The Architectural Origin of Mesopotamian Standards in Late Uruk/Jemdet Nasr Period Iconography (original) (raw)

2018, Antiguo Oriente

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Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate that, according to the iconographic evidence, standards had their origins in the late Uruk/Jemdet Nasr Period as architectural standards. A variety of different standards are depicted in relation to architecture. Some of these standards were also represented as signs in the archaic Uruk script, and this can offer further insight into their meaning or relevance. Each of the late Uruk/Jemdet Nasr standards is discussed in turn.

An analysis of the ‘ballstaff’ and ‘cross’ symbols in Mesopotamian glyptic art from the Isin/Larsa to Neo-Babylonian periods

This dissertation is an analysis of provenanced cylinder seal and seal impressions sourced from ten sites in Mesopotamia, dating from the Isin/Larsa period through to the Neo-Babylonia period. The focus of the research concerns two symbols: the ballstaff, and the cross. These symbols have not been analysed in great depth, hence, this new research unveils some intriguing proposals concerning their meaning and purpose. The main questions set were to establish what the two symbols could tell us about Mesopotamian society during the second and first millennia B.C., and whether it was possible to identify their symbolic meaning. In order to answer these questions, information collated and recorded on a database revealed visual and functional clues, which may instigate further exploration of the two symbols.

THE PUZZLING LOGOGRAM: WRITING AND REASONING IN EARLY MESOPOTAMIA

Signs - Sounds - Semantics, 2021

The widely accepted typology of writing systems designates the historically dominant type of the cuneiform scripts as “logo-syllabic,” especially the Sumerian writing. Within this typology, the logogram,” is perceived as referring to one (or sometimes more) word(s). However, as is well known, many “logograms” represented by simple or complex (compounded) signs—sometimes also by sign combinations—have a variety of different readings and therefore strictly speaking trespass on the limits of a simple “logographic” system. In contrast perhaps to the earlier Chinese systems1, it is very likely that in Mesopotamia, the earlier (Uruk IV–Uruk III) signs are hesitatingly and rarely phonetized.

Figural motifs on Halaf pottery: an iconographical study of late neolithic society in Northern Mesopotamia

2019

Information about the lifestyles of ancient cultures, their daily activities, religious beliefs, close or long distance trade relations, or cultural interactions come from their products. Ancient material productions can be briefly mentioned by examples such as stone tools, pottery, and secular or religious buildings. Thanks to excavations or socio-cultural surveys, we are able to make comments on the ancient societies' materials. Wall paintings, motifs or scenes on pottery provide us important information about the lifestyles or religious beliefs of ancient cultures. The aim of this thesis is to give information about the motifs on Halaf pottery, which belongs to the Late Neolithic period and spread over a wide area in Northern Mesopotamia. First, the socio-cultural structure of the Halaf culture will be examined. It will turn to animal motifs, human motifs or narrative scenes on Halaf pottery for the information about Halaf culture that it presents to us. It also examines the role of dancing figures and feasting in the Halaf culture.

Winter, I. J. (2016). Text on/in Monuments: ‘Lapidary Style’ in the Ancient Near East. Sign and Design: Script as Image in a Cross-Cultural Perspective (300-1600 CE). B. M. Bedos-Rezak and J. F. Hamburger (eds.). Washington, D.C., Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection: 197-218.

