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Book Title:Art of the First Cities Third Millennium B.C. Mediterranean-Indus
Signed:No
Ex Libris:No
Narrative Type:Nonfiction
Dimensions:12 x 9¼ x 1½ inches; 6¼ pounds
Publisher:Metropolitan Museum of Art
Original Language:English
Intended Audience:Young Adults,Adults
Inscribed:No
Vintage:Yes
Personalize:No
Publication Year:2003
Type:Historical
Format:Trade Paperback
Language:English
Era:Ancient
Author:Joan Aruz
Personalized:No
Features:Illustrated
Genre:Historical
Topic:Achaemenid Iran,Akkad,Anatolia,Ancient Aegean,Ancient Arabia,Ancient India,Ancient Iran,Ancient Iraq,Ancient Meditteranean,Ancient Middle East,Ancient Near East,Ancient Turkey,Ancient World,Anthropology,Arabia,Archaeology,Art History,Assyria,Babylon,Cultural History,Cultural Studies,Egypt,History,Indus Valley,Mesopotamia,Regional History,Social History,World History,ancient art,sociology
Number of Pages:564
“Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus” by Joan Aruz (Editor). NOTE: We have 75,000 books in our library, almost 10,000 different titles. Odds are we have other copies of this same title in varying conditions, some less expensive, some better condition. We might also have different editions as well (some paperback, some hardcover, oftentimes international editions). If you don’t see what you want, please contact us and ask. We’re happy to send you a summary of the differing conditions and prices we may have for the same title. DESCRIPTION: Softcover. Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003). Pages: 564. Size: 12 x 9¼ x 1½ inches; 6¼ pounds. Summary: Our civilization is rooted in the forms and innovations of societies that flourished more than six thousand years ago in distant lands of western Asia, extending from Egypt to India. The earliest of these societies was in the region known to the ancients as Mesopotamia, which occupies what is today Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey. In Mesopotamia arose the first cities, and here urban institutions were invented and evolved. Writing was invented, monumental architecture in the form of temples and palaces were created, and the visual arts flowered in the service of religion and royalty. These extraordinary innovations profoundly affected surrounding areas in Anatolia, Syria-Levant, Iran, and the Gulf. Mesopotamia was influenced in turn by these outlying regions, for as networks of trade emerged they encouraged cultural exchange. This publication explores the artistic achievements of the era of the first cities in both the Mesopotamian heartland and across the expanse of western Asia. More than fifty experts in the field have contributed entries on individual works of art and essays covering a wide range of subjects. Among the objects presented are many that display the pure style of Mesopotamia, others from outlying regions that adapt from Mesopotamian models a corpus of forms and images, and still others that embody vital regional styles. Included are reliefs celebrating the accomplishments of kings and the pastimes of the elite; votive statues representing royal and other privileged persons; animal sculptures; and spectacular jewelry, musical instruments, and games found in tombs where kings, queens, and their servants were buried. The volume opens with a focus on the cities of southern Mesopotamia, among them Uruk and Nippur; the cities of the north, Mari and Ebla; and the Akkadian Dynasty. Next follow sections devoted to art and interconnections from the Mediterranean to the Indus, in which Egypt, the Aegean and western Anatolia, the North Caucasus, the Gulf, Iran, and the Indus area are studied. Finally, a section on literature and legacy treats the invention of cuneiform writing and the heritage of Mesopotamian literature and ideas. More than five hundred reproductions of the works in the exhibition as well as comparative materials are included in the lavish illustrations, and landscape photographs offer a sense of place. Maps, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index are provided. CONDITION: NEW. HUGE new softcover. Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003) 564 pages. Unblemished, unmarked, pristine in every respect. Pages are pristine; clean, crisp, unmarked, unmutilated, tightly bound, unambiguously unread. Satisfaction unconditionally guaranteed. Satisfaction unconditionally guaranteed. In stock, ready to ship. No disappointments, no excuses. PROMPT SHIPPING! HEAVILY PADDED, DAMAGE-FREE PACKAGING! Meticulous and accurate descriptions! Selling rare and out-of-print ancient history books on-line since 1997. We accept returns for any reason within 30 days! #8976.1b. PLEASE SEE DESCRIPTIONS AND IMAGES BELOW FOR DETAILED REVIEWS AND FOR PAGES OF PICTURES FROM INSIDE OF BOOK. PLEASE SEE PUBLISHER, PROFESSIONAL, AND READER REVIEWS BELOW. PUBLISHER REVIEWS: REVIEW: The roots of our own urban civilization lie in the remarkable developments that took place in the third millennium B.C. This was a time of astonishing creativity as city-states and empires emerged in a vast area stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indus Valley. Although remote in time and place, this urban revolution, first represented by the formation of cities in southern Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq), must be looked upon as one of humanity’s defining moments. These complex centers of civilization, such as the city of Uruk, which arose toward the end of the fourth millennium B.C. in the fertile plains bordered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, stimulated great inventions, such as writing, and witnessed a flowering of artistic expression. Much of this art demonstrated devotion to the gods and celebrated the power of kings. The growth of cities and powerful ruling families led to a demand for luxury items. These were fashioned from materials obtained largely from abroad and were destined for temples and tombs such as the famous Royal Graves at Ur (ca. 2500 B.C.). Partly as a result of these advances in Mesopotamia, other major civilizations developed along the great maritime and land routes that connected them to one another. During the third millennium B.C., diverse populations inhabited the vast areas stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River and from Central Asia to the Gulf. Among the most intriguing of these peoples are those who dwelt in the cities and countryside of Sumer (southern Mesopotamia). In their own language, Sumerian, they call themselves sag giga, or “black-headed ones.” There were also Semitic-speaking peoples in Mesopotamia. With the foundation of the Akkadian dynasty by Sargon of Akkad (r. ca. 2340–2285 B.C.), they established a political center in southern Mesopotamia. The Akkadian kings created the world’s first empire, which at the height of its power united an area that included not only Mesopotamia but also parts of western Syria and Anatolia, and Iran. One undeciphered language is Harappan, named after the major Indus Valley city of Harappa. Unlike the cuneiform (wedgelike) script adopted for Sumerian and Akkadian, which was largely written on clay, the Harappan, or Indus, script is composed of signs familiar from short inscriptions above animal representations on numerous Harappan stone seals. The basic characteristics of the artistic style that came to define the art of the Near East were already established by the third millennium B.C. in Mesopotamia. One of the primary aims of Mesopotamian art was to capture the relationship between the terrestrial and divine realms. Styles and iconography were transmitted to sites such as Mari and Ebla in northern Syria as well as to Iran and as far as Arabia. In contrast to the arts of Mesopotamia, those of Egypt glorified the king as the embodiment of divine power, and it remains difficult to assess what, if any, contribution Egyptian art made to Mesopotamian artistic style. However, there were links with the cultures of the Mediterranean littoral: sites such as Troy, where the fabled “Treasure of Priam” was uncovered by Heinrich Schliemann, reflect artistic connections that extended through central Anatolia and northern Syria. In the east, the distant Indus Valley region also interacted with the Near East in the third millennium