Page 42 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

THE PROTOLITERATE PERIOD
mcnt to a statue presumably of wood. The head must have been very nearly life-size (the
face is eight inches high) and was found at Warka. By analogy with later usage one I:
assumes that the eyebrows were inlaid with lapis lazuli and the eyes with shell eyeballs
and lapis lazuli or obsidian pupils. The flat ridges that mark the hair and the deeply-cut
parting were originally overlaid with a sheet of gold or copper which was fastened with
small metal studs, in holes drilled into the stone in inconspicuous places; one is visible on
the right below and behind the car. The hair was no doubt rendered by fine engraving
in the metal, so that the present unsatisfactory contrast between the subtly modelled face
and the large flat ridges of the hair does not express the artist’s intention. In fact the extra­
ordinary sensitivity with which the face is modelled — the smooth forehead, the soft
checks, the noble mouth - was almost certainly offset by a colourful setting, a statue of
other materials in which only the exposed flesh of the face was rendered by the luminous
marble.
We do not know who this figure can have represented, or even whether a goddess or
a mortal appeared in such exalted beauty. Nor is there another work to match it.
To the latter half of the Protoliterate Period belongs a small statuette (four inches
high) from Khafaje (Plate 9b). It shows a woman with a bare torso and hair hanging
loosely down the back, with hands folded in the attitude assumed before the gods. It
lacks the restraint of the head of plate 7, but shares its exactness in the rendering of the
physique of the model. This tendency towards naturalism, which merely enriches the
plastic forms of the head, appears in the little figurine as a kind of irrepressible vulgar
vitality. The woman stands with her bare feet four-square on the ground and the head is
poised quite naturally. This freedom of pose and the realistic modelling of the breasts
and the posterior were never found in later times. The eyebrows are not joined (as
always later), but are heavy, the checks are fleshy; the large nose, damaged at the tip,
looks more excessively hooked than was intended. Like Egyptian works of the corre­
sponding stage of development, the Mesopotamian sculpture here described lacks the
later discipline of style, but achieves an effect which could not even be attempted once
an established convention had defined artistic aims more closely.
The third work of sculpture in the round which survives is likewise small but of a
different order (Plates 9c and 10).38 It represents a daemonic being, and stands at the
head of a long line of monsters which appear in all the great periods of Mesopotamian
art and convincingly express the terror with which man realized his helplessness in a
hostile universe. The monster of plates 9c and 10 denies one even the comfort of recog­
nition : viewed as anthropomorphic the body appears bestial, but if one views it as a
lioness it has a ghastly air of mis-shapen humanity. There is, however, no uncertainty
about the cruelty of the mouth on the point of baring its fangs while the clutched claws
unbend.
It is paradoxical that this vision of terror has been carefully embellished with pellets of
lapis lazuli inlaid at the tail and in the mane. It shares this feature with amulets of the
period,39 and it may well be that our figure, too, had an apotropaic function. The lines
of the muscles at the shoulder-blades suggest the symbol of the mother goddess,40 and
once again we suspect that her destructive aspect has here found expression in art.

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