Art of the Transition to Urban Societies

Offering bearers, in priesly nudity, from the 'alabaster' vase from Uruk (Warka)
Dozens more of the vase in Google Images

In Mesopotamia, earlier than anywhere else, villages tended to turn into towns.  They not only got bigger but began to be organized in a somewhat more complicated way.  Above all, as early as the Halaf period, in Mesopotamia, we find temples that are temples of the town rather than the religious gathering place of the clan (probably the numerous shrine rooms at Çatal Hüyük mean that each family unit had its own).  Towns with administrative centers, because there is no "separation of church and state" in the Early Bronze Age, or in any other primitive urban society, are centered on the temple.  The justification for rule was either that the god owns the land that the ruler just takes care of for him (stewardship) or that the ruler participated in divinity, often being identified with gods (divine kingship).  The ruler was not a god in the same way as the gods were, but divine kingship made him absolutely different from other people.  We are at the transition to urban life, the beginning of class structure (if you want to be Marxist about it): there seems not to have been class structure in ancient Neolithic societies.  Even when you call the ruler a "steward", as in Mesopotamia, you do have class structure now: priesthood, army, rulers, craftsmen, all separate groups, but probably this is too early for slavery; there was the ruling class and . . . everybody else.  It was no fun to be "everybody else", but at first this was not a complicated enough economy for slavery.

We shall deal with Egypt and southern Iraq (Kuwait was then under water, for the Gulf came up further, and towns like Ur were on or near the coast then).  No doubt that this is the cradle of civilization.  The Biblical word Eden is a Sumerian word, meaning "the land", not a Hebrew or any other kind of Semitic word.  Here in Sumer (southern Iraq), writing and urban life started, though Egypt was not far behind.  In fact, "being first" is of no importance; the unexamined assumption that being first is what matters makes all arguments about priority unproductive.  What matters is, who sustains and builds on civilization.  Who's first may depend on ecology or accidents.  It was harder to manage the Nile flood than that of the Euphrates.

[MG 214] [MG 215] By the second half of the fourth millennium, ca. 3,500-3,000 B.C., the "Transition" of the title, very large and elegant temples appear, more than one temple per city, too.  The most famous Protoliterate Period site is Uruk (be very careful not to confuse Uruk and Ur--that's not a mere "spelling error").  They're about 70 miles apart.  Level IV at Uruk about 3,100 B.C. is particularly brilliant, and in this course it stands for the whole period.  In the center of town they had a great temple complex for the goddess Innana, their principal deity, but, at the edge of town, they had a man-made temple mound--not a habitation mound, accumulated, but one that they built deliberately, in order to elevate the temple, a ziggurat.  It has recessed-panelled brickwork, and on top of it a typical Mesopotamian temple, of the type that the Sumerians invented.  They bequeathed it to the later Babylonians and Assyrians and others, who inherit their culture, even though they belong to a different ethnic and linguistic group.
(NOTE: there is no necessary correlation between race and language, on the one hand, and the kind of art and other culture that you have, on the other, especially when groups succeed each other and inherit each others' stuff).
This temple is built of sun-dried brick (in Spanish, adobe), which is ugly.  Sumer is an alluvial plain; we southern Louisianans know what that means: deposited mud from the surface "all the way down to China".  No stone to quarry in Baton Rouge.  Neither was there in Sumer.  Still today southern Iraq is fairly marshy land; only now the marshes are farther south as the head of the gulf silts up.  So they invented recessed panelling to give it sculptural form in the sunlight; some African cultures who build with mud brick also have found sculptural forms for their buildings.  With hardly any rainfall, unfired brick presents no problem.  This panelling probably arose earlier from the need to buttress the wall wherever you place the roof beams (strategic strengthening), then out of that necessity, they developed a decorative vocabulary.  These temples are built, whether down in the town or on a temple mound (ziggurat), each on a special platform.  Read the plan: the rectangular outline represents the platform (plan-reading is a necessary skill in this course).  Another little step marks where you came in, though there are other doorways; typically, you entered, then turned at a right angle to face an offering table and perhaps an image in a niche or against the end wall, on a platform (the platform is evidence for the image).  It is very different from an Egyptian or Greek temple; each civilization has its own tradition in religious building.  These ziggurats (probably a much later one lies behind the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel) are to raise the temple a little closer to the gods (compare our feeling that churches should have spires, something that reaches a bit higher).  The temple on the ziggurat is dedicated to the sky god, Anu; it was well preserved when excavated (photo): interior panelling, offering table (in the distance, you see the alluvial plain).  Of course, it is weathered; the unfired brick has been subjected to wind and sand erosion over centuries.  Uruk is a German excavation; you can see paintings of the site on the walls of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin from 65 years ago, and excavation continues.