B.C., maintaining merchant enclaves in Central Asia and perhaps in Mesopotamia itself. Yet this civilization was also quite different from that of Mesopotamia. There is no evidence of monumental temples and palaces or large-scale sculpture in the Harappan world. Rather, the focus seems to have been on private housing, public works, and urban infrastructure, with an emphasis on a sanitary and abundant water supply. In the intervening regions of eastern Iran and western Central Asia, the arts reflect a vast and diversified tapestry of peoples and languages organized in independent polities but culturally unified through trade. Thus the art of the third millennium B.C. reflects not only the extraordinary developments in the cities of the Near Eastern heartland but also their interaction with contemporary civilizations to the east and west. This was a seminal period in the history of humanity, and by exploring it we gain perspectives not only about the major artistic and cultural achievements of ancient Mesopotamia but also about the enduring legacy of the earliest of urban civilizations. REVIEW: This illustrated work highlights one of the most important and creative periods in the history of art: a time marked by the appearance of the city states of the Sumerians, the citadel of Troy, the splendid royal tombs at Ur, and the monumental cities at Mohenjodaro and Harappa. The volume examines the cultural achievements of these first urban societies, placing them in a historical context. Topics covered include the emergence of the first city states, the birth of written language, and trade and cultural interconnections between the Ancient Near East and outlying areas. More than 500 works of art, including sculpture, jewelry, vessels, weapons, cylinder seals and tablets executed in a wide variety of materials such as stone, metal, clay, horn/bone and semiprecious stones, are included. The accompanying texts are written by leading scholars in the field. This is the catalogue for an exhibition to be held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 8 May to 17 August 2003. REVIEW: This large volume accompanies an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2003, celebrating the artistic achievements of the period during which the first cities emerged in Mesopotamia. The impressive list of international contributors present thematic studies of the major cities of Mesopotamia and their artistic and literary legacy, as well as placing the objects from the exhibition in a social and historical context. Objects include statues, reliefs, animal sculptures, jewelry, plaques, weapons, vessels, seals, and some stunning metal artifacts, many presented in color. REVIEW: Published as the catalogue to the exhibition by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition gained additional poignancy following the looting of Iraq’s Natinal Archaeoogical Museum and countless other sites in the early days of the American invasion. In Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, what were probably the first cities arose, and their arts, particularly in metal and stone, were nothing short of stunning, often arrestingly modern in a manner quite different from later Egyptian art. This publication represents the first book/exhibition to cover the entire region during this crucial period. Contributors’ essays abound. 712 illus., 535 in color. Chronologies, Bibliography, Index. 540 pages. REVIEW: Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Professor in Anthropology and teaches archaeology and ancient technology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has taught at Madison since 1985 and is currently Director of the Center for South Asia, UW Madison. His main focus is on the Indus Valley Civilization and he has worked in Pakistan and India for the past 40 years. Dr. Kenoyer was born in India and lived there until he came to the U.S. for college. He has a BA in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and completed his MA and PhD (1983) in South Asian Archaeology from the same university. He speaks several South Asian languages and is fluent in Urdu/Hindi, which is the major language used in Pakistan and northern India. He has conducted archaeological research and excavations at both Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, two of the most important early sites in Pakistan, and has also worked in western and central India. He has recently been involved in research in China as well as Oman, where he is searching for links between the Indus and other early civilizations. He has a special interest in ancient technologies and crafts, socio-economic and political organization as well as religion. These interests have led him to study a broad range of cultural periods in South Asia as well as other regions of the world. Since 1986 he has been the Co-director and Field Director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project in Pakistan, a long term study of urban development in the Indus Valley. He was Guest Curator at the Elvehjem Museum of Art, Madison for the exhibition on the Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, which toured the U.S. in 1998-1999. In 2003 he was consultant for the Indus section of “Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus” exhibition curated by Joan Aruz at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has also been co-curator of the “Tana-Bana: Warp and Weft – The Woven soul of Pakistan”, exhibition with Noorjehan Bilgrami and J. M. Kenoyer, at the Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA, February, 2003, and at the Mingeikan Museum, Tokyo, April-May 2004. His work was featured in the July 2003 issue of Scientific American and on the website www.harappa.com. REVIEW: Joan Aruz first worked in the Metropolitan Museum as a curatorial fellow from 1978 to 1981, studying textile patterns of Assyrian reliefs. In 1978-79 and 1980-81, she was awarded the Hagop Kevorkian Curatorial Fellowship for doctoral studies in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art; in 1983-84, she held the Norbert Schimmel Fellowship in the departments of Greek and Roman Art and Ancient Near Eastern Art; and, in 1985, she received the Museum’s J. Clawson Mills Fellowship in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. She returned to the Metropolitan in 1987 as a researcher on the Museum’s collection of cylinder and stamp seals. In 1989, she was appointed Assistant Curator and, in 1995, Associate Curator. In 1999, Dr. Aruz was appointed Acting Associate Curator in Charge of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. In July 2001, she was named Acting Curator in Charge and then, in February 2002, Curator in Charge of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since 1995, Dr. Aruz has helped organize several exhibitions at the Metropolitan, including “Assyrian Origins: Discoveries at Ashur in the Tigris” (1995); “Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum” (1995); “Ancient Art from the Shumei Family Collection” (1996). She curated “The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the Russian Steppes” (2000) and “Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus” (2003). Dr. Aruz received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and has written extensively on the subject of art and intercultural exchange, with special focus on stamp and cylinder seals. Her book entitled “Marks of Distinction: Seals and Cultural Exchange Between the Aegean and the Orient”, is presently in press. REVIEW: Joan Aruz is Curator in Charge in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Director’s Foreword by Philippe de Montebello. Acknowledgments by Mahrukh Tarapor. Acknowledgments by Joan Aruz. Art of the First Cities: The third millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus by Joan Aruz. Uruk and the Formation of the City by Hans J. Nissen. Art of the Early City-States by Donald P. Hansen. Proto-Elamite Period by Holly Pittman. Fara by Joachim Marzahn. Excavations in the Diyala Region by Karen L. Wilson. Stone Sculpture Production by Jean-Francois de Laperouse. Nippur by Jean M. Evans. Tello (Ancient Girsu) by Beatrice Andre-Salvini. Metalworking Techniques by Jean-Francois de Laperouse. Al Ubaid by Paul Collins. Kish by Paul Collins. Royal Tombs of