Antiquities

Middle Eastern Antiquities

Their pottery is very simple, usually wheel-thrown, of cream colour, very thin and never glazed. In the earliest periods pottery was coiled and painted with back oxides with figures of birds, mammals and people in simplified form. Their skills in pottery allowed the development of clay tablets as writing materials. The tablets are inscribed with linear abstractions of pictorial signs in the early Jemdet Nasr period, and later the syllabic signs are still further abstracted and impressed by a triangular stylus, which made cuneiform [wedge-shaped] marks. Often their building bricks were stamped with inscriptions giving details of the name of the building and the city ruler who made it.

The vigorous art style of Sumerian carving reflects their quality of energetic advancement in the arts and sciences. They were great poets and competent astrologers, altogether a people who began many things which were the true roots of civilized living.

The Akkadians, a Semitic people who were to found Babylon and many another great city state, succeeded the Sumerians in Iraq in about 2350 B.C. They were also living in a bronze age, and their metal statuettes, less commonly in repoussé work than the earlier Sumerian works, have great dignity. The Akkadians also made fine jewelry in gold, usually with symbolic animal ornaments, and elegant and efficient pottery, all wheel-thrown but not of great variety. In their great days they carved relief figures of gods on basalt boundary stones which often include long cuneiform inscriptions in the Akkadian language, which is akin to Hebrew. A special class of small objects is formed by the cylinder seals carved in intaglio and perforated so that they could be rolled over clay to leave a relief design and often a short inscription. The seals are carved in a variety of hard stones and are testimony to the great skill of the engravers. Weapons, such as swords, arrow-heads and mace-heads, are usually made of cast bronze.

These arts of the Akkadians were greatly revived in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., particularly in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, and were then more decorative and more numerous because of the riches of the wider world of those times. However, the earlier epoch at Mari on the Euphrates produced fine painted and encaustic tiles which compare well with the blue and yellow glazed tiles of Nebuchadnezzar's city.

To the west of the rivers of Iraq were deserts crossed by the trade routes of the fertile crescent. The peoples of this region, the Syrians and Canaanites, spoke Semitic dialects, founded great trading cities and were among the wealthiest people of the world in the second millennium B.C. However, the earliest of all cities was made in their region by the people of Jericho, who, even before the invention of pottery, were using a kind of gypsum plaster to model realistic faces on human skulls in the fifth millennium B.C. The earliest people making pottery in Syria were adept at carving and painting designs on pottery and on walls. Frescoes of bulls and birds decorated temples as well as pots. Seals were made of [p. 35] Hard stones and of shell. A number of small idols with huge eyes come from Tell Brak in the north.

The coastal peoples of Palestine were probably the first makers of glass, about 2000 B.C. They acquired great skill and sold the beautiful bottles and phials to Egypt and Babylon. The glass is a soda-sand mixture and very light in weight. It is mostly highly coloured even sometimes displaying millefiori techniques. However, clear glass developed later and was always unusually good in form. Also from coastal Palestine come fine carvings in ivory, notably those produced by the Phoenicians, and many bronze weapons and figurines. Perhaps the greatest Semitic achievement was the development of an alphabet in about 1400 B.C., cuneiform in the north, but linear [derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics] in the south. It is to be seen painted on potsherds, and sometimes inscribed on rock slabs, and even on some Phoenician sarcophagi.

A very different world of culture arose to the north east of Mesopotamia during the third millennium B.C. This included hill peoples who made coiled buff pottery and vases of stone; they extended in various small groups as far as Baluchistan. These hill peoples seem to have had a considerable influence on the development of the Indus Valley culture centered around two great brick-built cities at Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. Pottery from the Indus Valley was mostly wheel-thrown, and washed over with a reddish-brown slip on which geometric patterns were painted in black. Bronze was known, and very rare small figurines were produced. There was also some stone carving. But the main artistic impulse in the Indus Valley seems to have centered on making small square seals, depicting rhinoceros, buffalo, elephant and occasionally a seated god. Many have a few symbols from the still undeciphered script used in this ancient culture of between 2500 and 1800 B.C.

There can be little doubt that the Indus Valley cultures developed under the influences coming from the wide region from northern Turkey and Iran through to Baluchistan. The region was inhabited by tribes who may have been seasonally nomadic. They produced pottery, often of great beauty though nearly always monochrome. The ceramics of Amlash in Eastern Turkey have become famous, but there were many other regions which produced good work, and the small bronzes from the northern part of the region, especially from Ordos, inner Mongolia, are works of art of great beauty.

The area that extended from Turkey to Iran was one of the earliest homes of art. There were many areas in which coiled and painted pottery was produced, and the painted walls of ­atal HÄyÄk [sixth and seventh millennia B.C.] discovered in recent years, have shown that the Mesolithic population had great artistic skills. Into a culturally divided land the Hittites moved from the east in about 1500 B.C. They settled in central Turkey, producing rather crude pottery but fine stone carvings, jewelry and cuneiform tablets. Later they were overthrown [c. 700 B.C.] and the range of cultures there and in Syria show considerable Assyrian influence.

In Iran, the great Achaemenid kings of the middle of the first millennium B.C. who built Persepolis brought a fine tradition of metalwork in arms and personal adornment. Silver and gold were much used for drinking vessels, and the art was spread by the Scythians to the shores of the Black Sea. The Persians used fine stone seals, some of them of roller type and all engraved with gods and animals. Indirectly this intaglio art influenced the origin of matrices for striking the earliest coins, made in Lydia before it fell under Persian dominion. In fact the whole of the Middle East was greatly influenced by Persian art, so we find ceramics, ivory, glass and jewels all showing Persian artistic influence. It even spreads to archaic Greece and founded a tradition which developed its own styles later. The later Persian art of the Sassanian period [c. 200 B.C.-A.D. 700] includes highly developed work in silver, glass and gold. It is near-realistic and very elegant and was a decisive influence on the development of Islamic arts.

Arabia, the cradle of Islam, had trading relations to east and west from time immemorial. The arts developed richly and fine pottery, ivory and stone carvings were made and exported throughout the first millennium B.C. Influences from both Egypt and Mesopotamia are noticeable. Later, in about the third century B.C., Hellenistic art had a greater influence through the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. In the incense-trading country on the shores of the Red Sea there was a developing kingdom [p. 36] of Saba [c. 1000 B .C.] which spread its influence northwards through the great Nabatean trading center of Petra. As befits a trading nation, the arts were not original but followed the patterns liked by most other peoples around the Levant. However, a group of towns in the south developed at about the same time an independent style in sculpture, partly because they used a fine hard stone, rather like alabaster, which could be made into portrait heads and carved tomb slabs. The style ranges in its expression from realism to severe formality and simplicity. Many of these slabs have inscriptions in linear and decorative characters which can be translated. Various later cultures have flourished in Arabia, and beautiful Islamic ceramics dating from the first quarter of the seventh century A.D. can be found, reflecting a local tendency to directness of statement but rather less rich in decoration than those from the surrounding areas. [pp. 35-37]