Art and Visual Culture in the Ancient Near East

Who lived in the Tower of Babel? Who was buried in the Royal Tombs of Ur? How were the ziggurats built? Peoples of the Ancient Near East produced a unique body of works of art, artifacts, and monuments, using a remarkable variety of materials and technologies, and created a long-lasting and diverse visual and material culture. This introductory lecture course investigates the art, architecture, and visual culture of Near Eastern societies from prehistoric times to the time of Alexander the Great (ca. 330 BC). The art and architecture of the earliest urban centers in ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria, Iran and the Levant will be studied. We will explore not only how modern scholars make sense of pictorial, sculptural and architectural forms of Near Eastern art, but will also investigate various technologies of production. Art can be broadly described as the creative and imaginative work of human communities and individuals using their material skills and acquired bodies of knowledge, in order to build a meaningful world around them. Architecture involves the building arts that on the one hand allow human communities to construct shelters, houses, and public monuments, while on the other hand characterizes the culturally specific way that they shape the space, the landscape, and the environment around them. Material culture includes everything that one uses in everyday life from kitchen utensils to writing implements, from clothing to cell phones. These are our intimate companions as we live in and make sense of the world. We tend to categorize them as fetishes, souvenirs, heirlooms, tools, knick knacks, voodoo dolls, marionettes, toys, furniture, relics, fossils, pots and pans, amounting to what we cumulatively call “material culture”. Visual culture is the culture of looking at and seeing the world in a particular way and producing images that reflect and embody those specific ways of seeing. In this course, we explore these different categories of things, monuments, and art that are produced by the ancient Near Eastern cultures. We will start with a discussion of the history of research in/on the Middle East, by the antiquarians, the first archaeologists in the 19th century and the establishment of the first museums to exhibit their finds. The chronological journey of the course starts with the Palaeolithic cave paintings and Neolithic figurines from the oldest, prehistoric communities in the Middle East, and take us all the way to the time when the Middle East was gradually Hellenized after the conquests of Alexander the Great and the collapse of the last Near Eastern empire- the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The survey will highlight precious, sacred objects such as the Uruk Vase, burial goods such as the Royal Tombs of Ur, public monuments such as the Stele of Naram Sin or the Law Stele of Hammurabi, architectural complexes such as the Assyrian Palaces, legendary wonders such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the Tower of Babel.

Assyromania and More. In Memoriam for Samuel M. Paley. F. Pedde, N. Shelley (eds), MARRU 4, Zaphon: Münster, 429-447., 2018

Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World, 2021

This opening chapter of the volume Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World examines the marginal and contingent integration of the ancient Near East into the narrative of Western (art) history and the consequences of this integration for the study of Near Eastern things. It also outlines the volume’s contributions, which are centered around the themes of Art | Artifact; Representation; Context; Complexity; Materiality; Space; and Time | Afterlives.

The survival of visual imagery in the archaeological record from ancient western Asia is patchy and irregular. In some cases, spectacular deposits reveal literally thousands of images (e.g., the so-called royal cemetery at Ur); in other cases, we are hard-pressed to articulate in any depth the visual record at a particular place in a particular time (e.g., Babylon at the time of Hammurapi). Thus, attempts to give a synthetic treatment of a theme at a specifi c time and place often face serious obstacles.

Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, 2014

This study assesses the strategic deployment and polysemic functioning of mythological imagery in both the official (Machtkunst) and popular arts of Mesopotamia. It also addresses, as a corollary, such issues as the definition and status of art and the artist in the ancient Near East; the relationship between patron and artist or artisan; the implications of mass production or the deliberate copying of certain art forms or images, as through the use of molds or sketch- or pattern-“books”; degrees of literacy among the general population, and especially among those involved in the crafting of individual artworks or the designing of larger visual programs; the cultural role of mythology in Mesopotamia and the relationship between those myths extant in writing and those (now lost) circulating as oral compositions; and the striking mismatch between text and image, and especially between written (Sumerian and Akkadian) mythological narrative and pictorial narrative or visual mythological representation. It is concluded that the numerous and varied mythologies of Mesopotamia, both oral and written, were conventionalized through two deliberate visual strategies: (1) the circulation and replication of certain figural stereotypes; and (2) the visual representation of even complex mythological scenes or episodes in iconic form. Both strategies yielded a conventionalized composition capable of circulating independently of any single or immutable signification, allowing for its flexible deployment and investment with meaning by those representing it and its interpretation on multiple levels by a diverse audience of heterogeneous cultural knowledge and experience.

Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2002

Ancient images as much as texts attest to the worldviews and symbol systems of past societies. On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, the Swiss Society for Ancient Near Eastern Studies invited an international group of distinguished scholars to explore new approaches to the pictorial heritage of ancient civilizations. In an age concerned as never before by the global impact of visual media, archaeologists and art historians were asked to address ancient images as media and primary sources for the history of human civilization. The symposium concentrated on the 1st millennium BCE, when ideas and objects originating in distant cultures entered a period of unprecedented interaction with the advent of early empires and large interregional trade networks. It highlighted ancient states and people in contact, exchanging and adapting concepts and beliefs alongside with their merchandise and skills. The fifteen papers published here cover a large area from Thebes to Persepolis, paying particular attention to the zones of contact in the Levant. They establish dialogues between the autochtonous and the imported, the monumental and the minute: palace reliefs and statuary, metalwork and ivory carving, vase painting, seals and coinage. They do not consider images primarily as art but as media designed to convey messages, political or cultural, social or religious. Images are thus taken seriously, being addressed as documents involving human intellect and knowledge, tradition and creativity, economy and practical use, consumers' taste and craftsmen's competence.

The modern engagement of ‘landscape’ as a concept and reality is historically constituted; nevertheless, it appears to be especially relevant to the study of the ancient Assyrians, who were hearty conquerors of an imperial realm. This paper outlines the history of scholarship on the Neo-Assyrian landscape, including critical perspectives on the concept’s evolution. The ancients themselves did not use an all-encompassing term such as ‘landscape’, but rather, described individual features of the lands they encountered or conquered, both natural and man-made. These records are found in royal texts as well as in monumental images, and reflect, to varying degrees, the economic, social, political, and symbolic significance of the land and its relationship to Assyrian identity. With a wealth of new archaeological, art historical, and textual material constantly emerging, however, this paper asks what types of data might be brought to bear on the topic, as well as what theoretical frameworks or methodological concerns might guide our interpretations. Traditional aesthetics-based and unproblematized historical approaches to palace culture are shown to be enhanced or potentially superseded by multi-level research strategies that include a more in-depth and interpretive reading of Assyrian visual and textual sources, the incorporation of archaeological survey discoveries, and the inclusion of data from lesser-known commemorative sites in outlying territories. Ultimately, the concept of the Assyrian landscape is shown to generate a number of alternative readings and trajectories.