Ur by Julian Reade. Tomb of Puabi by Paul Collins. Great Death Pit at Ur by Julian Reade. Mari and the Syro-Mesopotamian World by Jean-Claude Margueron. Treasure of Ur from Mari by Nadja Cholidis. Ebla and the Early Urbanization of Syria by Paolo Matthiae. Tell Umm el-Marra by Glenn M. Schwartz. Tell Banat by Anne Porter and Thomas McClellan. Art of the Akkadian Dynasty by Donald P. Hansen. Lost-Wax Casting by Jean-Francois de Laperouse. Tell Mozan (Ancient Urkesh) by Giorgio Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. Tell Brak in the Akkadian Period by Jean M. Evans. Art and Interconnections in the Third Millennium B.C. by Joan Aruz. Egypt and the Near East in the Third Millennium B.C. by James P. Allen. Aegean and Western Anatolia: Social Forms and Cultural Relationships by Claus Reinholdt. Early Bronze Age Jewelry Hoard from Kolonna, Aigina by Claus Reinholdt. Troy by Eleni Drakaki. Poliochni and the Civilization of the Northeastern Aegean by Lena Papazoglou-Manioudaki. Central Anatolian Plateau: The Tombs of Alaca Hoyuk by Oscar White Muscarella. North Caucasus by Elena Izbitser. Maikop (Oshad) Kurgan by Yuri Piotrovsky. Novosvobodnaya by Yuri Piotrovsky. Susa: Beyond the Zagros Mountains by Paul Collins. Gulf: Dilmun and Magan by D.T. Potts. Copper Alloys and Metal Sources by Jean-Francois de Laperouse. Tell Abraq by Paul Collins. Island of Tarut by Paul Collins. “Intercultural Style” Carved Chlorite Objects by Joan Aruz. Pathways Across Eurasia by Maurizio Tosi, C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky. Altyn-Depe by Yuri Piotrovsky. Gonur-Depe by Elisabetta Valtz Fino. Indus Civilization by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. Baluchistan by Paul Collins. Cities of the Indus Valley by Paul Collins. Beads of the Indus Valley by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. Approaching the Divine: Mesopotamia Art at the End of the Third Millennium B.C. by Jean M. Evans. Rediscovery of Gudea Statuary in the Hellenistic Period by Beatrice Andre-Salvini. Earliest Scholastic Tradition by Piotr Michalowski. Uruk and the World of Gilgamesh by Beate Salje. Mesopotamian Legacy: Origins of the Genesis Tradition by Ira Spar. Appendix: Problems of Third-Millennium-B.C. Chronology by Julian Reade. PROFESSIONAL REVIEWS: REVIEW: A truly spectacular, groundbreaking exhibition of Near Eastern art and urbanism that is closing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art this month, Art of the First Cities gained additional poignancy following the looting of Iraq’s National Archeological Museum and countless other sites. In Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, what were probably the first cities arose, and their arts, particularly in metal and stone, were nothing short of stunning, often arrestingly modern in a manner quite different from later Egyptian art. Seals and cuneiform tablets are shown in extreme close-up, revealing terrific detail. Short, articulate essays by 50-plus experts from the Hermitage, the Louvre and the Met, brought together by Aruz and Wallenfels, curatorsof ancient Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, summarize what is know about Uruk, Ur and other early cities, along with the pieces found there, from the copper “Striding Horned Demons” from 3800 B.C. Iran to a “Recumbent human-headed bull or bison” from Ur of circa 2000 B.C. Maps, detailed chronologies and a massive bibliography round out this first book and exhibit to cover the whole region during this crucial period; it should serve as a fine summation for scholars and curious lovers of art and urbanism. [Publisher’s Weekly]. REVIEW: Aruz (curator, ancient Near Eastern art, Metropolitan Museum of Art), along with many other curators and scholars, spent the last several years arranging this monumental summer 2003 exhibition in New York City. Museums and collectors from all over the world loaned items, but the current political situation barred the involvement of the ancient Mesopotamian area itself, that is, modern Iraq. Despite that absence, Aruz shows that a wealth of art and artifacts has survived from the formative millennium. Luxury artifacts in gold, silver, copper, horn/bone, lapis lazuli, and other precious materials-such as the famous Ur treasures now at the University of Pennsylvania-are discussed in detail, as are small-scale narrative scenes from seal impressions, stone sculptures, cuneiform tablets, and other objects. These are amply presented in 712 illustrations (564 in color). Contributions by more than 50 scholars add dimension, and useful maps place ancient and modern localities in context. These maps also visually emphasize the truly panoramic aspect of this catalog and its numerous essays: in the third millennium B.C.E., trade and other relationships extended in all directions to and from the origins of the first cities in the Tigris and Euphrates area. Recommended for academic and public libraries both for its high quality and for its particular relevance in this millennium. [Library Journal/University of Wyoming]. REVIEW: The catalog “Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) more than just documents the exhibition of the same name that recently ended at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 564 pages with 535 color illustrations and 177 black-and-white figures, the catalog fleshes out the context of the art objects with current scholarship on the major sites and emerging cultures of Mesopotamia, the Aegean, the Indus Valley, and Central Asia. Edited by Joan Cruz, curator in charge of the Metropolitan’s department of ancient Near Eastern art, the catalog has fifty-one authors, many with multiple contributions. Despite the high quality of the whole, individual chapters are uneven in detail and analysis. The catalog is a delight to the eye and essential reading. Of particular interest are sections on technology–stone sculptural production, metal-working techniques, lost-wax casting, and use of copper alloys–as well as a special section on the “Intercultural Style” of carved chlorite objects, which share a distinctive iconography (especially men in combat with snakes) that integrates stylistic elements from the Indus to Mesopotamia. REVIEW: The most timely exhibition in years, as well as diplomatically dexterous and beautiful. It surveys the culture of the third millennium B.C., mainly centered in Mesopotamia, the crucible of Sumerian civilization, where art, architecture, law and writing developed with the rise of the earliest cities. The beginnings of a cosmopolitan art are in tiny cylinder seals and in figurines. The show is full of small objects that are monumental in concept. [New York Times]. REVIEW: The catalogue successfully provides a broad view of art during the third millennium B.C. and makes a noteworthy contribution to academic studies of this subject. To have achieved this in an accessible and highly readable form is a compliment to the quality of contributing authors, editing and illustration. [Burlington Magazine]. REVIEW: Exceptional in its breadth and the number of experts who contributed to it. . . . Far more ambitious than many similar catalogs, this is a must for anyone (layperson or scholar) interested in the period covered and for any library, be it a university, college, or public library. Essential. [Choice]. REVIEW: Dazzling works of art like the famous gold-and-lapis-lazuli rearing goat with a flowering plant from the great death pit at Ur join forces here with less well-known works of visual paradox. [The New York Times]. REVIEW: These remnants of “the urban revolution represented by the formation of the cities of southern Mesopotamia” complement what Aruz says “must be looked upon as one of humanity’s defining moments”. [The Washington Post]. REVIEW: This lavishly illustrated catalog showcases the artistic achievements of ancient Sumer, Akkad, and their neighbors in western Asia…Experts offer a series of clear, concise essays that cover such topics as the formation of cities, production techniques, commercial and cultural links, and the legacies of these earliest urban civilizations. [Science]. REVIEW: Beautifully illustrated…provides a solid introduction to the region and the art discovered from the first cities…The contributors are all well-established specialists in