The Centuries of Reorganization

After the End of the Bronze Age (part one)

Louvre.  From Khorsabad, reign of Sargon II.

(A) From c.1,000 B.C. to c.600 B.C.

We have observed that, after the end of the Bronze Age, Egypt, although not unified and without an empire, preserved the continuity of her ancient civilization; indeed there is some very fine art from Dynasty XXII, roughly contemporary with the Hebrew kings, David and Solomon.  Indeed, the existence of the united kingdom of Judah and Israel is related to the absence of the empires that had dominated the Levant during the Late Bronze Age.  The Hebrews built the Temple at Jerusalem, which we know primarily from the Biblical description, and got Phoenician craftsmen for its ornamentation.  The Phoenicians occupied trading cities concentrated in what is today Lebanon; they sailed and traded far and wide in the Mediterranean, and their craftsmen were capable of producing luxury art in bronze and ivory (for furniture inlays, for example) in a rather good imitation of Egyptian style.  This luxury art was exported wherever there were buyers, as far west as Spain, but the Phoenicians' best customers were the kings of the Late Assyrian period, which is the great period in Assyrian history.  Thus it is that we study ivories from Nimrud to gain understanding of Phoenician art.  The Late Assyrian kings became powerful and began to create an empire in the ninth century B.C.  The greatest of the ninth century kings was Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled from 883 to 859 B.C.  He was succeeded by Shalmaneser III (858-824 B.C.).  In the next century, in 722 and 721 B.C., the Assyrians conquered Samaria in Israel and Carchemish, a city state on the upper Euphrates River with a predominantly sub-Hittite culture and art.  Sargon II (the Assyrian who, in Lord Byron's phrase, "came down like a wolf on the fold") reigned from 722 to 705 B.C. and built a new capital city called, for himself, Dur Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad).  The last great Assyrian builder was Ashurbanipal, who ruled from 669 to 626 B.C. and built a new palace at Nineveh, that great city that the Hebrew Jonah visited and found astonishing.  The Late Assyrian Empire was brought to an end not only by internal decay but also by the incursions of barbarian Northerners, the Cimmerians.  During the period of the Late Assyrian Empire, in present-day Syria and southern Turkey, there were small states centered on individual cities; their populations were varied.  Some, like Carchemish, mentioned above, were primarily Luvian (the Luvians, having been ruled by the Hittites in the Late Bronze Age, had imbibed and preserved a great deal of Hittite culture); others, like Tell Halaf (the same site from the deepest levels of which came Neolithic pottery called Halaf ware), were by this date Aramaean (the Aramaeans spoke a NW Semitic language very closely related to Hebrew).  At this time, the Aramaeans and Phoenicians both were using their alphabet, the easiest and most universally applicable mode of writing yet devised.
The Aegean in the eleventh century was partly deserted, newly invaded by Dorians, desperately poor, and illiterate.  It seems that only legends remained of the Bronze Age.  With a few centuries of story telling, these became the myths and legends of their Heroic Age.  Among the traditions of Athens was their conviction that they had never been conquered by the Dorians, although those new Greeks had conquered even as far as the islands of Crete and Rhodes.  This tradition is probably true, since their dialect of Greek is closest to that of Ionia, and Athens' archaeological record shows real continuity from the end of the Bronze Age; the Athenians' pottery in the eleventh century B.C. takes up where impoverished grass-roots level sub-Mycenaean leaves off, and they retained enough skill in working bronze to make pins to fasten their garments and bronze finger rings.  With hindsight, we see that the Athenian pottery of the eleventh and tenth centuries B.C. contains the germs of a new style that will become the Geometric style in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C., and so we call it Protogeometric. 

