Rafca Youssef Nasr, “The Newly Discovered Paintings of Saydet El-Rih in Enfeh (Lebanon)”, Studia Orientalia Christiana Collectanea (2021–2022), 235-266 (original) (raw)
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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.
The figural arts in crusader Syria and Palestine, 1187-1291: some new realities
Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 2004
" rt history has come a long way in the thirty years since Otto Demus's Byzantine Art and Sthe West was published" in 1970.1 In that set of lectures however,2 Demus had very little to say about the art of the Crusaders, so in the present discussion one may paraphrase this ...
2018
A significant quantity of mainly monumental statues has been found in the northwestern Arabian oases of Dadan (al-Khuraybah) and Taymāʾ. They have been associated with the dynasty of Liḥyān, which ruled at Dadan from about the mid-1st millennium BCE for several centuries. The present contribution discusses the archaeological contexts as well as the significance of the statues, some of which according to preserved inscriptions on bases may represent dignitaries of the royal Liḥyānite court if not kings. Placed in or near temples, the statues were dedicated to the king. Part of the expression of the local elites this genuine northwest Arabian sculpture as part of an iconographic cultural pluralism unites aspects of Egyptian and Eastern Mediterranean styles.