A NCIENT MESOPOTAMIA DID NOT PLAY WITH ITS IDEOGRAPHIC SIGNS AND syllables. This does not mean that there was never wordplay. However, unlike the iconicized scripts of Islam, the historiared and embellished initials of the Western medieval world, or the animated hieroglyphs of pharaonic Egypt given agency by the addition of arms and legs, once Mesopotamian signs were stabilized into abstracted and legible forms, they retained their boundaries and their shapes within the scribal canon. With the possible exception of phonetic rebuses in the form of recognizable images early in the first millennium BeE,! distinctions between text signs and image figu res were carefully maintained. And yet, there are things to be said about the relationship between verbal and visual representation throughout the three millennia of the Mesopotamian sequence-particularly for a volume exploring cultural and historical permutations on the relationship between textual signs and imagery. It is my intention here to focus upon a particular subset of inscriptions in Sumerian and Akkadian, the languages of ancient Mesopotamia: those intended to be deployed and viewed in public. As a class, the works bearing inscriptions range in size from small cylinder seals, held in the hand and impressed upon clay tablets, bullae, and door and jar sealings, to large-scale, independent monuments and architecture. At both extremes, the inscribed works function "out there," in a domain where the carrier of the inscription has a material presence beyond the private exchange of information, as would have been the case in a letter from a father to a son scribed on a clay tablet, in which handwriting, that is, scri pr-wr iting, could be individual and distinctive. Because most of the examples I shall discuss are largely carved on stone rather than impressed into clay and were intended to be viewed by a public unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of personal-ized writing, the signs on monuments tend to be particularly well articulated and regular. As such, the signs both connote and contribute to legibility. They convey a formality that is seen to be part of the visual effect of the inscription. I shall refer to this group of texts on public works as executed in a "lapidary style" not unlike the regularized scripts employed on Roman triumphal arches and temples, or funerary markers from the classical world to the present. I would characterize such works, often

“From Drawing to Vision”. The Use of Mesopotamian Architecture Through the Construction of its Image

The efforts of reconstructing the image of ancient Near Eastern cities have characterized both the production and diffusion of the Near Eastern discoveries since the European archeological activities in the 19 th century started. In the course of time, the practice of creating likely images not only of the decorative apparata but mainly of the architectural remains has became a "traditional" practice and, at the same time, a crucial device that archaeologists and scholars develop to manage, perform, visualize and hand down the amount of data and hypothesis they produce. If the assumptions and aims of architectural reconstruction did not completely change from the 19 th century until today, the development of technology has gradually affected them, turning a mere image into a virtual reality. This paper aims at presenting an investigation of a recent experience in the field of the digital architectural reconstructions. Thus, we must start from a structuralist analysis of the whole of the archeological and architectural data in order to explain the nature of each architectural context and so return it to its most likely image. As a result, it is possible to bring together the reconstructed components of the whole context and look at it in the light of its complex nature, its limits and contradictions; this is also the start of a new and maybe even more "real" intellectual experience of Mesopotamian architecture.

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References (97)

  1. VA 7236. For photographs of this vessel, see Andrae 1930: Abb. 4-6.
  2. Now in the Yale Babylonian Collection, Goucher College Collection 869. For a reconstruc- tion of the seal impression, see B.L. Goff and B. Buchanan (1965: Pl. XIX Fig. 4).
  3. MNB 1166. For a photograph of this seal, see H. Frankfort (1939: Pl. VIId).
  4. IM 31400. For a photograph of this seal, see Frankfort (1955: Pl. 80.854).
  5. Such as a green serpentine cylinder seal now in the Pierpont Morgan Collection (Morgan Seal 5). For a photograph of this seal, see E. Porada (1948: Pl. II.5) and a white chalcedony seal from the Kleinfunde at Uruk now in the Vorderasiatisches Museum (VA 11043). For a photograph of this seal, see Heinrich (1936: Taf. 19.a).
  6. As well as the ring-post without streamer, discussed below.
  7. E.g. Andrae 1933: 21-25; van Buren 1945: 43.
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  9. Keel and Schroer 2002: 109. 49 Also read as Nintur. 50 Selz 1995: 266. 51 "is to be rendered as approximately 'mistress who gives birth/creates.'" 52 Schroer and Keel 2005: 288. 53 Stol 2000: 80.
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  13. For example a white magnesite cylinder seal surmounted by a silver ram now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (Ashmolean 1964:744. For a photograph of this cylinder seal and a line drawing of its impression, see D. Collon (2005: 14 Catalogue No. 12) and an alabaster seal of unknown provenance now in the Pierpont Morgan Collection in New York (Morgan Seal 2). For a photograph of this seal, see Porada (1948: Pl. I.2).
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"Statuary and Reliefs.” In A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Art, edited by Ann C. Gunter. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Blackwell: 2019: 385-410