Athens, c. 1000, vases from burials in the Kerameikos Museum

By about 1,000 B.C., other centers, such as the adjacent island of Euboea, also produced ceramic art in a Protogeometric style.  So far the development of post-Bronze Age Greek art was isolated and independent of the Near East, but in the ninth century a few motifs and the use of the granulation technique for gold jewelry show a little contact with the Near East.  In the eighth century, and especially at Athens, the Geometric style came to its full and perfect development.  Although it is an austere style, it is also highly disciplined.  Still lacking stoneworking skills (lost since the end of the Mycenaean Bronze Age) to make statues or stelae, they made great amphoras and kraters, as much as five feet tall, as grave markers in the Kerameikos cemetery of Athens, near where the Dipylon Gate would later be built, whence the great vases are called Dipylon Vases.  At Athens, Corinth, and elsewhere they also made bronze statuettes of men and animals in the same style as the painted figures on the Dipylon Vases.  In this same period, the eighth century B.C., they began to need more land and founded colonies; they also founded trading posts, like that at Al Mina on the Syrian coast, and, not surprisingly, borrowed the Semitic alphabet in use on those shores, adapting it to their own language and adding vowels; although, just as later, the Greek cities were independent states, yet their sense of cultural identity, with their shared language and religion, was strong enough to lead them to establish Panhellenic games: the traditional date for the foundation of the Olympic Games, at the age-old sanctuary of Zeus and Hera at Olympia, was 776 B.C.; to the best of our knowledge, this date, from which the Greeks counted chronology (as we count from the birth of Jesus, or, if we are Moslem, from the Hegira), seems at least approximately correct.  There were other contemporary cultures with art styles generically "geometric", for example the Hallstatt culture in Germany, to which the indigenous art of Italy at the same date seems to be related.  And it was in this same eighth century B.C. that, according to tradition, Rome was founded, in 752 B.C.

By 700 B.C., the Greeks were sending ships back and forth to their colonies and were well acquainted with the Levant, although Egypt was still closed to them.  Confronted with the delightful luxury art of the Phoenicians and with the cruder, but still impressive, art of the Aramaeans in Syria, it is not surprising that they abandoned their Geometric style.  It is not a matter of foreigners imposing their goods on the Greeks but of Greeks going out in their own ships and adopting whatever took their fancy; everything they took over, they also changed.  Each independent city had its own trade with different places, and each developed its own new art, but all alike can fairly be called Orientalizing styles.  Corinth, Crete, and some other centers were especially affected by the Egyptianizing Phoenician ivories that the Assyrian kings of the eighth century also coveted and purchased; a few of these have been found in Greece itself, as have a few Syrian pieces in a rather different (non-Egyptianizing) style; from the Phoenician inspiration came the Orientalizing style that we call Daedalic, because Crete was one of its centers, and the legendary Daedalus, the clever craftsman, was from Crete. 
The Orientalizing style of Athens is quite different and perhaps owes more to North Syria (in any case, at this date, Athens did not trade and colonize so widely as Corinth, for example, did).  On the wealthy islands of Samos and Rhodes and on the Ionian coast we find still other kinds of Orientalizing.  All have in common inspiration from Near Eastern, but not yet Egyptian, models, all transmuted in accord with Greek taste.  In Etruscan Italy, north of Rome, indigenous linear, abstract art also gives way to Orientalizing in the seventh century B.C.  Since the bearers of the Etruscan language, which is unrelated to Italic languages such as Latin, probably came to Italy from Asia Minor (as the Greek historian Herodotos says they did), one might suppose that they brought Orientalizing with them, but their seventh-century art suggests instead that they were in touch with the same sources of inspiration as the Greeks.  They too were sailing traders; Etruria is rich in metals, especially iron ore, and the Etruscan sailors were in fact identical with the "Tyrrhenian pirates" of Greek stories.  They also traded with Greeks, and sometimes we cannot tell which Orientalizing motifs they acquired directly from the source and which they got secondhand from Orientalized Greek art; there were Greek colonies in Italy as close as Kyme (Latin Cumae) near Naples, and the Etruscans also traded with the Ionian Greeks in the eastern part of the Aegean.

Eleventh to tenth centuries B.C.: Protogeometric Greek art; sub-Hittite art in Luvian-language centers.
Ninth century B.C.: Early Geometric Greek art; Ashurnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III kings of Assyria; sub-Hittite and Aramaean culture in cities of North Syria and southern Asia Minor; Phoenicians.
Eighth century B.C.: Ripe Geometric Greek art; Sargon II king of Assyria, conquering Syrian cities and Israel, the northern Kingdom of the Hebrews; Phoenicians; Hallstatt and Villanovan
Seventh century B.C.: Orientalizing Greek styles; Ashurbanipal king of Assyria; end of Assyrian Empire in 612 B.C.; beginning of Neo-Babylonian Babylon about 625 B.C.; Orientalizing Etruscan art.

