Page 43 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

PART ONE: MESOPOTAMIA

Commemorative Relief

The stele of plate 9A should, as far as we can judge, be considered a secular work. It is a
boulder, now chipped and damaged at the edges, and must have been brought to
Warka from abroad, since it is black granite. It is smoothed on one side and shows two
scenes carved in the flat relief of the latter half of the Protolitcrate Period. It resembles
the figurine of a woman from Khafajc in the naturalness and vivacity of the poses; note,
for instance, how the archer, in taking aim, draws in his head between his shoulders. The
hunter appears in the dress and with the distinctive coiffure which characterize leaders,
perhaps kings, on Protoliterate monuments, and which remained in use for princes until
the times of Sargon of Akkad (Plates 34, 3 5, 42, and 43). The hunter ia shown destroying
lions with spear and arrows. If we realize that with this monument the commemorative
stele makes its first appearance in the history of art, the events which it commemorates
seem hardly adequate to explain the innovation. There again we must acknowledge
some uncertainty as to their meaning. Two and a half millennia later Assurbanipal dis­
played his courage and skill in killing lions (Plates 108-9), but one does not expect this
emphasis on the sportsmanship of a ruler in the very period when cities were being
founded and when communal life seems to have been stronger than at any other age.
Is it possible that the battle with wild beasts was a phase in the reclamation of marsh and
wasteland indispensable to the development of the city-state, so that the valour of this
leader deserved to be commemorated by a public monument? If so, it is odd that neither
the ‘king’ nor the occasion is specified, although writing was known at the time and was
extensively used in the administration of the temples. This anonymity would seem to
nullify the effect of the monument, and appears even odder if we remember that in
Egypt the first steles, as well as other historical reliefs, are inscribed with the name of the
ruler who erected them and often also with the name of his defeated enemies or of the
locality.41 The same anonymity attaches to another historical record of the Protoliterate
Period. It shows a ‘ king ’ leaning on his spear upon the battle-field among bound captives
and enemy dead. This scene was engraved upon a cylinder less than two inches in height
and employed as a seal; in fact, several impressions of clay sealings were used for the
partial reconstruction of the design in figure 7A.

Cylinder Seals

The scene of figure 7A would seem unsuitable to a seal design, because a seal does not
offer scope for epic treatment. Its appearance among glyptic designs once again empha­
sizes the fact that in the formative phase of a new movement in art the distinctions be­
tween the categories are still vague.
The Mesopotamian seal has a peculiar shape (Plate 8c), a small cylinder engraved on
the outside, and thus impressing its distinctive design when rolled over the clay of a
tablet or of the sealing of a package of merchandise. The awkward problem of inventing
designs for such seals seems to have been congenial to the Mesopotamians and to have

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