their fields. [Religious Studies Review]. REVIEW: Beautiful and scholarly! [New York Review of Books]. REVIEW: The exhibition is spectacular. Laboriously entitled “Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium BC. From the Mediterranean to the Indus”, it shows how incredibly advanced civilization was in that part of the world more than 4,000 years ago. Mesopotamia might even have had pop singers who went on concert tours. One of the finest works of art in the show is a stone statue of a male singer with long black hair and huge round eyes made from shell and lapis lazuli. The statue was found in the ancient city of Mari, now in Syria, but the singer’s name, Ur-Nanshe, shows he came from Sumer, hundreds of miles to the south in present-day Iraq. This, says the catalogue, suggests that singers and musicians might have traveled great distances in the furtherance of their careers. The lack of objects from Iraqi museums is hardly felt because so many Mesopotamian treasures were dispersed years ago to museums in the West. Many of the objects in the show are on loan from the British Museum. We might have been guilty of looting ourselves, but at least the items in our care are safe and accessible to all. [Telegraph (UK)]. REVIEW: The recent looting of the museum in Baghdad gives the show Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. From the Mediterranean to the Indus—which recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a contemporary impact rarely found in exhibitions of ancient art. The anxiety created by this looting goes well beyond a concern over the Army’s inability to defend the museum or the larger failure to protect ancient sites around the globe. It evokes a more fundamental crime, calling to mind the violation of a birthplace—or, to put it differently, the robbing of the “cradle” of civilization. The societies that began to develop about 5,000 years ago in what is now Iraq seem only a step away from the origins of mankind. They occupy a mysterious and important place in our imagination, one that lies somewhere between the shadow of myth and the reality of historical time. You don’t drive Humvees through the Garden of Eden. You don’t plunder your family’s tomb. Organized by Joan Aruz, curator in charge of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Met, “First Cities” contains around 400 works from more than 50 museums around the world. It concentrates on the cultural evolution of the early cities that emerged between the Tigris and Euphrates, but also includes material from lands throughout the region that were affected by developments in Mesopotamia, ranging from the Aegean to the Indus Valley. On display are marvelous examples of statuary, jewelry, architectural elements, cylinder seals, and various decorative objects. Some of the most dramatic and memorable works in the show come from the Royal Cemetery at Ur. The British Museum, for example, has lent the legendary Standard of Ur from the Early Dynastic Period (2550–2400 B.C.), a richly colored and geometrically designed mosaic that on one side commemorates a battle—with chariots and corpses—and on the other celebrates a banquet replete with the bounty of the land. What may surprise many people is that well before the Old Testament was written, the main elements of art were already largely in place. These city-dwellers worked in a sophisticated manner with narrative, metaphor, and symbol. They were attracted to both geometric and biomorphic design. They used art to celebrate spiritual and material ends. Some of their figures were more abstract, some more natural, in appearance. (The noble figures created at the close of the third millennium B.C. in the city-state of Lagash are early miracles of observation.) At the same time, the art retains a rough-hewn vitality rarely found in more advanced societies. The animals often seem partly human, the humans partly animal. The hammered gold evokes the sun, the lapis lazuli the sea, the carnelian the blood and fire of life. The extraordinary crown and “cape of beads” found in the tomb of a woman who was probably a Sumerian queen —her name was Puabi—still pulse with energy. Buried in the nearby tomb of a king was a magnificent lyre adorned with a bull’s head, which rested on the heads of three women who were probably sacrificed as part of the royal entourage. In the afterlife, they would fashion music from a divine bull. The art of “First Cities” arouses in contemporary viewers a strangely complex sensation of time. The objects are obviously ancient, but they can’t just be called old. In terms of the evolution of art, they are actually young and fresh. No intelligent person should romanticize early urban society, of course, but only those with impoverished imaginations will fail to feel the pull of such beginnings. In certain respects, we are older today than the ancients. We know the weight of time and the burden of history. [New York Magazine]. REVIEW: The “Great Lyre” of Ur (2550-2400 BC), with its golden bull’s head, is just one of the dazzling objects on display at a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But next to it is a photo of another one of these extremely rare lyres. It has gone missing, part of the looting that has taken place across Iraq since the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Similar photos appear throughout the Met’s latest blockbuster exhibition, “The Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium BC from the Mediterranean to the Indus,” which opened Thursday and continues through Aug. 17. They serve as reminders of magnificent ancient art that may be lost forever. Mesopotamia, a region roughly the equivalent of modern Iraq, is the focus of the Met show, which aims to spotlight this “cradle of civilization” and demonstrate how it influenced early cultures as far away as Greece in the West and the Indus River Valley in the East, in what is today Pakistan. The exhibit has been a bittersweet undertaking for curator Joan Aruz, who has spent the past five years planning to display some 400 objects from 16 countries and nearly 50 public and private collections. Her “great hope” was to help people appreciate the value of this art, she says. “Now it’s taken on an even greater significance because it’s a way of keeping the story [of Iraq’s looted art] in the public eye, a way of educating the public to what is lost.” The objects in the show “stand almost as a tribute,” she says, “because they remind you of what is not there.” Though the show is impressive in its breadth, “the major collection was in Iraq,” she says, including countless “absolute masterpieces that are irreplaceable.” In addition, new undocumented objects were coming into Iraqi museums constantly, so just what has been lost may never be fully understood. “If the loss is as great as we think it is…it just appears that this is a major, major destruction.” Martha Sharp Joukowsky, a professor of archaeology and art at Brown University in Providence, R.I., estimates that perhaps “90 percent” of the ancient findings that have been unearthed in Iraq were still in the country before the recent looting. The materials in the Met show, she says, represent those collected before laws changed to require artifacts to remain in their country of origin. In retrospect, Ms. Joukowsky says, one can say, “Thank God!” some objects had gone abroad. In the late 1990s, the Met’s director asked his curators to propose shows that could celebrate the coming of the third millennium A.D. in 2001. “I started to think about what was going on in the third millennium BC, which was such a seminal period in the development of the world,” Ms. Aruz says. Looking at the time when the first cities were created, when writing was invented, when the first works of art were made to honor gods and kings, would enable visitors to “understand a little more about ourselves – and a lot more about the ancient world that seems so remote.” She has divided the exhibition into two parts. The first examines the culture of Mesopotamia (Iraq) in 3000-2000 BC The second looks at the cross-fertilization that occurred between Mesopotamia and surrounding cultures, showing how they stimulated one another. Long before the establishment of legendary trade routes like the Silk Road, Mesopotamia was reaching out