Page 39 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

PART ONE: MESOPOTAMIA
farmer’s year, the most important religious occasion being die New Year festival, held
at the critical turn of the seasons, when, after winter, or after the much more terrible
summer, nature’s vitality was at its lowest ebb and all depended on the turn of the
weather. During the sterile season the god who personified generative force, and who is
best known as Tammuz, had vanished or died; and the Great Mother, who was wor-
shipped at Warka and throughout the land, had suffered a bereavement in which the
people shared. They found expression in public wailings and in the rites of mourning
and atonement which opened the New Year celebrations. In the course of the festival,
which lasted several days, the god was discovered, liberated from the land of death and
resurrected. Then the sacred marriage of the divine couple ensured nature’s fertility and
man’s prosperity for the coming year.
It is this festival which is depicted on an alabaster vase (Plate 3, A and b), over three feet
high, which was found in temple ruins of the Protoliterate Period at Warka. The main
scene appears in the uppermost band, and the lower registers seem at first sight to be
mere decoration. Its elements are, however, appropriate to their setting.25 The lowest
band consists of plants and animals in which the goddess is manifest and which sustain
man: ears of barley alternate with date-palms, and sheep with rams. The next frieze
shows men bringing gifts, naked, as was common then and throughout Early Dynastic
times when man approached the gods! The many small differences between individual
figures destroy, on closer scrutiny, the impression of a merely ornamental frieze, and one
notices that even here the figures are rendered with such vigour and directness that they
seem vibrant with the excitement of the occasion, and therefore intimately connected
with the main scene. Of this a few fragments are unfortunately missing, above and be­
fore the figure of the goddess, and we do not know, therefore, whether she wore the
homed crown which distinguished the gods on later monuments. She is receiving a
basket of fruit, like those carried in the frieze below. Behind her stand two reed bundles
bound in a peculiar fashion; they identify her, for such a bundle is the pictographic
prototype of the character with which her name was written in historical times. The
presenter of gifts who appeared behind the naked priest is lost; this was probably the
bearded person of a king, or leader, known from seal engravings of this period (Figure
9). He offers her, as a suitable wedding gift, a richly decorated and tasselled girdle, of
which one end is well preserved (cf. Plate iib).
Behind the goddess other gifts are piled up - mostly in pairs. There are two vases,
shaped like the one whose decoration is here described and which we know, from frag­
ments found, to have been one of a pair. We see, moreover, two vases, in the shape of a
goat and a Hon respectively, and recognizable as vessels by the rimmed opening on the
animals’ backs.26 In front of these gifts is a problematical object, either an ideogram or,
more likely, a piece of temple furniture. It consists of the large figure of a ram supporting
a two-staged Ziggurat or temple platform, shown by reed bundles to be a shrine of the
goddess. Upon it stand a man and a woman.27
In this frieze the goddess is not, or is hardly, larger in size than her worshippers, as she
would be in an Egyptian rendering of such a scene. Her appearance in the frieze does not
interrupt the continuous design which encircles the vase. But the main subject, far from

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