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

Chapter Six [cont.]

So far as we know, the most original and the most fruitful contribution to art was made by the metal-workers of Urartu. The technique of the Urartu bronzes shows that the craftsmen were complete masters of their craft, but in addition they were admirable designers and real artists. From sites in the neighbourhood of Lake Van there have been recovered quantities of vases, weapons and parts of furniture of bronze richly decorated sometimes with a combination of incised and repoussÚ work, sometimes cast; these are of different dates, as certified by inscriptions, some being of the eighth and many more of the seventh century, so that they illustrate the output of the Urartu workshops over a considerable period. It can safely be assumed that Urartu art had developed a good deal earlier than the time of Rusas I [c. 733-714 B.C.], the earliest of the kings to whose reigns any of the [p. 170] objects from Toprak-kale can be assigned; when Sargon II captured the Urartian town of Musasir in 714 B.C. the Assyrian soldiers were amazed at the quantity and quality of the metal-work which they carried off as booty--besides such vessels as are familiar to us there were even life-size cast statues and groups of figures which imply a higher degree of skill than we should otherwise have attributed to the Urartian school and, also, a very long experience. After Sargon's victory the level of art certainly declined, as is shown by the relatively poor workmanship of the decorated shields dedicated by King Rusas III [c. 600 B.C.], and with the destruction of the kingdom of Cyaxares the Mede in 585 B.C. it loses all importance.

Urartian metal-work was largely made for export. When Urartu, in the eighth century, extended its power over north Syria the value of that territorial expansion lay in the fact that it secured a harbour on the Mediterranean, and through the port at the mouth of the Orontes Urartian goods could go direct to Cyprus, to Greece and to Etruria. Actually, the finest examples of metal-work from Urartu that we possess were found not in the country of their origin but abroad, for instance, the great cauldron from the Barberini tomb, now in the Villa Giulia Museum in Rome; the base, with its winged human-headed lions confronting each other on either side of a sacred tree, shows the craftsman's skill in embossed work while the lion and [p. 172] gryphons' heads that project from the bowl are fine pieces of casting and thoroughly characteristic of Urartian art. It is worth noting here that in Etruria, side by side with such imported vessels, there are found local imitations, such as the cauldron from the Regolini Galassi tomb, in which the Etruscan smith has reproduced the original design exactly but has treated the details in a non-Asiatic fashion. The same thing occurs in other countries; thus at Gordion out of a hoard of bronze vessels some--ram or lion situlae and bowls with human busts at the handles--are attributed by the excavators to a local school of metallurgy, whereas others are described as Assyrian imports but appear rather to be of Urartu make. A very large proportion of the Urartu bronzes naturally went to the nearest and richest client, Assyria, either as merchandise or as tribute, and here a certain difficulty arises. Bronzes of 'Urartu' type are found in the ruins of Assyrian palaces and are figured on the wall reliefs and are taken to be characteristically Assyrian; decorative motives on 'Uratu' bronzes sometimes reproduce those of Assyrian carvings; thus while some authorities have maintained that Urartu art was a native aboriginal creation which influenced Assyrian art others, recalling the fact that the earliest Urartu inscription is Assyrian and that cuneiform continued to be the script of the country, regard Urartian art as merely modelled on that of Assyria: Barnett [6] follows a middle course but with a bias in favour of the latter view when he summarizes the matter by saying: "The Urartians owed something to the Empire of Hurri, but as much or more to Assyria."

In Chapter V attention was drawn to the skill and readiness of the Phoenician ivory-carvers in adopting foreign fashions to meet the demands of foreign markets. Precisely the same thing has been observed of the ivory-carvers of Alalakh in the fourteenth century B.C. It is safe to assume that the Urartian craftsman was no less adaptable. Considering the political supremacy of Assyria, especially after 714 B.C.--and it is to this late period that the bulk of our evidence for Assyrian influence on Urartian art belongs--it would be strange indeed if those craftsmen were not at pains to supply just the kind of thing that the Assyrians would appreciate. Nor would this be difficult for them. From Toprak-kale come caved ivories precisely of the style of those found at Nimrud; these are not likely to have been carved in Urartu, since the raw material would not have been available there; they are Syrian or Phoenician, like the Nimrud ivories, done for the Assyrian market in Assyrian style, purchased by the Urartians either [p. 173] for their own use or for inlay in the bronze furniture in which they specialized. Such objects as these would serve as models, and designs based upon them might well pass as Assyrian.

