Ancient Mesopotamia and Persia
Mesopotamia, greek name for "the land between rivers (Tigris and Euphrates)", is where the funadamental change in the nature of our daily lives first occurred. Often called the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia is the presumed locale of the biblical Garden of Eden (Gen. 2.10ā15).
Sumer
3500-2332 BCE
Ancient Sumer, which roughly corresponds to southern Iraq today, comprised a dozen or so independent city-states under the protection of different Mesopotamian deities.
Two great inventions of Sumerians are city-state, which are ruled by a single person or a council, and writing, from early pictographs to later more abstract cuneiform signs. The Sumerians also produced great literature. Their most famous work, known from fragmentary cuneiform texts, is the late-third-millennium bce Epic of Gilgamesh, which antedates the Greek poet Homerās Iliad and Odyssey by some 1,500 years. It recounts the heroic story of Gilgamesh, legendary king of Uruk and slayer of the monster Huwawa.
White Temple and its ziggurat
A ziggurat is a built raised platform with four sloping sidesālike a chopped-off pyramid. Ziggurats are made of mud-bricksāthe building material of choice in the Near East, as stone is rare.
Lots of attention are drawn due to the great discovery of the Royal Cemetery at Ur in southern Iraq, by British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley (1880ā1960) in the 1920s.
Mask of Wakar
Marble is rare in Uruk so the stone for this might come at a great cost. There should be a lot of decoration in its original appearance, like a wig at the top of the head and colored shell or stone filling the eyebrows and eyes.
Warka Vase
The Sumerians were probably the first to use pictures to tell coherent stories. This vase depicts a religious ceremony.
Eshnunna Statuettes
The inlaid oversized eyes and the tiny hands, which represents a conscious decision on the part of the sculptors to vary the size of the parts of the bodyāa kind of hierarchy of scale within a single figure complementing the hierarchy of scale among figures in a group. Perhaps the purpose of these votive figures was to offer constant prayers to the gods on their donorsā behalf, the open-eyed stares most likely symbolize the eternal wakeful- ness necessary to fulfill their duty.
Similar figurines are found at other sites. I hate to admit it but these are my favorites. Aren't they both creepy and cute...
Standard of Ur
Two principal roles of a Sumerian rulerāthe mighty warrior who defeats enemies of his city-state, and the chief administrator who, with the blessing of the gods, assures the bountifulness of the land in peacetime. Isn't it beautiful.
Mesopotamian Seals
Akkad
2332-2150 BCE
Sumer cities got dominated by a great ruler, Sargon of Akkad (r. 2332ā2279 BCE). The Akkadians were Semitic in origin.
Akkadian Portraiture
It was originally the head of a statue that was knocked over, perhaps when the Medes, a people that occupied the land south of the Caspian Sea, sacked the city in 612 BCE. But the damage to the portrait was not the result solely of the statueās toppling. There are also signs of deliberate mutilation. To make a political statement, the attackers gouged out the eyes (once inlaid with precious or semiprecious stones), broke off the lower part of the beard, and slashed the ears of the royal portrait. What a pity.
Naram-sin Stele
The stele commemorates the Akkadian rulerās defeat of the Lullubi, a people of the Iranian mountains to the east. It carries two inscriptions, one in honor of Naram-Sin and one naming the Elamite king who captured Sippar in 1157 BCE and took the stele as booty back to Susa in southwestern Iran, the steleās findspot.
The sculptor depicted Naram-Sin leading his army up the slopes of a wooded mountain. His routed enemies fall, flee, die, or beg for mercy. The king stands alone, far taller than his men, tread- ing on the bodies of two of the fallen Lullubi. He wears the horned helmet signifying divinityāthe first time a king appears as a god in Mesopotamian art. At least three favorable stars (the stele is damaged at the top) shine on his triumph.
The sculptor showed daring innovation in creating a landscape setting for the story and placing the figures on successive levels within that landscape. Among extant Mesopotamian works, this is the first time an artist rejected the standard format of telling a story in a series of horizontal registers, the compositional formula that had been the rule for a millennium.
Neo-Sumerian and Babylonian
2150-1600 BCE
Neo-Sumerian
Around 2150 bce, a mountain people, the Gutians, brought an end to Akkadian power. The cities of Sumer, however, soon united in response to the alien presence, drove the Gutians out of Mesopotamia, and established a Neo-Sumerian state ruled by the kings of Ur. Historians call this period the Neo- Sumerian age or the Third Dynasty of Ur.
Gudea of Lagash
Nearly two dozen of Gudea, the ensi (ruler) of Lagash around 2100 BCE survived. The inscription of this figure emphasis that it is built from diorite, a precious material that had to be imported from present-day Oman. And it is extremely hard to carve.
Babylon
The resurgence of Sumer was short-lived. It fell to the hands of the Elamites, who ruled the territory east of the Tigris River. City-states, including Mari and Babylon, reemerged.
