Page 38 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

THE PROTOLITERATE PERIOD
As it happens, we cannot follow this development at Warka, but another feature of
Protolitcratc architecture is well represented there, while it survives in small fragments
only on other sites: its mural decoration. At Warka we can study an amazing and highly
original attempt on the part of these early builders to disguise the ugliness of the material
which they were forced to use. We have already seen how they used recesses and white­
wash, expedients which remained popular down to Hellenistic times. They arc fully
con ipatibic with the austere, massive, rectangular forms which imparted monumentality
to the public buildings of Mesopotamia. But the architects of Protoliterate times experi­
mented with two additional methods of decoration: a plastic enrichment of the walls,
and patterned colouring. The first expedient, which really does violence to the character
of brick architecture, was revived only on one or two later occasions.23 Polychromy, on
the other hand, became common towards the end of the second millennium b.c., when
the Assyrians had learned the art of glazing on a large scale and used coloured (and some­
times moulded) glazed bricks to produce figured panels or to cover whole wall surfaces.
The methods of the Protolitcratc builders, however, were different from this. They
covered walls, and even the columns of a colonnade (columns measuring nine feet in
diameter) and the semi-engaged columns of adjoining walls (Plate 2a) with a coloured
and patterned weather-proof skin. This consisted of tens of thousands of small clay cones,
about four inches long, separately made, baked, and dipped in colour, so that some had
black, some red, and others buff tops. These cones were inserted side by side in a thick
mud plaster in such a way that zigzags, lozenges, triangles, and other designs appeared in
black and red on a buff ground. After a while the technique was simplified (Plate 2b) ;
the cones were only used in flat rectangular panels which were framed by edgings of
small baked bricks. In this way a great deal of labour was saved, but the weird, exuberant
richness of the earlier mosaics could not be achieved. It is even possible that the most
accomplished examples of the earliest method have been entirely lost (many more cones
have been found loose in the soil than were retained in their original positions), and that
these included representational designs as they existed in the later phase when baked brick
edgings framed the panels. At that time there were also plaques of baked clay in the form
of rosettes and of goats and heifers. These plaques were entirely covered with circular
reed impressions, as if to suggest that they consisted of separate cones,24 and it therefore
seems likely that prototypes composed of such separately inserted cones had once existed.
Their subject - rows of animals - recurs in the contemporary temple at Al ‘Uqair, not
in the form of cone-mosaics but of wall paintings. The geometrical motifs of plate 2
arc also repeated at Al ‘Uqair in paintings. They adorn the walls and the front of the
altar. The meaning of the friezes of animals and rosettes will become clear when we
con-
sider the works of sculpture found in these temples.

Applied Sculpture and Relief

Sumerian art, although bom in the newly founded cities, expressed man’s unshakeable
attachment to nature. The gods were manifest in sky and earth and water, in moon and
sun, m storm and lightning. The public festivals celebrated the main events of the

9