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For reasons that we do not fully understand, the Bronze Age ended almost simultaneously everywhere that there was one--even in China.  See "Syllabus" above.  Many areas were left depopulated and poor.  High culture disappeared; no palaces anymore.  No literacy (except Egypt and China); where literacy had been only an elite skill, it was gone.  Nothing to write about, when all you'd been writing was king's records, anyhow.  Linear B for Greek was gone, not to be deciphered till 1952.

From those ashes, new things.  Horseback riding.  Iron technology; it's ugly and rusts, but it's tough and common.  Requiring long-range trade for copper and tin, bronze technology for making fine things barely survived in Greece.  Hittites' Empire gone; Kassites gone.  Back to grass roots; empires perish, peoples remain.  The great moment for the united kingdom of Israel, its great period, in a power vacuum.

Greek population decimated.  Athens always believed she had never been conquered by the Dorians, and although hints, as of their clothing (the pins that fasten the peplos), are found in tombs, basically the archaeology bears out that claim.  The Attic dialect is non-Dorian.  It was in Athens that the technique of making pottery with black glaze (as invented by Late Minoan potters) survived best.  We have continuous series of graves with pottery.

In Egypt, Dynasties XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, art is pretty good, a continuation of New Kingdom art.  The tradition and techniques are still alive.

[the limited number of University Prints available reflect the chopped-up coverage of textbooks and introductory courses in the first two thirds of the 20th century]

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Over in Mesopotamia, those Assyrians on the upper Tigris, who had built Late Bronze Age Ashur, in the course of the tenth and ninth century B.C. became very powerful and wealthy and started expanding.  They not only created an efficient army and civil service, and became unpopular with their less efficient neighbors; they founded libraries and preserved Babylonian and ancient Sumerian literature.  Studied the ancient languages the way we study Latin and Greek.  We owe them a lot.  There are two sides to the Assyrians: the military machine and that which fostered literacy, art, and a technology beyond what armed might required.  In their own cities, admirable.

[M 163] Here is the very image of a great Assyrian king: obviously in the Mesopotamian tradition, mainstream, back through Babylon to Akkad and beyond.  New rigidity, firmness, sobriety.  Life-size Ashurnasirpal II (884-859 B.C.).  First great builder king of the Late Assyrian period.  Patterned curly beard, thick wavy hair, fishbone-patterned eyebrows, back to Akkadian Ruler of ca. 2300.  Holds shepherd's crook and flail; more ancient symbols ("thy rod and thy staff . . .").  Magnificent statue in British Museum.

[M 14] Ashurnasirpal II built a new palace at Nimrud (Calah).  Palaces fundamentally similar to the Middle Bronze Age palace at Mari, arranged around squarish courtyards of varying sizes.  In the rooms of state of Assyrian palaces, the dadoes at the base of the walls (not our measly baseboards), made of "alabaster" carved in relief: religious ceremonial scenes (as genii flanking tree of life), military exploits of the king (sacking of cities, crossing of rivers, and the like), and royal hunts.  Never underestimate the significance of royal hunting in ancient societies.  Not that there were plenty of lions to hunt around Nimrud; trapped lions were brought to the royal hunting preserve and released for him to express his manhood in hunting.  [Over in Texas, someone had/has an African hunt ranch, hunt for pay--in this day and age!]  Brave king with large bodyguard goes out in chariot and dispatches the lions.  One suspects that the artists have admiration and sympathy for the noble animals; we have seen before that the artist can fulfill his own agenda and satisfy the requirements of his patrons at the same time.  But, also, the royal king must have truly noble animals to hunt, or the image is pointless--shabby tigers won't do.  It proves his potency, a metaphor of his ability to rule.  These lions are still rather linear and patterned in their anatomy, but notice that the artist has accounted for all the muscles and the shoulder bones that we haven't seen before in Mesopotamia

[M 17] Assyrian style is affected by the medium that the artist worked in.  Again in the British Museum, you can see reconstructed the great bronze gates of the city of Balawat built by Shalmaneser III (859-824), the successor to Ashurnasirpal II.  Here the figures are a little suppler and slenderer and softer and with a little less linear detail, but the basic conventions of drawing, like using curly lines for water, and what I call "narrative space" (what we first saw on the Stele of Naram-sin, back in the Dynasty of Akkad) are the same here as in the stone reliefs, as well as in Assyrian paintings that we cannot study in this course.