for new goods and ideas. An example of this can be seen in the development of “intercultural” objects, like images of the lion and bull, symbols of power and fertility, that emerged in the region. Aruz couldn’t obtain loans from either Iraq or its neighbor Iran, but other countries in in the Middle East and Asia did participate, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. Objects in the show include sculptures, jewelry, vessels, weapons, cylinder seals, and tablets. Formed from materials such as gold, silver, and semi-precious stones, they served to adorn homes, temples, royal courts, and burial chambers. Many of the objects are being displayed away from their home institutions for the first time. The British museum lent the famous “Standard of Ur,” a wooden box inlaid with mosaics that depict a Sumerian king as a priest and mediator responsible for the welfare of his people. The life-sized “Seated Statue of Gudea: Architect With Plan” (2090 BC), on loan from the Louvre, represents a ruler of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash in a pious posture, with a layout of a temple in his lap and his hands joined in a position of honor for the deity Ningirsu. The importance of the Mesopotamian culture represented in the show can’t be overemphasized, Joukowsky says. Mesopotamia is the source of the earliest cuneiform writing and the earliest laws, as well as the first monumental architecture. It’s the setting for much of the history that takes place in the Bible’s book of Genesis, including Noah’s flood. Mesopotamia is “the beginning of it all,” she says. [Christian Science Monitor]. REVIEW: The Metropolitan prepares a major new exhibition, “Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus.” It is to open May 8. About 400 rare works of art will be displayed, many of them from Iraq, though no works from the Baghdad museum were available. More than 230 scholars of ancient Mesopotamian history from 25 countries have signed a petition to be delivered to the United Nations on Monday. Drafted by researchers at Yale and Oxford Universities, the petition urges military leaders and postwar administrators of Iraq to safeguard cultural artifacts “for the future of the Iraqi people and for the world.” American archaeologists said that they had lost contact with their Iraqi colleagues in recent weeks. The last they had heard was that several antiquities officials and researchers had barricaded themselves in the Baghdad museum. They had hidden some of the most precious artifacts elsewhere, and protected others with sandbags. At last report, just before the outbreak of war, Dr. Russell said that Dr. Donny George, the research director of antiquities who is known for his heft, was seen to be thin and exhausted from the stress of preparing to defend the museum. Of the several thousand artifacts at the museum, Dr. Russell said some of his favorites were the stone birds from Nemrik, north of Mosul. The site, investigated in the last decade, is one of the world’s first villages, from about 8,000 B.C. The museum’s collection includes a cult vase from Uruk decorated with some of the earliest narrative pictures from the Sumerian culture. The pictures show fields and flocks and people making offerings to the goddess Inanna, the Sumerian version of Ishtar. “That’s a beautiful, important piece,” Dr. Russell said. REVIEW: “To overturn the appointed times, to obliterate the divine plans, the storms gather to strike like a flood. [The gods] An, Enlil, Enki, Ninhursag have decided its fate—to overturn the divine powers of Sumer…to destroy the city…to take kingship away from the Land [of Sumer]…The people, in their fear, breathed only with difficulty. The storm immobilized them…There was no return for them, the time of captivity did not pass…The extensive countryside was destroyed, no one moved about there. The dark time was roasted by hailstones and flames. The bright time was wiped out by a shadow. On that bloody day mouths were crushed, heads were crashed. On that day heaven rumbled, the earth trembled, the storm worked without respite…The foreigners in the city even chased away its dead…There were corpses floating in the Euphrates, brigands roamed the roads…In Ur people were smashed as if they were clay pots. The statues that were in the treasury were cut down….” The Lamentation Over Sumer and Ur, from which these passages come, was composed four thousand years ago in the aftermath of an invasion by the Elamites of Iran that brought the Sumerian kingdom of Ur to an ignominious end. This was a fittingly dramatic turning point for what our calendar marks as the transition from the third to the second millennium BC. After some twenty years of incursions, in 2004 BC the Iranian army finally breached the walls of Ur and carried off its last king, Ibbi-Suen, into the mountains: “like a bird that has flown its nest,” as the poet puts it, “he shall never return to his city.” The rich cities of Sumer, in present-day southern Iraq, were overrun and from the ensuing desolation emerged a vivid literature of lamentation that bewailed the destruction of temples, cities, agriculture, and all civilized life. It is a cruel mirroring of history that the third millennium of our own era should likewise have begun with an invasion of Sumer, one in which the culture of Iraq is again under dire threat. And within weeks of the fall of Baghdad the most ambitious exhibition ever mounted on the art of the very cities sacked by the Elamites opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition served to highlight both the extraordinary richness of Mesopotamia’s cultural heritage and the corresponding magnitude of the loss suffered when many unique and supremely important works of art were stolen from the Iraq National Museum between April 10 and 12 of this year. After much initial confusion, the scale and significance of the looting are gradually becoming clearer. Initial estimates of 170,000 missing objects were hasty extrapolations from reports that “everything” was gone. It soon turned out that many of the showcases were empty because the museum’s staff had removed the important objects to more secure locations, and that most of the collection was still intact (more or less) in the storerooms. This created something of a backlash. Having initially denounced the scandal of troops being stationed at the oil ministry while one of the world’s great museums was looted—“protecting Iraq’s oil but not its cultural motherlode”—much of the press has since played down the disaster as overblown. This is not the case. The quantities of works stolen were substantial and, more to the point, their cultural significance immense. A recent official estimate is that around forty major works were taken from the main public galleries, including the Warka Vase (later returned) and the Warka Head—two of the greatest masterpieces of Sumerian art, found at the site of ancient Uruk (modern Warka) in Southern Iraq. They also included Assyrian ivories, a large copper sculpture of a hero, and a number of other irreplaceable works. Much more was taken from the storerooms, including nearly all of the museum’s collection of cylinder seals—some 4,800 small stone cylinders carved in intaglio with miniature figured and decorative scenes that were rolled over damp clay tablets. The finest of these are exquisite and powerful works of art. Also gone are much jewelry, sculpture, metalwork, and ceramics. At the urging of mosque leaders and museum authorities, some objects were brought back in the days immediately after the looting, and many more have since been seized both in Iraq and in customs and police operations in Jordan, Italy, Britain, and New York. As of July 11, a total of 13,515 objects had been confirmed as stolen, of which 10,580 were still missing, including all but a handful of the most important works. As terrible as these losses are, even greater damage has been done in the months since the fall of Baghdad by the extensive, organized, and in some cases mechanized plundering of archaeological sites in the Sumerian heartland of southern Iraq. After the first Gulf War there were reports of illicit excavations and of unusual quantities of “fresh” artifacts reaching Western markets. During the past four months clandestine digging on a much greater