[M 192] Down in the town, in the Innana precinct (she is the principal deity), we see the beginning of a long tradition that will give rise to the great tiled mosques; since brick isn't pretty or weatherproof, it begs for facing.  Here in the Innana precinct we find them very cleverly decorating and weatherproofing the walls with cone mosaics:  fired clay cones each about the size of an ice cream cone, solid, with the base of the cone dipped in earth colors that will fire: red, yellow, white, black.  In mud plaster, stuck in like thumbtacks in a colored pattern.  The photo shows the reconstruction in the museum in Berlin.  The effect must have been very handsome.  Just as we build in concrete, then usually face it (look at the big banks downtown) and mosques are built of brick (or concrete today) sheathed in tile, these early buildings were partly sheathed in cone mosaics.

[M 193] From the temple of Innana at Uruk came this large (30") "alabaster" cult vase, a relatively easy to carve stone--harder than gypsum, but softer than marble.  It is a ceremonial vessel, on which we see the goddess herself in front of her shrine and people bringing offerings and sacrificial animals.  The offering bearers are nude and with shaven heads.  We shall compare them with Egyptian figures of the same date.  Later in Mesopotamia, we do not see ceremonial nudity.  Nudity is very rare in Egypt (children and slaves).  Here nudity seems to mean ritually clean and pure (cf. "the naked truth").  The bodies are compact and round, and, combined with hunched shoulders and angular elbows, their compactness makes them look powerful and energetic.

[M 193] So also in the Brooklyn lion monster (finding place not certain, but it is genuine).  She is part lion because she is the embodiment of mountain storms.  Here is an astonishing merging of beast and human, and she twists and turns in three dimensions; Sumerian art is at ease with this, whereas Egyptian art typically likes to deal with unambiguous fronts and sides.  Also, monsters like this are un-Egyptian, but Mesopotamian art loves to fuse different species inextricably.

[M 194] This "marble" female head from Uruk (the stone is the same as in the "alabaster" vase) may be a head of Innana herself; it is from her temple.  It is not complete; represented on the on the tall vase that we just saw the headdress that she once wore, probably made of sheet gold and attached in the groove at the top of the head, is represented.  The eyebrows were inlaid with black bitumen (mineral pitch).  The eyes also were inlaid, with a disk of either black or blue set into bone or white stone.  Finally, there probably was color on the lips and cheeks.  Sumerian art excels in combining different materials in one work of art; remember, they don't have large stone here (as Egypt has), so naturally the Sumerians rarely make statues of single blocks of wood or stone, as is the rule in Egypt.  This head is a good, early example of what they do best.  It is about 2/3 life size.

[M 193] This vessel, in your Prints (and another similar to it from Uruk in the other slide), is from Tell Agrab, quite a ways to the north.  Remember the man wrestling lions in the Egyptian wall-painting from Hierakonpolis?  Here is an example pf such a motif with bulls, and the man-hero has a beard and horns.  It is a frequent motif in Mesopotamian art.  There does seem to have been sporadic contact between the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates valleys in the centuries around 3,000 B.C.  These vessels are not household goods.  What is the story?  Impossible to be sure, but if you have read any of the Gilgamesh epic, you will sense that these images belong to that world.  Gilgamesh, by the way, is as legendary as King Arthur, but in his case, too, there was an historical figure, an early ruler of Uruk, in this period, behind the legend.

