Preliminary Report on the Wall Paintings at Tell el-Burak: Iconography (original) (raw)
Related papers
Tracing Technoscapes. The Production of Bronze Age Wall Paintings in the Eastern Mediterranean, 2018
The excavation of Building FF2 at Ebla provided new important data related to the tradition of wall paintings in Early Bronze Age Syria. This tradition still remains quite poorly known and understood, and the way to an interpretation of the relevant features, meanings and developments is thus mostly made of comparisons with findings from other regions and periods. The main difficulties are here represented by the lack of shared approaches in recording and publishing information on this kind of material witness, in particular in relation to technical and technological aspects. This contribution is based on efforts that point at collecting as many evidences as possible to outline a profile of the Early Syrian wall painting techniques. The main aim is here to find enough evidence supporting the placement of the Ebla wall painting findings within the Early Syrian tradition and its chronological developments, as well as in the context of the artistic and artisan cultures of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean regions.
Tell Masaikh, situated on the eastern bank of the Syrian Lower Middle Euphrates, has been excavated since 1996 by an international team directed by M. G. Masetti-Rouault, and identified as the Neo-Assyrian colony of Kar-Assurnasirpal. In different parts of the local palace, dated to the beginning of the 8 th century, fragments of wall painting were found, characterised by different geometric motifs built up through the opposition of black and white bands. Other fragments, found in situ, exhibit black geometric motifs on a white background. These motifs generally resemble the decoration of other residences in North Syrian sites, although it is almost a century later, yet they also present some unusual features. From this perspective, the Tell Masaikh wall painting fragments represent one of the oldest examples of such a new way to use colours in architectural context. The aim of the paper is to try to present a hypothesis about the origin of this particular taste, based on the opposition of black and white, and of its possible symbolic and artistic meaning, beginning with the documentation from the palace of a Neo-Assyrian colony in an Aramean country.
RECONSIDERING THE ALALAKH FRESCOES WITHIN THEIR LEVANTINE CONTEXT
Alalakh and its Neighbours, 2020
Together with Tel Kabri in the southern Levant, Alalakh has been often considered the earliest find spot with wall paintings of the so-called fresco-secco technique in Western Asia and hence a central corpus for the long-lasting discourse about the technique’s origin in the Eastern Mediterranean. But one of its most crucial aspects, namely that fragments of this type of painting have been discovered as early as Level IX and up to the Late Bronze Level IV, has often been eclipsed due to the prominence of the famous and appealing reconstruction of the palatial paintings of Alalakh Level VII. Nonetheless, their chronologically widespread contextual dates challenge the assumption that these paintings are the result of Minoan craftsmanship and raise the question of whether we are not dealing with a locally embedded tradition of their production and consumption — a tradition which lasted from the period when Alalakh was still under the control of Yamhad until it became a Levantine city kingdom in the area of conflict between Mitanni, Hatti and Egypt. Within the frame of our research project ‘Aegean Design in Near Eastern Palaces,’ funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which aims to discuss the diversity in the production and consumption of wall paintings at different sites in the Levant, Anatolia and Egypt, Alalakh is thus a key site for approaching the phenomenon of fresco-secco painting in Western Asia. How these paintings have been embedded within the local material culture, to what extent the practices involving them are interwoven with other regions of the Eastern Mediterranean, or the nature of the local intention of using such a technique and iconography are thus central questions to be addressed within this chapter.