The Art of The Middle East - Including
Persia, Mesopotamia and Palestine

Chapter Six [cont.]

Ceramics also have small importance, and such interest as there is is confined to the Hurri rather than to the Hittite element of the north Syrian population. In early times, that is, in the first half of the second millennium, there was in common use a painted pottery that deserves mention. The painted ornament was virtually confined to two types of vessel only, a small stemmed bowl and a slender-necked jug; the latter, generally having an eye painted on the spout and a band round the shoulder with metopes of bird or animal figures framed between geometrical panels, are well-designed and quite effective, and they continued in favour for a long time; but towards the middle of the millennium they lost quality and disappeared. Then, by a curious freak of fashion, their place was taken by the primitive hand-made bowls and jugs familiar to archaeologists as the characteristic pottery of Cyprus in the later Bronze Age; in fact it was not by origin a Cypriote ware at all but was made by some backward Anatolian tribe and exported first to north Syria and later to Cyprus, where it was freely imitated. The bowls are covered with a [p. 155] white meerschaum slip on which is a stitch pattern in black and red paint imitating the seams of a leather bowl: the jugs [for these vastly preponderate, though a few other shapes were made] are of grey clay with an almost black surface decorated either with simple stripes in red or white paint or with a curvilinear design, like horns, in applied slip; a favorite variant was a jug in the form of a cow. For some reason this foreign pottery, and local copies of it, obtained so great a vogue that in the second half of the fifteenth century it was the official table-ware of the king of Alalakh; but by 1400 B.C. it was being replaced by a different type which was essentially Hurri. This 'Nuzi' ware, which becomes a regular symbol of the authority of the Mitanni rulers, was made chiefly in one shape, a tall slender goblet with a very small foot; the vessel was covered with a white slip and then a part or the whole of the bowl's outer surface was painted black and on this black ground the decoration was done in white paint; the most common patterns were bands of scale-pattern or rosettes, guilloches, hatched triangles or birds. It is a gay and pleasing type of pottery which is found throughout the whole area from Nuzi, east of the middle Tigris, to the Amq plain in the neighbourhood of Antioch, and although there must have been several centres of manufacture [p. 155] it is remarkably uniform, the potters everywhere producing identical designs. The sole exception noted hitherto is Alalakh. There was more variety of form, bowls, jars, bottles and even zoomorphic vases being occasionally produced; but there is also a unique addition to the repertoire of design: some potter seems to have got hold of a Cretan Minoan vase decorated in the 'Palace' style of the seventeenth century, a veritable museum piece, and reproduced the pattern with minor modifications, wholesale. While these vases can scarcely claim the originality of the original 'Nuzi' ware, they must rank artistically as greatly superior to it, and their popularity at the time was well deserved.

The next phase in Syrian ceramics was the imitation of imported Mycenaean vases. Magnificent examples of the latter have been found at Ugarit, where there was a prosperous colony of Mycenaean merchants, but the local potters were not able to produce vessels of such high quality, nor did they discover the secret of the Mycenaean glaze; they copied, indifferently, only the cheaper and rougher wares. Because Mycenaean pottery came to Syria mainly from or via Cyprus, the Iron-Age pottery of the island shows a close connection with the Syro-Hittite school of ceramics. The graves of the Yunus cemetery at Carchemish, covering the period from c. 1200 to 600 B.C., contained quantities of cinerary urns and two-handled craters [sometimes on [p. 156] loop feet] whose form and geometric decoration at once recall Cypriote types, and juglets ornamented with concentric circles in black on red which are sometimes imports and sometimes well-made local imitations. If the level of ceramic art is not high, that may in part be due to the fact that this was a wealthy time, and for those who could afford luxury and appreciated art table-ware was not of clay but of metal. Bowls of gold-coloured bronze [i.e., of bronze alloyed with gold], plain or finely godrooned, came from the Yunus cemetery; beautiful examples of such were common at Deve Höyük in the Sajur valley, and since that was a poor sixth-century B.C. cemetery we must conclude that then, and probably in the preceding centuries, bronze bowls with godrooned, fluted, rosette or lotus patterns were in quite general use. One vase in precious metal, found in the Marash district and now in the British Museum, shows the type of work that the Syro-Hittite goldsmith could produce. This is a rhyton--and the rhyton was a typically Anatolian form from the earliest times--of which the cup part is of silver, a perfectly plain funnel which is bent round below virtually at a right angle; the stand is of gold, in the form of the fore part of a kneeling bull. The treatment of the bull is formal in the extreme; everything is reduced to a pattern which is scarcely related to life, and yet the figure gives an impression of latent force in repose and of dignity which suits its subject; this sublimation of the animal is really more appropriate to the stand of a drinking-horn than is the liveliness of the magnificent ibex of the silver rhyton from Erzincan now in the British Museum, a piece of later date and different origin but ultimately in much the same tradition. It is true that the bull shows some signs of Assyrian influence--particularly in the formal leaf-shaped muscle of the upper leg--and that the folds [p. 157] of the shoulder muscles find an analogy in the drawings of bulls on an embossed and engraved bronze shield from Van, in which connection it must be remembered that Marash had at one time in the eight century been subject to the kingdom of Urartu. The Syro-Hittite goldsmith, like his fellow-worker in sculpture, was subject to various influences--he did not work in a cultural vacuum--but he was faithful to his own forebears; and in this strong and rather heavy figure, with its technical skill and its sober repression of detail, as also in that combined use of different metals which first strikes us at Alaca Höyük, we can recognize the quality of the artist. [p. 158]

[Woolley, Leonard. The Art of The Middle East, including Persia, Mesopotamia and Palestine. New York: Crown Publishers. 1961.]