[M 31] Now let us consider Egypt at the same dates.  The transition to an urban culture came at the end of Predynastic and the beginning of Dynasty I.  We have dates in Egyptian records; the difficulty comes in translating their calendar into our calendar.  Things like lunar and solar cycles have to be interpreted to obtain dates B.C.  The upshot, though, is that the Unification of Egypt (beginning of Dynasty I) cannot be later than about 3,000 B.C.  The king who is named as the unifier in the traditional history had, like other Egyptian kings, several names.  His name as identified with the hawk god Horus (the sun hovering on the horizon) is Narmer, the name that is written in the cartouche on this slate palette.  Other sources call him Menes.  We'll call him Narmer.  These slate palettes go back to the Predynastic period. An ordinary slate palette might be small and just in the form of a turtle or a fish or jackal or hippo with a surface on which to grind pigment, like malachite eye make-up.  This one is 12" high, quite different.  It does have a place to grind eye make-up, but this is a royal palette, bigger, more elaborate than any function requires.  Also, it is a wonderful document of Egyptian history and art forms, because here already and all of a sudden (instead of looking like Predynastic art) we have characteristic Egyptian art, albeit in an early form.  Striding pose ("I conquer").  Royal mace (< head-basher on end of a stick, now symbol of might).  King in mixture of front and side view that will be used for millennia for noble and royal representations--in which each part of the body is accounted for in the clearest possible way.  This mode of representation is not incompetence: action and three-quarter views are used for figures where the action, not the image, is the subject of the work--e.g., for farm laborers in representations of the owner's estate as the source of his wealth.  The profile face, frontal chest, etc., is used for the owner of the tomb, for gods, for eternity, where the image is the thing; the image is almost a catalog of parts.  The enemy of Narmer is also in a standard form.  Narmer holds his forelock: that also says "I conquer"; he is rendered helpless.  The picture is equivalent to writing; the images are large ideograms.  On the other hand, the king's name, the hieroglyph in the cartouche, is itself a little picture; at this date, the distinction between picture and writing is very slight.  At its beginning, writing is still based wholly on pictures.
Here the six papyruses are signs for Lower Egypt ("lower": remember that the Nile River flows south to north, so lower means in the north), which Narmer has conquered to unify Egypt.  Hence the ring in the nose.  This is no news picture of his victory, nor even some composition like "Washington Crossing the Delaware", but a pictographic statement of it.  The horned female at the top is the love goddess Hathor, who had the form of a cow.  The Egyptians, like more recent Africans to the south of them, loved and admired fine cattle.  The Greeks' Homer, also, calls Hera, the Queen of Heaven, "cow-eyed".  Their wealth was fine cattle (no coined money before about 600 B.C.).
On other side, the hollow for grinding pigments.  A protoliterate Sumerian cylinder seal of about 3,100 B.C. has the same "animals" (not known in fossils, wholly imaginary) with intertwined rubbery necks.  Not giraffes: check feet and tails, etc.  Below, the king is a bull battering a fortification--the prototypical powerful male animal.  Egypt had been partly unified into Upper and Lower Egypt just before this time.  So in his striding image, Narmer wears the tall, bulb-peaked WHITE crown of Upper Egypt (color known from later paintings), and on the reverse, in the triumphal procession, he wears the crown with the spiral in front and a high projection in back, the RED crown of lower Egypt--wearing both shows his dual kingship.  Sometimes, later, the red crown is worn over, on top of, the white.  Same idea.  On both sides, behind him, his sandal bearer is represented at a smaller scale, and he is barefoot; that means he is engaged in a ceremony, probably in a temple enclosure, on holy ground (remember Moses taking off his sandals, because "this is holy ground").  Barefootedness is analogous to the shaven heads and nudity of the Uruk priests of Innana.  This is long before Moses: an ancient, profound feeling calls for the bareness.  The animals on tall poles being borne ahead of Narmer should be the totem animals of the conquered districts.  To the right you see what writers on art a century ago regarded as an attempt at perspective (bodies aligned vertically representing the slain strewn over the expanse of the battlefield).  From what we have already observed, you will realize that it is no such thing; this art does not aim to show how things looked and, if it wanted to show that, could surely do so more effectively than this.  This is no more perspective than the rubber-necks are zoology or the six papyruses a picture of a garden.  Each figure with a head neatly placed between its legs: a tally surely, each one standing for, say, a hundred or a thousand slain.  Ten figures, times 100 or 1000.  These figures are on the border, again, between picture and writing.  This is why I called the newly conceptual art of the Neolithic humanity's "reading readiness".

Whenever I spend so much time as I've just done on something, you will know for certain (a) that the ideas are all basic to the rest of the course and must be learned now, and (b) that the first test will find out who has, and who has not, gotten these building blocks.  Continuous ideas and relationships are the art history; they must be anchored in time and geography and cultures; we need labels, however, in order to talk about things in history.

[M 32] By the end of Dynasty I, Egyptian art is even better established.  Let us look at the Stele of the Serpent King (his hieroglyph, as you see, is a snake) that comes from in front of his tomb (in Dynasty I, royal tombs are flat-topped and built of mud brick; stone pyramids are still in the future).  Here is the name of the king as the embodiment of Horus in the cartouche (Walt Disney used the god's name for his cartoon hawk, but spelled it like Horace Greeley's name; since it is not difficult, you must spell the Egyptian name Horus).  But this cartouche: it's of the kind called serekh, and it certainly looks like mud brick recessed panelling.  Is this more evidence for contacts between the two civilizations?  Maybe so.  The serekh is a palace façade, and we shall see these forms translated into stone building in Dynasty III.  For now, Egypt builds in mud brick and reeds.  The famous sleek, self-contained forms of Egyptian art are fully developed in the shape of the hawk, Horus, on this stele.  The sculptor judiciously simplified the contours in the interest of clarity.  Not schematization such as we see in the Christian fish symbol drawn like crossed parentheses.  Instead they have studied closely the exact anatomy of real hawks--exact, specific form of skull, of wing, of tail--then clarified by eliminating fussy little things.  This is very high art.

As an extra slide, for a treat and to show their luxury objects, I usually show a Dynasty I alabaster pot that still has its gold foil sealing on it.  From a royal tomb, the pot is hollowed out of solid stone.  Egyptian craftsmen made wonderful stone vessels, not only of alabaster but of harder stones, and other cultures learned the craft from them, especially in the Aegean, whence came the emery abrasive.

Now we turn to Dynasty III, which may be regarded as the beginning of the Old Kingdom, and of Early Bronze Age Egypt.  Dynasties I-II are usually called the "Archaic" period of Egypt (not to be confused with the Greek period, ca. 600-480, that is called Archaic).