[G 26][MG 212] Towards the end of the next, the eighth, century, a pivotal century (if you have a good Bible, an Oxford Annotated, a Jerusalem, for example, it will have good date tables in the back that are useful in this course, and maps of the Assyrian Empire, too), the most interesting king and builder is Sargon II (722-705)--not that he was related to Sargon of Akkad, 15 centuries earlier, but Assyrian royalty wished to associate themselves with him.  He built a brand-new capital city on a virgin site; it is modern Khorsabad, but he called it Dur Sharrukin, "Sargon City".  Sharraku is his actual name.  The palace, the military camp, and the temple got built, and the streets were all laid out, but it was never fully built, never fully inhabited.  Fortification wall complete.  His successor did not want to use it, so here again (as at Amarna) archaeologists have a site where everything is of one period.  As I said, generically similar to Mari.  Gates, with an arched opening between two towers, of a type going back to Sumer (Khafaje, Ishchali).  Beside the palace temple is a ziggurat: stepped, like a wedding cake; now the temple is no longer on top of it, but beside it.  Throne room.  Everything at huge scale.  Here they have plenty of stone.  Secondary gate into temple quarter, "Gate A": the excavation photograph with a man for scale: true arch, with a keystone (true arch goes back to ca. 3000 B.C. in brick), stone jambs.  Animals emerging from gate jambs should remind you immediately of the Hittite gates at Boghazköy, which, as we said, are truly distinctive.  But surely the Assyrians did not know the gates of an empire that had ended 400 years earlier and was off in the center of Asia Minor!  Among the people the Assyrians had conquered, in southern Asia Minor, were some who had been part of the Hittite Empire and had preserved a certain amount of provincial Hittite culture, though they were themselves not linguistically Hittites (these are the very people that the Bible calls Hittites; the Hebrews of the age of David and Solomon did not know the real Hittites of Boghazköy).  On the evidence, the Assyrians picked up sub-Hittite ideas, including animals emerging from jambs, from them, and then they improved on the idea; these Assyrian lamassu (man-headed bulls, guardians) emerging from the jambs of palace gates, from Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Nineveh (Khorsabad is not the only palace to have them), are masterpieces.   The divine heads wear the same kind of crown as Shamash, the sun god, wore on the Old Babylonian Stele of Hammurabi.  [Note that in this course, as in a foreign language, you cannot forget what you've already been tested on, as it is integral to the new material].

Athens.  Detail of the second great amphora in the same style as the preceding one, but showing the transport of the corpse, with the mourners, to the cemetery: the ekphora.

[MA 75] The eighth century B.C. was pivotal also for Greece.  The Bronze Age, become legend, had become the Heroic Age.  In Athens, starting from the dregs of Mycenaean pottery, and without much trade or other outside contacts, in the space of two centuries, the Athenian potters had refined what they inherited from sub- Mycenaean pottery technology and created a limited but great art, still in a poor economy, still without large architecture or large sculpture.  This pot, dating from about 750 B.C., is 5' tall, and obviously is not an ordinary container.  It is a grave marker and, in fact, on the shoulder bears a picture of the prothesis, the laying out of the corpse, with mourners.  It is called a Dipylon Vase, because it and others like it come from the Geometric Period cemetery near the later (Classical) double gate (Dipylon) in the city wall of Athens; it is usual to have cemeteries away from the center of cities; this neighborhood is also called the Kerameikos, the Potters' Quarter, of Athens, because messy industries also were away from the center.  So much is new in this great amphora [MA 74; learn shapes of Greek vases] that it is worth noting that the double handles, abstracted from horned ox heads, go back to Mycenae [MA 58, the Warriors Vase], as does the production of the black glaze-paint by firing successively in an oxidizing, reducing, re-oxidizing kiln.  Starting with little more than stripes, half circles, and wavy lines (all that was left of an octopus) in the 11th century, by the 9th century they had invented the maeander pattern--an outlined maeander hatched at a 45° angle; this pattern is the hallmark of Geometric pottery.  It is in the middle of the 8th century that we see scenes added in the handle zone on the shoulder of the amphora or krater, the prothesis or the ekphora, the carrying of the corpse on a wagon to the cemetery.  These occur on the huge vases that were grave markers.  We think that the amphoras were placed on female, the kraters, which are the ones with chariot scenes below the funerary scene, on male graves.  The chariot scenes may allude to funeral games, like the games in honor of Achilles' friend, Patroklos, at the end of Homer's Iliad.  The classic (perfect, acme) development of Geometric style is represented by the great Dipylon amphora: the Geometric patterns are distributed judiciously over the surface, denser where the vase contracts, and the highly disciplined figure style is made to fit into this decoration, to be part of the network of dark pattern stretched over the pale orangish color of the clay (even [MA 11], which may be no more than a decade later, breaks this equilibrium between figure and pattern, between design and storytelling).  As the syllabus points out, this austere Geometric style which has been four centuries in the making, undisturbed, will shortly cede to new excitement and new ideas from abroad.  Do not think that the figures of the corpse and mourners are "mere" stick figures.  Anyone can draw more naturally than this; it is hard not to; rather, the severely disciplined silhouette mourners represent the acme of an Athenian stylistic development; compare their shape with that of the ivory statuette, hardly later, also from the Dipylon cemetery, which shares Print

