Page 161 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

PART two: the peripheral regions
interlocked spirals which is picked out with gold wire. The spirals recall Aegean designs,
and in Crete similar wide metal belts were worn. Polychromy in metals, although prob­
ably invented in Syria,62 is best known in the famous daggers from the shaft graves in
Mycenae. The cosmopolitan trade of the period is illustrated by the discoveries at Tell
Atchana in the plain of Antioch, where an ivory with a purely Mycenaean design was
found as well as one decorated with the Hittitc ‘royal sign*. It is therefore impossible to
say where the belt from Boghazkcuy was made. But whether it came from die Aegean,
Syria, or Anatolia, the spiral design is borrowed from the Aegean, a debt repaid 1,000
years later, when Hittite as well as Syrian designs supplied patterns for the Proto-
corinthian vase painters.

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