scale by AK-47-toting bands has again been rampant at several important Sumerian sites. Some are already almost entirely gone; others are riddled with trenches and tunnels. “The looters stop at nothing,” says Pietro Cordone, head of cultural affairs in the Coalition Provisional Authority, “they use trucks, excavators, and armed guards to steal objects of great value without being disturbed. We’ve tried everything to end this systematic pillaging, military patrols at the site and helicopter overflights, but so far we haven’t been successful.” Officials on the ground still report a lack of funding for the basic necessities of site protection—guards, vehicles, and guns. This is where the Bremer administration, UNESCO, and other supranational organizations should concentrate their resources, shutting down the looting at its source. What has happened in recent months is already among the worst mass desecrations of cultural sites in our lifetime, perhaps the worst. If more time is lost before the sites are protected effectively we shall be in need of a lamentation over Sumer and Baghdad worthy of the Sumerian poets. The cities of Mesopotamia (Greek for “between the rivers,” corresponding to modern-day Iraq plus easternmost Syria) lie mostly under rounded mounds of weathered mudbrick, the inconspicuous tombstones of deserted settlements that can easily be taken for features of the natural landscape. Apart from a few better-preserved ziggurats (staged temple-towers), there is little in Iraq to compare with the dramatic standing monuments of the Mediterranean, and it was therefore visited and studied much less by the early pilgrims and antiquarians who, from medieval times, reopened Western eyes to the Holy Land and Egypt. All this changed in the 1840s when northern Iraq became the scene of the most substantial excavations ever undertaken in the Near East. The French were first in the field in 1842 at Nineveh and, from 1843, at Khorsabad, the eighth-century-BC capital of the Assyrian king Sargon II. But they were soon outshone and outmaneuvered by a young British traveler and adventurer, Austen Henry Layard. En route to Ceylon, the twenty-eight-year-old Layard became intrigued with stories of buried remains in the mounds near present-day Mosul which turned out to be ancient Nineveh and Nimrud, the two most fabled capitals of the Assyrians. Within days of starting the digging at Nimrud, Layard hit upon the first of eight palaces of the Assyrian kings dating from the ninth to seventh centuries BC, which he and his assistant eventually uncovered there and at Nineveh. In amazement they found room after room lined with carved stone bas-reliefs of demons and deities, scenes of battle, royal hunts and ceremonies; doorways flanked by enormous winged bulls and lions; and, inside some of the chambers, tens of thousands of clay tablets inscribed with the curious, and then undeciphered, cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) script—the remains, as we now know, of scholarly libraries assembled by the Assyrian kings Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal. By later standards it was treasure-hunting rather than archaeology, but after a few years of excavation in difficult political and financial circumstances, Layard had succeeded in resurrecting for the first time one of the great early cultures of Mesopotamia. He never made it to Ceylon. The most spectacular finds were shipped back to the British Museum, where the Victorian fascination with the Bible assured these illustrations of Old Testament history a rapturous reception. By the early 1850s, progress in reading the Assyrian-Babylonian script had allowed names and events to be attached to the images, among them Jehu, the ninth-century-BC king of Israel (shown paying obeisance to King Shalmanesser III), and the siege of Lachish in Judah by Sennacherib. Layard’s account of his discoveries, Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), soon had a huge success: “the greatest achievement of our time,” according to Lord Ellesmere, president of the Royal Asiatic Society. “No man living has done so much or told it so well.” An abridged edition (1852) prepared for the series “Murray’s Reading for the Rail” became an instant best seller: the first year’s sales of eight thousand (as Layard remarked in a letter) “will place it side by side with Mrs. Rundell’s Cookery.” Work on the decipherment of the language of the Assyrian inscriptions was making good progress while Layard was in the field, partly owing to his discoveries. But the key to cracking the cuneiform script lay elsewhere—in a trilingual inscription of the Persian king Darius carved on the face of a cliff at Behistun in western Iran around 520 BC. (In all, the cuneiform script was used for over 3,500 years.) One of the three versions of the text used a much simpler cuneiform script with only around forty characters, which scholars soon realized must be alphabetic. Even before Layard’s excavations, by making some inspired guesses about likely titles and names, they had deciphered this script and shown the language to be Old Persian, thus of the Indo-Iranian language family (a close relative of Indo-European). Having determined the general meaning of the three texts, scholars now confirmed that the second version, written in the much more complex cuneiform script (some three hundred characters) of the tablets from Assyria, was, as many had suspected, a Semitic language (i.e., cognate with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic)—what we now know as Babylonian.6Many texts could be read reasonably well by the time Layard’s finds started arriving in England, but the decipherment was not officially declared to have been achieved until 1857, when four of the leading experts (including W.H. Fox-Talbot, one of the inventors of photography) submitted independent translations of a new inscription and all were shown to be in broad agreement. After two and a half millennia, the Assyrians had again found their voice. What the tablets said continued to cause a stir, especially when it threw light on the Bible. The most celebrated episode took place in 1872 when a young curator at the British Museum, George Smith, found among the tablets from Nineveh one that bore the story of how a Babylonian hero had survived a devastating flood: On looking down the third column [of the tablet], my eye caught the statement that the ship rested on the mountains of Nizir, followed by the account of the sending forth of the dove, and its finding no resting-place and returning. I saw at once that I had discovered a portion at least of the Chaldean account of the Deluge. A Babylonian Noah! The London Daily Telegraph offered to fund an expedition to look for the missing part of the tablet. Smith duly set out, and on only his fifth day of searching through the spoil heaps of Nineveh—with luck that must have seemed divinely inspired—found a tablet fragment that filled most of the gap in the story. The texts from Assyria were written in two closely related Semitic languages: Assyrian and Babylonian, spoken by the ancient inhabitants of northern and southern Mesopotamia respectively. As the prestigious language of higher learning, Babylonian was also used in an archaizing dialect throughout the land for literary works and royal commemorative inscriptions. So far things were much as an erudite Victorian would have expected from his reading of the Bible, where Ashur (the name of the first Assyrian capital and of the nation’s tutelary deity) appears among the descendants of Noah’s son Shem (Genesis 10:22). But the Nineveh tablets included also some bilingual texts in which the Babylonian version was accompanied by a totally different and so far mysterious language. This used the same script as Babylonian-Assyrian (and could therefore, to some extent, be read phonetically) but the language bore no relation to them, or indeed to any other known tongue. Some scholars even argued that it did not represent a real language at all but was a secret code for recording sacred knowledge by the Babylonian priests. The issue was put to rest in the 1870s, when excavations by the French at Tello (ancient Girsu) in the south of Iraq uncovered sculptures and other objects bearing unilingual inscriptions in this language, in