An article on Ancient Near Eastern art might attempt to describe the vast wealth of artistic production created over many millennia, but such a task proves impossibly large. Instead, the following essay explores several Mesopotamian works of art through a variety of perspectives and interpretations. It concentrates exclusively on Mesopotamia and even then eschews comprehensiveness in order to penetrate more deeply into questions raised by the art objects.
One can divide the modern discipline of the study of Mesopotamian art into three major periods. The first, which followed the archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was characterized by basic documentation and sometimes rather speculative conclusions. Starting in the 1930s and culminating in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, a second phase consisted of the publication of lavishly illustrated surveys that sought to chart the full measure of artistic (usually understood as stylistic) development from prehistory to the coming of Alexander the Great. A period of less homogeneous studies emerged in the 1980s, marking the third phase.
Although there are still relatively few art historians specializing in the Ancient Near East, the field has experienced a kind of renaissance during this last phase, especially within American colleges and universities, where scholars have been grappling with conceptual, socio-historical, and methodological questions that push the intellectual purview beyond cataloging and stylistic development. This recent work has broached a host of issues including, for example, aesthetics, the function of art as story telling, relationships between text and image, sexuality, and the nature of representation. Not too surprisingly, the trajectory sketched here parallels that of the discipline of art history as a whole.
An issue that underlies and continues to vex discussions on Mesopotamian art is that of artistic legitimacy. Arguing for a relevance to Western art history often entails viewing Near Eastern art within the value hierarchies of Western art, while conversely, support for its particularity tends to cast the Near East as ‘‘other,’’ marginalizing it within the discipline.
The first view tends to see Mesopotamian art as the foundation for Classical Greece. This characterization appears early on, for example in Perrot and Chipiez’s two-volume study, A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria from 1882. They were limited to the first millennium bce since principally Neo-Assyrian archaeological discoveries in northern Iraq were available. With reference to the depiction of the human body, they write, ‘‘[Mesopotamia] created many types that were transmitted to the Mediterranean nations, and soon adopted by them. These types were perfected, but not invented, by the Greeks’’ (1884: 2: 80). On the other hand, Malraux wrote that Sumerian art was invisible for us, by which he meant it was unimaginable because it lay outside the visual apparatus of Western culture (Malraux 1961: xiii).
The Western versus non-Western tension is evident also in the dichotomy established early in Mesopotamian art scholarship between ‘‘conceptual’’ art and ‘‘naturalism’’ understood as a distinction between non-Greek and Greek arts (Perrot and Chipiez 1884: 2: 82). Working from the normative assumption that the imitation of nature motivates representation, this theory claims that the artists of Mesopotamia strove to depict ‘‘what they knew’’ rather than ‘‘what they saw.’’ Such notions persist but are being contested by scholars such as Winter (1995) and Bahrani (2003) who seek to understand Mesopotamian conceptions of art on their own terms. Trends in contemporary art, such as modernism in the early and mid-twentieth century that questioned the basis of art in illusion through movements such as abstraction, have provided an impetus for this reappraisal. For example, both Malraux (1961: xlviii) and Mazenod (1980) consider the modern viewer freed from the constraints of the Classical canon and thus primed fully to appreciate Mesopotamian art.
Concepts of beauty and realism that formerly flowed through much art historical scholarship have faced challenges in the discipline over the past quarter of a century, allowing art historians of the Ancient Near East to position themselves as an independent field that both contributes to and benefits from discussions in the larger discipline of art history. Nevertheless, questions of what constitutes art as distinct from artifact and its relationship to aesthetics and illusionism continue to affect scholarship. For example, Collon in her recent art survey begins with the disclaimer ‘‘The objects... are not always what we now understand as art. But art is so often a question of personal taste, and what is beautiful to one person or within one culture may not be so to another person or in another context’’ (1995: 15).
The supposed conflict between art, as the object of disinterested aesthetic contemplation, and artifact, as evidence for ancient history, surfaces in several textbooks. For example, the editor’s note to the first edition of Frankfort’s Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient hails Frankfort’s contributions to art appreciation: ‘‘[Frankfort’s] greatest love was the work of art for its own sake, and he regarded it as his task - as indeed the present book fully proves - to present oriental art as art, and not as archaeological evidence.’’ But Frankfort himself writes in the introduction, ‘‘[Near Eastern arts] remain enigmatic, unless we acquire some insight into the spiritual climate and the geographical and historical conditions in which they were created. In other words, it is the archaeologist who must build the scaffold from which we can view these ancient monuments as works of art’’ (1954: xxv).
Acknowledging the Euro-centric biases that even the word art carries - namely, the distinction between craft and fine art according to function or lack thereof - Winter has proposed a reconstruction of indigenous terminology and concepts. She suggests as a working definition of art ‘‘any work that is imaginatively conceptualized and that affords visual and emotional satisfaction, for which manufacturing skill is required and to which some established standards have been applied’’ (Winter 1995: 2570). This flexible definition, specific to Mesopotamia rather than universal, has the merit of being derived from the surviving objects and texts rather than imposed from later classically influenced concepts of art.
In the early twentieth century the increasing archaeological finds spurred a desire to construct an unbroken narrative of the history of Mesopotamian art, understanding history as a sequence of causal events and thus art history as stylistic development leading seamlessly from one period to the next. Frankfort begins his seminal book, ‘‘Strictly speaking, a history of the art of the ancient Near East has never been written,’’ referring to the new wealth of information at his disposal (1954: xxv). For many scholars tracing an unbroken development of Mesopotamian art formed the primary objective despite the generally acknowledged obstacles of unevenness of evidence and archaeological serendipity (Woolley 1935: 9; Parrot 1961b: 3-4; Garbini 1966: 10; Strommenger and Hirmer 1964: 7; Moortgat 1969: vii; Mazenod 1980; Collon 1995: 40; Harper et al. 1995: 11). Moortgat bemoans the historical and artifactual gaps that make ‘‘the writing of a truthful history of the art of Ancient Mesopotamia’’ extremely difficult (1969: x). A motivating factor in tracing artistic development lies in the belief that artistic products reveal the true nature of a people. Parrot writes, ‘‘Looking at the plumed horses [of the Neo-Assyrian period wall paintings from Til Barsip in northern Syria] galloping towards a lion pierced with arrows, we learn something of the mentality of these born fighters... ’’ (1961a: xviii). More recently, this sentiment has been echoed with respect to carved NeoAssyrian reliefs: ‘‘They.. .constitute one of the most impressive and eloquent witnesses of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, giving us an extraordinary glimpse into the minds and material culture of [the Assyrians] ... ’’ (Reade 1995: 39).
In recent years, a growing disbelief across disciplines in our ability to discern universal humanistic laws and to construct seamless narratives has prompted more particularized scholarship that focuses on single art works, time periods, or theoretical issues. These specialized studies analyze questions about art’s context and relation to society, such as overlapping meanings, audiences, or socio-political impact. As one of many examples, Thomason (in press) explores the role of collecting luxury objects in the formation of Mesopotamian royal identity. Additionally, an interest in the complicated relationship between inscribed text and figural representation has borne intellectual fruit across a range of periods and artifacts (Winter 1989; Russell 1993; Suter 2000; Bahrani 2003; Slanski 2003).
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