Winter, I. J. (1991). Reading Concepts of Space from Ancient Mesopotamian Monuments. Concepts of Space: Ancient and Modern. K. Vatsyayan (ed.). New Delhi, Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts: 57-73. (original) (raw)
N o th eoreti cal text s are prese rved fro m anci ent Meso pot ami a, compar able to th e sdstra s in In d ia, no r revealing sac red tex ts like th e Rgueda or th e Upanisads, th at would permit us to recon struct eithe r th e conceptual b ases for th e arts in general , or th e very con cept of sp ace in particular. As Ca rl N yland er has written in his lovely, lyrical bo ok , The Deep We ll, what we find in th e N ear Eas t is " no t th e mu sic, but th e flute . .. not the grief, but th e grave ." 1This does not mean , o f co urse, th at we can never find th e mu sic, or th e grief, or even th e underlying concept, such as space or tim e. But , since we are so ofte n dep endent solely on th e archaeological record , we are fo rce d to wo rk backwa rds fro m th e monuments themsel ves, in orde r to extrapolate th e Meso potami an ideat ional syste m.
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Ziggurats, the monumental mud brick towers of ancient Mesopotamian temples, have long been understood as the embodiment of important symbolic concepts current within ancient Near Eastern theology. They are the house of the god, the sacred mountain, an attempt to rise as physically close to the heavens as possible. But archaeological analysis has rarely addressed the visual affectiveness—the physical and emotional impact upon a viewer situated in the landscape—of these structures as part of their symbolic function and design. The positioning of such dominant structures relative to the movement of the sun through the day, and to their surrounding architecture and wider settlement, can be shown to engineer the presentation of a series of potently symbolic images to intended viewers. This paper will outline the ways in which ziggurats were designed to be visually affective, both in general terms and in highly culture-specific ways which echo the evidence of ancient textual sources. This will be illustrated by a case study of the ziggurat of Ur-Nammu at Ur, in southern Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), including a detailed analysis of changing sunlight distribution on the ziggurat terrace through the day and year. The intention is to demonstrate how the visual effects produced by structures in changing sunlight can act as an important organizing principle in built space and can be considered as one of the primary functions of some architectural designs. For large-scale monumental structures, intended to be viewed primarily at a distance, the visual experience they engender is overwhelmingly a product of the relative positions of the building, the viewer and the sun. This experience varies profoundly through the day, and also through the year. This paper examines how the massive ziggurat structures of ancient Mesopotamia and their surrounding temple complexes sought to engineer this experience through their orientation to the sun and their positioning of the viewer. The ziggurat structures examined here are restricted to those of the Bronze Age; from the first appearance of distinctive ziggurats in the mid-Third Millennium BC until the start of the Iron Age at around 1200 BC. The ziggurats considered here are also restricted geographically to the Mesopotamian plain of central and southern Iraq in order to correspond to the geographical range of the textual sources alongside which they are examined.
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"The architectural practice of using orthostats—sculpted wall slabs in stone—in monumental buildings is usually understood as an idiosyncratic phenomenon in the Upper Mesopotamian cities of the Iron Age. Late Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers of this period are known for sponsoring building projects that incorporated carved orthostats into their architectural corpus, lining the monumental walls of ceremonial and public spaces. These orthostat programs were commemorative in nature and often took the form of pictorial narratives that structured and animated the ceremonial spaces of the Iron Age cities. Irene J. Winter was among the very first to address critically the problems of representation in the narrative relief programs of Late Assyrian palaces, while breaking new ground in developing a contextual approach to study Syro-Hittite monuments within the artisanal networks of the early first millennium BC. In a number of articles, she eloquently demonstrated that architectural technologies and material styles offer exceptional opportunities to study cultural interaction between the Assyrian empire and the Syro-Hittite polities. As the following discussion was sparked in part by Irene Winter’s work on networks of cultural interaction, it seems appropriate on this occasion to present this paper on the architectural significance of the orthostats."
Ziggurats: An Astro-Archaeological Analysis (revised 24 Jan 2021)
Harmony and Symmetry: Celestial regularities shaping human culture, Proceedings of the SEAC 2018 Conference in Graz, Österreich, 2020
ABSTRACT. This paper examines the astro-orientation, geometry and metrology of a random sample (n=5) of Mesopotamian ziggurat/temples (3000-550 BC) with archaeological site plans, GIS/satellite imaging, and astronomical software. The major finding is that ziggurats appear orientated to sun rise/set at the solstices and equinox, moon rise/set at the midwinter/midsummer major/minor standstills, and/or Venus rise/set at zenith/nadir passage. Evidence is also presented that the length/width ratios of rectangular ziggurat platforms and temple floorplans were based on 3:4:5 (n=2), 20:21:29 Pythagorean Triples (n=2) and 1:1:√2 square (n=1). The best fit for integer linear units of measurement are the Mesopotamian cubit (n=2) for length/width and (unexpectedly) Egyptian Old Kingdom setat (n=3) for area.
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
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