a clearly much earlier stage of the script (now dated around 2600–2100 BC). In the 1880s an American team began working at Nippur (which turned out to be the Sumerians’ religious capital) and found thousands more tablets recording (as we now know) literary, mythological, mathematical, and other compositions, the refuse from scribal schools from around 1700 BC. The Sumerians, creators of the earliest of all Mesopotamian civilizations, had now arrived. But who exactly were they? Like the later Assyrians and Babylonians, the Sumerians are defined for us by their language: to be a Sumerian, whatever it meant five thousand years ago, today means a Sumerian-speaker. The language itself is not inflected as Semitic and Indo-European languages are, but agglutinative: grammatical and other elements are added on as prefixes and suffixes. Its slow and painstaking linguistic analysis has been one of the triumphs of modern philology. The texts can now be translated with reasonable confidence, though many uncertainties remain. From the archaeological remains of those who wrote and spoke Sumerian it has been possible to reconstruct much of how they lived, their arts and crafts, religion, history, and so on. But there is virtually no evidence that bears directly on the Sumerians’ ethnic or racial identity; nor indeed is it clear that these anthropological categories are really useful at this remote date. The early Near East was polyglot and multicultural. Mesopotamian scribes of the third millennium spoke and read Sumerian, Akkadian (the Semitic ancestor-tongue of Babylonian and Assyrian), and sometimes a third language as well. Shulgi, king of the Sumerian city of Ur and a great patron of learning, claims to have spoken no fewer than five. The texts speak of interpreters (including one for “Meluhhans,” i.e., people from the Indus Valley in Pakistan), and we see parents with foreign names giving their children Sumerian or Akkadian names so they will blend in. Many times in Mesopotamian history invading peoples were absorbed into the existing population and culture. Clearly language and culture mattered, but just as clearly people moved around and were able to deal with other ways of speaking and living. The term “Sumer” derives from “shumeru,” the name for Sumer used by the Akkadians, who lived alongside the Sumerians in the heartland itself (the region from Nippur south to the head of the Gulf) and predominated just to the north in Akkad (northern Babylonia, around modern Baghdad). The Sumerians themselves called their land kiengi(r), or just “the land,” and described themselves as “the black-headed ones.” When and from where they first settled near the Euphrates was much debated a generation ago, but without any clear consensus. People had settled the region and were growing crops by irrigation before 5000 BC; the best we can say is that the urbanized people who, before 3000 BC, first wrote Sumerian emerged out of this agricultural way of life and tradition without any obvious break. That story is what school textbooks like to call the birth of civilization, and though, like all clichés, this is an oversimplification, the uniqueness of what happened in early Sumer and its significance for world history can hardly be exaggerated. The main source of this revolution seems to have been the city of Uruk (biblical Erech, modern Warka) in southern Sumer, which by circa 3400 BC had become the largest permanent urban settlement ever created. At its core lay two monumental temple complexes dedicated to the sky-god Anu and the goddess of love and war, Inana. In and around these temples were found what are still the earliest writings from anywhere in the world, the pictographic system of recording on clay tablets that evolved into cuneiform, along with sophisticated architectural, technological, and artistic traditions illustrated by the Warka Vase and Head. Life in and around the temples was supported by well-coordinated religious, social, and presumably political administrations. As more recent excavation has proved, the early Sumerians were also active colonizers, if not imperialists. In the centuries before 3000 BC, colonies and outposts of the “Uruk culture” were established hundreds of miles away, along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Syria and Turkey, and in western Iran, presumably to procure metals, stones, timber, and other raw materials. It is at this time also that Sumerian cylinder seals, artistic motifs, and other cultural traits are found in Egypt, suggesting some Mesopotamian stimulus in the emergence of a distinctive culture under the first dynasties there. How the Uruk network was achieved and maintained we do not know, but its success cannot be doubted: by the early third millennium the city had grown into a massively walled metropolis of over 1,300 acres. The earliest writings provide a window into the minutiae of everyday life in early Sumer for which nothing else in the ancient world can prepare us. The earliest pictographic texts (circa 3400–3200 BC) deal primarily with agricultural administration—lists of livestock, disbursements of grain, and so on. But already there are a few lists of types of animate and inanimate objects—evidence of the Sumerians’ peculiar predilection for categorizing the universe. The script had taken on its distinctive wedge-shaped character by the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period (circa 2900–2350 BC) during which other genres gradually made their appearance: literary texts, proverbs, hymns and cultic compositions, and historical narratives about border disputes between rival city-states such as Lagash, Umma, Ur, and Kish. Kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur (circa 2112–2004 BC), the last and most glorious flourishing of Sume-rian culture, were great patrons of literature and learning, none more so than the multilingual Shulgi—“in my palace no one in conversation switches to another language as quickly as I do”—who claims to have “learned the scribal art from the tablets of Sumer and Akkad…. The academies are never to be altered,” he declared, “the places of learning shall never cease to exist.” It was probably in these academies that much Sumerian literature was standardized into something like the form we see it in the students’ exercises from Nippur three hundred years later. Scholarship of the past fifty years has done much to bring this sophisticated world back to life in epics of heroic bravery and combat (most famously Gilgamesh); the loves and rivalries of the gods; the travails of their favorites on earth; proverbs and fables; and in royal and sacral hymns of praise. Underneath it lies a much weightier mass of mundane ephemera from everyday life—hundreds of thousands of texts that make Mesopotamia the most fertile ground for social and economic history of any ancient culture. “Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium BC from the Mediterranean to the Indus closed” on August 17 but its beautiful and scholarly catalog preserves much that was exciting about it. Having sold some six thousand copies it may also have done more than any book since Leonard Woolley’s Ur of the Chaldees (1929) to raise public consciousness of the ancient Near East in this country, and at an especially important time. The cultural heart of the show was Mesopotamia, which is also treated in far greater depth than its neighbors in the catalog. Despite its title, the exhibition was about much more than art (many objects qualified at best as craft, but are important for other reasons) and rather more than cities (many works came from towns and small trading entrepôts). But as a leitmotif for the exhibition, the city was the right choice. Urbanism lay at the heart of what was new about culture at this time; and cities were the source of much of the greatest art, which provides the easiest point of entry for visitors today, many of whom will be unfamiliar with this region. This unfamiliarity was no doubt a large part of the exhibition’s raison d’être. Indeed, in some ways, the ancient Near East is a more exotic and alien land to New Yorkers today than it was to Londoners in Victorian times—certainly no subsequent writer has had anything like Layard’s success—and popular appreciation of its artistic achievements has fallen