The fact is that Urartu had a style of its own, in part at least derived from old Anatolian traditions, in part peculiar. Their outstanding works are individual--nowhere else had there been produced the great bowls with animal protomoi on elaborately embossed bases or on tripods whose feet are animal feet--but for commercial reasons the Urartians were perfectly ready to borrow popular motives. The shields of King Argisti found at karmir-Blur with their concentric rows of animals might have been copied from, but might equally well have inspired, the Ionian shields carried by Greek mercenaries into Syria and Anatolia. The Russian excavators of Karmir-Blur emphasize the number of objects found there which show Scythian influence. Those wild horsemen from south Russia during their brief tenure of Anatolia made a marked impression on the country, so that even a village site such as Deve Höyük in northern Syria produced horse-bits and scabbard-chapes with characteristically Scythian ornaments. By no means a barbarous people, the Scythians, at the western end of the vast belt of steppe country, were neighbours of and mingled with the Mongols of the eastern end and fragments of silk found at Toprak-kale, the earliest yet known in the west, afford a link between Urartu and distant China. The Scythian motives adopted by Urartu account for the decoration of the great Treasure of Sakiz brought to light on the south shore of Lake Urmia. [7]

It was an eclectic art, but it reached a very high level. Although nearly [p. 174] all the objects now surviving are parts of vessels or of furniture [many belonged to a magnificent royal throne] and may therefore be classed as objects of applied art, yet in themselves they are admirable. Two bull's heads in the British Museum, from Toprak-Kale, are in their feeling for the force and dignity of the animal altogether in keeping with sympathetic treatment of the animal world which we have seen in the earliest Anatolian bronzes [from Alaca Höyük] and also in the early Sumerian works in bronze, silver or gold from the Royal Cemetery at Ur; conventions have changed indeed, and the heads are formalized as befits their purely decorative purpose, but the natural inspiration remains and stamps them as the work of a real artist. Not all are of the same merit; the head of a snarling lion is a grotesque--an ornament with no life behind it, and in those cases where the Assyrian element is strongest the artist is least successful; he elaborates his detail, but his heart was not in his work; his composite monsters, winged bull-women and bull-lions, leave us as cold as do the artificial demons of the Assyrian palace reliefs.

It was not merely metallurgical skill that made Urartu so important for the history of art. Had they been executants only the bronze-workers and goldsmiths of that remote region would have contributed little to the world, nor would they have done much more if they had only copied Assyrian models, for the palace art of Assyria did not survive the Assyrian empire. As it was, they influenced profoundly the art of Media and of the Achaemenids; their exported goods--vessels made after their own style, not borrowed from Assyria--coming overseas in the eighth century B.C. helped to mould the art of classical Greece, and at least as early as that--probably a century or more earlier--reached Etruria and inspired Etruscan art. It has been suggested [8] that Urartian smiths migrated to Etruria, perhaps when their own country was suffering from the effects of defeat; but even without that suggestion we cannot but admit the debt that Etruria owed to Urartu, at least so far as its metal-work was concerned.

Our knowledge of Anatolia in the early Iron Age is still sadly limited, and what we do possess in the way of illustration is not always easy to evaluate. The one or two examples of Urartu rock-carving, e.g., the Adilcevaz relief, are little better than provincial imitations of the Assyrian; but they are of late date, belonging to the decadence of Urartu, and they are not necessarily characteristic of Urartian sculpture. Similarly some examples of Lydian goldsmiths' work show admirable technique but are not distinctive stylistically; further discoveries [p. 175] may establish a conection with Ionia, but at present our material is too scanty to afford a basis for judgement. The treasures of King Croesus, which dazzled the imagination of the Greeks, may well have included objects of local make and style which served as models for the goldsmiths of other lands whose originality has not been called in question; but of such treasures there remains nothing. [p. 176]

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