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AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL VIEW FOR “MOVEMENT”: The case of Uruk expansion in the middle of IV millennium BC in Southern Mesopotamia from the perspective of private architecture Luca Volpi – Sapienza Università di Roma International Conference "The World in Motion: Language, Culture, and Intercultural Communication in Asian and African Studies" University of Warsaw Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28 00-927 Warsaw, Poland 30.09.2016 Studies on domestic contexts allow us to know more about ancient society than any other archaeological context. This is even more true in Near Eastern Archaeology, mostly based on the analysis of major public buildings, like palaces and temples. The so called “Uruk period” (3900 – 3100 BC ca) develops in Southern Mesopotamia at the beginning of the IV millennium BC and gradually spreads all over the “Greater Mesopotamia”: from the Middle Euphrates to the medium and high valley of Tigris, From the Susiana to the Arabic/Persian Gulf. How this spread happened is not clear enough: in fact we have evident examples of new foundations (it is the case of the so called “Uruk colonies”); but we could have also cases in which Uruk and local elements coexist inside a tripartite structure or cases in which they coexist where the architecture is completely different from what we would expect. The aim of this preliminary work is to analyze the problems involved in the reconstruction of these contexts in this specific period and to focus also on the architecture of these private buildings. From at least the ‘80s indeed is taken for granted that the tripartite model of the houses was one of the distinctive features of Uruk culture all over the “Greater Mesopotamia” as well as the fundamental role of the southerners in the cultural development of this region compared to the minor one of the northerners. The selection of archaeological sites analyzed offer a more complex view of the problem and could let us to suggest for a more ancient development of the tripartite scheme and for a more complex interaction between local societies and Uruk people.

Emblems of Power: Ideology and Identity in Late Old Assyrian Glyptic

As markers of identity, social status, and administrative rank, seals and their designs functioned as one of the most important non-verbal identifiers for their owners in the ancient Near East. Consequently, the selection of seal imagery was a carefully made decision (either by the seal owner or a central institution), that turned seals into a means of communication. This dissertation studies the imagery of early second millennium glyptic in northern Mesopotamia to understand the political mechanisms and ideologies underlying the choice of motifs in seal design, and the effects of political change on material culture. Rather than a traditional text-oriented viewpoint, this project adopts an interdisciplinary approach to study identity from a visual perspective. By integrating methods and evidence from archaeology, art history, and textual studies, it seeks to provide insights into the socio-political aspects of northern Mesopotamia in this period and understand their reflection on the glyptic traditions of the region. The study focuses specifically on a period of ca. 75 years, covering the reign of Šamši-Adad I (ca. 1847-1776 B.C.) and ending with the destruction of Šeḫna by Samsu-iluna in 1728 B.C. The dataset consists of seals and seal impressions from official contexts at Tell Bi'a, Tell Leilan, Tell al-Rimah, and Mari, which were important administrative centers of Šamši-Adad's kingdom, as well as Acemhöyük in Anatolia, which had close diplomatic and economic ties with this polity. Textual evidence shows that Šamši-Adad successfully created a politically unified entity across Upper Mesopotamia by combining the preexisting political and ideological infrastructures of the region with the cultural memory and traditions of the Akkadian, Ur III, Old Assyrian, and Old Babylonian worlds. The visual manifestation of this unifying ideology is the standardized

Human, Divine or Both? The Uruk Vase and the Problem of Ambiguity in Early Mesopotamian Visual Arts

Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art edited by Marian Feldman and Brian Brown. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter., 2014

Early Mesopotamian images are several millennia removed in time from us. Their interpretation poses numerous difficulties, beginning with the identification of the represented figures. There are ongoing debates about the identity of quite a few anthropomorphic figures depicted on major early Mesopotamian monuments. They usually revolve around the question of whether the figures represented mortals or deities. Is it reasonable to solve the conundrum by reading ambiguity into the figures? This contribution discusses difficulties of interpretation by re-examining the Uruk Vase as an example of the complexities involved. Moreover, it aims at breaking the reiteration of the prevalent interpretation of this image, which was formulated eighty years ago and rests on a scholarly construct.