even further behind that of Egypt and the classical world. The first room of the exhibition was enough to show how unbalanced this perception is. Already in the Uruk Period (circa 3400–3000 BC), the arts of Sumer and neighboring Proto-Elam (southwestern Iran) have the confidence and refinement of a style and approach to art that are no longer groping toward something else but have arrived at a visual language fully adequate to their creators’ expressive and aesthetic intentions. (This cannot so confidently be said of Egyptian art of the same era.) Two supremely beautiful sculptures from Proto-Elam—a lioness-demon with her clenched paws braced against her chest (see illustration on page 18), and a silver kneeling bull in human attitude, dressed and holding up a vase with his front hoofs—are gems of early naturalistic fantasy. Miniature, low-relief versions of these same subjects on cylinder seals (which become essentially two-dimensional drawings when rolled over the wet clay) show also how the idiom had been carefully adapted to the different technical and aesthetic requirements of each medium. The rich finds from the Royal Tombs of Ur, dating from the mid-third millennium BC, are perhaps the most celebrated Mesopotamian discovery of the twentieth century. They include jewelry, lyres, vessels, and other objects all resplendently decorated in gold, lapis lazuli, and carnelian. (See the Rearing Goat with a Flowering Plant on page 20.) Despite their glittering appeal as treasure, however, the artistic quality rarely rises to the level of the finest cylinder seals, where we see well-muscled heroes grappling with bull-men and lions all in a space no bigger than one inch by two. The dumpy proportions and naive-looking expressions of figures in contemporary sculptures, relief carvings, and inlay work evoke a curiously unreal, toy-like world, even when they are waging war (as in the battle scenes on the Standard of Ur and Stela of the Vultures). The wide-eyed worshiper statuettes of this period likewise leave us wondering whether, for regular-sized art, we have yet to discover the finest works by the most accomplished court artists. There can be no doubt, on the other hand, that the succeeding Akkadian Period (circa 2350–2150 BC) was one of the pinnacles of early artistic achievement anywhere. A more intense naturalism of human and animal forms is immediately apparent, together with an adventurous expansion of composition and subject matter (in narrative, and especially mythological, scenes) and greater technical mastery in working metals and hard stones, which are now polished to a high sheen. It is a tantalizing thought that the glimpses we get from the surviving bas-reliefs of battle scenes and prisoners, bronze portrait heads of bearded kings, and mythological narratives on cylinder seals are surely only a foretaste of what lies ahead if the imperial capital of Akkad is ever found. This sculptural tradition reaches its climax in the series of statues of Gudea and other rulers of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash around 2100 BC that were the most spectacular finds from the early French excavations at present-day Tello in Iraq. Arriving at the Louvre a generation after the fearsome depictions of the Assyrian kings in battle, these engaging images of pious stewardship suggested an altogether more humane and appealing world; they have rightly come to be recognized among the masterpieces of ancient art. Gudea is usually shown standing, wearing a cap with rows of curls (fur?), his hands clasped at his chest in dutiful worship of Ningirsu (later known as Ninurta, the Babylonian war-god), his tutelary deity. One famous variant shows him as an architect, seated with the plan of Ningirsu’s temple on his lap. This is an image of the ruler as mediator between earth and heaven, as shepherd of his flock, as architect of their prosperous future—almost a Mesopotamian buddha. Not surprisingly, it has struck a chord with museumgoers, and especially with artists, ever since. The world of the ancient Near East outside Mesopotamia was a mosaic of disparate languages and cultures, but one showing evidence of extensive contact across very large distances. Although many of the languages remain undeciphered or unknown, and many of the cultures are defined solely by their archaeological remains, we can trace in considerable detail the traded goods, artistic borrowings, and other cultural exchanges between peoples from Pakistan all the way to the Aegean. It is a surprisingly large stage of interaction, one not matched until the emergence of the Persian Achaemenid empire founded by Cyrus the Great some two thousand years later. As the subtitle indicated, one aim of the exhibition was to place the civilizations of the Near East, including Mesopotamia, within this broader setting. Fifty years ago this undertaking would have had a very clear story line: it would show how civilization, once born in Mesopotamia, was diffused to Egypt and eventually right across the Old World: ex oriente lux, “from the East, light.” The argument was founded on findings of distinctively Mesopotamian artifacts and bureaucratic practices (writing, sealing, etc.) in Syria, Egypt, Iran, and even the Indus Valley; more rarely those of these other cultures in Mesopotamia. In some cases there was clear evidence of trade (especially along the Gulf between Mesopotamia and the Indus, and northwest with Syria); in others the suggestion of Sumerian colonies (Syria and Iran). But often, as with Egypt, quite what these “cultural contacts” amounted to in human experience remained unclear. While the evidence for such a diffusionist picture has multiplied dramatically, however, interpretation has headed in precisely the other direction—away from cross-cultural influence toward independent invention and regional distinctiveness. Partly this resulted from the realization that the idea of diffusion as a passive, one-way transfer of cultural capital from one place to another was flawed; even where influence can be demonstrated it is a multidirectional and selective process in which “peripheries” often played as large and active a part as “cores.” The Egyptians adopted the idea of writing from the Sumerians (if indeed they did so) because it suited their own rulers’ political and social purposes. Many other cultures chose not to do so—not because they didn’t know about it or were not smart enough, but because they did not have, or did not wish to have, the political and social institutions within which writing could function as a useful instrument of coercion and control. But this shift, it must be said, also has more than a little to do with fashion in academic thinking, in particular the growing resistance to seeing cultures in “primary” and “secondary” tiers. If there was a quibble with the exhibition as a whole it was its reluctance, having presented the evidence, to grapple with the changing interpretations that scholars have placed upon it. The catalog ends appropriately with a discussion of the Mesopotamian cultural tradition and its legacy through the Hebrew Bible to the West—the Sumero-Babylonian stories that parallel, to varying degrees, the Creation, the Garden of Eden, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. The thoroughly pagan Gilgamesh, Sumer’s most famous son, has been much harder to identify in art than his literary renown would suggest, and there were no certain images of him in the exhibition. A tragic hero whose great achievements as king of Uruk still cannot bring him the one thing he truly wants—immortal life—Gilgamesh is a sympathetic and human foil to the Egyptian kings who revel so comfortably in their assured divinity. He has of course had an immortality of sorts in the legacy that this exhibition triumphantly proclaimed. We can only hope that the violence still being inflicted on it in the mounds of Iraq will soon be brought to an end. [New York Review of Books]. READER REVIEWS: REVIEW: A major overview of a vital stage in the development of art and culture. And unlike so many books it does not focus solely on the Middle East (as the British Museum still tends to) and is written so that an amateur with limited knowledge but great interest can get to grips with
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