempt to overcome restrictive access to the temple, the modern museum has permitted even greater access to these objects and images. This essay has demonstrated that while the statues were initially presented to Western audiences primarily as “primitive art” and great artistic achievements, displays from the early twenty-first century have increasingly attempted to frame them in terms of their archaeological and historiographical context. Following the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003, the statues have also been used as symbols of a fragile and threatened heritage. The continued role of these sculptures as archaeological artifacts, human images, art objects, and politicized symbols reflects their enduring ability to evoke beauty, mystery, personhood, power, and presence. Visitors to museums, the secular temples of our time, continue to respond and be inspired by these images, layering multiple meanings onto them. Artists continue to be inspired by their abstract forms and wider role as icons of cultural heritage. The sculptures therefore continue to mediate social interactions, although no longer as intercessors between the realms of the living and the dead, or between the living and the divine, as in the early Mesopotamian temples. They now serve as a way of mediating between past and present, enabling visitors to gain an impression of ancient Mesopotamian people, their physical appearances as well as their religious practices."
Statuary and reliefs, along with the term sculpture, under which they could be subsumed, are modern categories. They designate art historical genres defined in terms of form, with the aim of being objective. There are no equivalents for such categories in ancient Mesopotamia, the region of the ancient Near East on which this chapter focuses. The terms alan, an-dul 3 , and ṣ almu, which in accompanying inscriptions and other texts refer to anthropomorphic statues, designated more generally an "image" or a "manifestation." They were also used as early as the Early Dynastic period to refer to anthropomorphic figures carved in relief (Waetzoldt 2000; Evans 2012: 112-15), and to aniconic Middle and Neo-Assyrian stelae (Feldman 2009: 46). The Stele of Hammurabi (Figure 16.1) refers to the image of the king and to the entire monument with the terms ṣ almu and narû, respectively: "Let a wronged man who has a legal case come before my image (depicting me as) king of justice, and let him have my inscribed stone monument read out loud; let him hear my precious pronouncements, let my stone monument reveal the case to him" (xlviii 3-17). 1 Mesopotamian stelae were largely royal monuments and ideal vehicles for self-representation, since they provided space for both extended visual narratives and long texts. The Akkadian term (narû) designating this image-and text-carrier is a loan from Sumerian na(4)-ru 2-a, which literally means "erected stone." In late second-and early first-millennium Babylonia, it was appropriated for stone boulders that record
NADALI VERDERAME 2023 Behind the Cultic Statue: The Materiality of Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia
N. Laneri - S.R. Steadman (eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Material Religion in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, London ...: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 69–76, 424–425., 2023
Production of images, more precisely of statues, is an ancient and common activity in Mesopotamia since the earliest periods. The archaeological evidence is scant, but cuneiform texts refer directly to statues or indirectly to materials, artisans, and actions related to-and made around-statues. The statues do not properly reflect the need to represent divine and human figures: at the same time, they cannot be considered decorative elements of closed and open spaces, as the statue is not the result of a series of aesthetic choices and solutions intended to attract viewers in admiration of a beautiful masterpiece. Statues were not created to be seen from a distance, untouchable; ancient Mesopotamian temples, where the majority (if not all) of the statues were placed, cannot be compared to museums where items, objects, and images are displayed at a safe distance from visitors.