Hammurabiās Laws
At the top is a representation in high relief of Hammurabi in the presence of Shamash, the flame-shouldered sun god. The king raises his hand in respect. The god extends to Hammurabi the rod and ring that symbolize authority. The symbols are buildersā toolsāmeasuring rods and coiled rope. They connote the rulerās capacity to build the social order and to mea- sure peopleās livesāthat is, to render judgments and enforce the laws spelled out on the stele. The collection of Hammurabiās judicial pronouncements is inscribed on the Susa stele in Akkadian in 3,500 lines of cuneiform characters.
Hittite and Assyrian
1600-612 BCE
Elam
The Babylonian Empire toppled in the face of an onslaught by the Hittites, an Anatolian people whose heavily fortified capital was at Hattusa near modern BoghazkoĢy, Turkey. After sacking Babylon around 1595 BCE, the Hittites abandoned Mesopotamia and returned to their homeland, leaving Babylon in the hands of the Kassites. To the east of Babylon was Elam, which appears in the Bible as early as Genesis 10:22.
The Elamites were strong enough to plunder Babylonia and to carry off the stelae of Naram-Sin and Hammurabi and triumphantly display them as war spoils in Susa.
Napir-Asu
A life-size bronze-and-copper statue of Queen Napir-Asu, wife of one of the most powerful Elamite kings, Untash-Napirisha (r. ca. 1345āca. 1305 BCE) is one of the most important finds discovered in the ruins of Susa. The statue weighs 3,760 pounds even in its fragmentary and mutilated state, because the sculptor, incredibly, cast the statue with a solid bronze core inside a hollow-cast copper shell. The bronze core increased the cost of the statue enormously, but the queen wished her portrait to be a permanent, immovable votive offering in the temple where archaeologists found it. In fact, the Elamite inscription on the queenās skirt explicitly asks the gods to protect the statue (interesting curse):
He who would seize my statue, who would smash it, who would destroy its inscription, who would erase my name, may he be smitten by the curse of [the gods], that his name shall become extinct, that his off- spring be barren. . . . This is Napir-Asuās offering.
Assyria
During the first half of the first millennium bce, the fearsome Assyrians vanquished the various peoples that succeeded the Babylonians and Hittites, including the Elamites, whose capital of Susa they sacked in 641 bce. The Assyrians took their name from Assur, the city dedicated to the god Ashur, east of the Tigris River in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq. At the height of their power, the Assyrians ruled an empire that extended from the Tigris River to the Nile (see page 80) and from the Persian Gulf to Asia Minor.
Assyrians built great palaces. Within them we found paintings, sculptures and vivid reliefs. One interesting sculpture are below, the artist thought of a unique way to handle the legs so the sculpture looked good on both direction.
Neo-Babylonian and Achaeminid
604-559 BCE
Neo-Babylonia
The most renowned of the Neo-Babylonian kings was Nebuchad- nezzar II (r. 605ā562 BCE), whose exploits the Book of Daniel recounts. Nebuchadnezzar restored Babylon to its rank as one of the great cities of antiquity. The Greeks and Romans counted āthe hanging gardens of Babylonā among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and the Bible immortalized the cityās enormous ziggurat as the Tower of Babel.
In fact, the wonderous garden were not in Babylon, but part of the Assyrian king Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh. And it might not be as impressive as it was depicted. The towel of Babel was Babylon's Marduk ziggurat erected by king Nebuchadnezzar. This is far more real. The king also constrcuted Babylon's Ishtar Gate:
Archaemenid Empire
Cyrus of Persia (r. 559ā529 BCE) captured Babylon in 539 BCE. Cyrus, who may have been descended from an Elamite line, was the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty. Egypt fell to them in 525 BCE, and by 480 BCE they boasted the largest empire the world had yet known, extending from the Indus River in South Asia to the Danube River in northeastern Europe. If the Greeks had not succeeded in turning back the Persians in 479 BCE, they would have taken control of southeastern Europe as well. The Achaemenid line ended with the death of Darius III in 330 BCE, after his defeat at the hands of Alexander the Great.
Persepolis Citadel
Greco-Roman and Sasanian
330 BCE - 636 CE
Alexander the Greatās conquest of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 bce marked the beginning of a long period of first Greek and then Roman rule of large parts of Mesopotamia and Persia, beginning with one of Alexanderās former generals, Seleucus I (r. 312ā281 BCE), founder of the Seleucid dynasty. In the third century CE, however, a new power rose up in Persia that challenged the Romans and sought to force them out of Asia. The new rulers called themselves Sasanians. They traced their lineage to a legendary figure named Sasan, said to be a direct descendant of the Achaemenid kings. The first Sasanian king, Artaxerxes I (r. 211ā241), founded the New Persian Empire in 224 CE after he defeated the Parthians (another of Romeās eastern enemies).
Palace of Shapur I
The New Persian Empire endured more than 400 years, until the Arabs drove the Sasanians out of Mesopotamia in 636 CE, just four years after the death of Muhammad. But the prestige of Sasanian art and architecture long outlasted the empire. A thousand years after Shapur I built his palace at Ctesiphon, Islamic architects still considered its soaring iwan (brick audience hall, covered by the vault of almost 100 feet tall) as the standard for judging their own engineering feats.
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