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