Page 44 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

THE PROTOLITERATE PERIOD
challenged their ingenuity. Elsewhere, for instance in Greece, the seal-cutters are often
believed to have been inspired by extant works of painting or sculpture, but Meso­
potamian mural paintings and other large-scale decoration, on the contrary, often seem
to depend on the compositions of the seal engravers. It is for this reason that we must
consider the seals in some detail, quite apart from the fact that they display the inventive-

ness and the originality of die Mesopotamian designers most strikingly.
It is clear that the design on a cylinder seal can be seen in its entirety only when one
turns it in one’s fingers. For instance, the cylinder in plate i ic shows a ‘ king ’ feeding the
herd of the temple. He is depicted with an ear of barley in each hand facing six head of
cattle, in two rows of three, and he is followed by a servant carrying a further supply of
barley.42 Of all this only a fraction appears in our plate. Seal designs can be made avail­
able for study only by illustrating, not the seals, but dieir impressions. Figure 7 and
plate 8 illustrate the variety of Protoliterate seals.
We find, in the first place, narrative scenes like the feeding of the temple herd which
we have just described, or a ceremony near a temple (Plate 8d). But this type of design
has great disadvantages, for the surfaces covered by the impression will, in practice,
hardly ever coincide precisely with the circumference of a seal. A sealing on a bale of
goods will be narrow and take only part of the impression; a clay tablet may be wider
and take more than a single revolution of the cylinder. In the first case only part of the
narrative will appear; in the second case there will be repetition of fragments on one or
both sides of the scene. The latter case is illustrated in plate 8d; the temple should appear
only once, and that in the middle of the impression, with the three large figures
approaching from the right and the boat from the left.
The disadvantages of a narrative scene may be overcome, if the importance of the
subject is so reduced that incomplete or redundant fragments do not matter. The
animal frieze is an example of this. But to be really satisfactory the cylinder design must
possess an inner harmony capable of asserting itself even within mere fragments. An
attempt to achieve this is shown in figure 7E, where the groups of animals attacked
by beasts of prey face in different directions, so that there is a play of antithetical corre-
spondcnces which effectively unites the whole composition. As a rule this result is best
achieved by closely interwoven heraldic groups such as figure 7, b, c, and D, and plate 8b.
The two ibexes of plate 8 a, to analyse just one design, cover the whole circumference of
the seal,43 but their repetition merely enlarges a harmonious whole without disturbing
its beauty. Both facing and averted the animals make a splendid symmetrical pattern,
and the hiatus that would otherwise occur on either side is filled, once by an eagle with
spread wings, and once by a pair of copulating vipers and a flower. In plate 8b the even
spacing and continuity of the design are obtained by the intertwining of the necks and
tails of the monstrous quadrupeds, and only the space above required a filling motif,
which was supplied by the lion-headed eagle.
The seal last described again illustrates that decline in quality which distinguishes the
second half of the Protoliterate Period from its earlier phase. It may be due to the great
demand for seals caused by a rapidly expanding economy; tablets now increase in num­
bers and are found even abroad. In the seal of plate 8b a bow drill has been used to

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