[MA 88] with an ivory boy of the 7th century; although the idea of a nude goddess, as well as the craft of carving ivory, is Near Eastern (and the ivory came from Syria), the Dipylon nude female statuette, especially from the waist down, is shaped just like the mourners on the Dipylon amphora: the style, as distinct from the subject matter and material, is purely Attic Geometric (Attic is the adjective for the region, Attica, of which Athens is the principal city).  With hindsight, we see in the masterpieces of Geometric pottery the germs of the particular artistic mentality that will produce Classical Greek art, the Parthenon, and all.  Proportions.  Design.  Restrained emotion.  We're done with the remnants of Helladic (Mycenaean) Greece and stand at the threshold of Hellenic Greece; see the Syllabus for alphabet, Olympic Games, etc.  Historical Greece.  No longer isolated.  First trade with what is today the coast of Lebanon and North Syria, whence alphabet, improved with vowels, 24 letters.  Requires no elaborate training; an inherently democratic kind of writing.  What with trade and colonies, a severely limited, home-grown style like this isn't likely to last much longer.

[MA 11] Not more than a decade later than the amphora, this Dipylon krater, now in the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, is significantly different, although the funerary subject matter is unaltered.  Kraters ordinarily were for mixing wine with water, just as amphoras were for transporting and storing wine, but this one is, like the Dipylon amphora, a grave marker.  The krater also has the double handles that go back to the Mycenaean krater.  With the chariot race added below the prothesis, the kraters have maeanders only around the neck.  The funeral games was as if today we had a rock concert at the wake of a rock musician.  The Geometric style on this krater has become "jazzy"; that is, exaggerated rounded shapes predominate, and the non-figural motifs are now just fillers.  The figured subjects obviously mattered more.  Furthermore, these exaggerated (circular indentations reducing shields to nearly nothing, for example) shapes are highly mannered, in a consciously decorative style: everything that can be, horses' heads, human legs, legs of the bier and the chair, is stylized to resemble crossed parentheses, and the barrels of the horses' bodies are pencil-thin.  The style almost flashes and dances before our eyes.  Furthermore, the human heads are opened up with dots for eyes, and some of the shields are done in outline rather than pure silhouette.  Besides, the anecdotal elements--child on bier at daddy's feet, baby on mother's lap--are new.  Yet only about a decade later than the Dipylon amphora; we are on the verge of one of history's periods of snowballing rapid change, very exciting.

This is the one in Berlin

[MA 40][MA 60, left] In the course of the eighth century, especially at the great religious sanctuaries, we begin to find the most delightful small bronzes.  At this scale, they are easy to cast, solid; they are only a few inches tall.  Horses are commonest, but increasingly, after ca. 750, we have other animals, warriors/gods with shield and spear, and even mythological subjects.  The famous horses in New York and Berlin are exactly like the exaggerated, contrasted, mannered horses that we just saw on the New York Dipylon krater; in bronze it takes the form of trumpet muzzle, blade neck, sharp leg joints, pencil-thin barrel, and (!) a tail that seems to be continuous with the stylized genitals--worth mentioning, because here is the artist at play, doing something purely for the sake of form.  When you see artistic play, improvised fun (that's why I called it jazzy), as here, you surely are not in a "Dark Age" (the 11th century had been dark, all right).  In a similar style, the man wrestling with a centaur.  Whether this is Herakles or Zeus wrestling, we are not sure, but it surely is a myth.  We must notice a couple of details: the conical helmets of both figures and the man's belt.  Those derive from the Phoenician Levantine coast; those are the helmet and belt worn by statuettes of the god Ba'al.  Borrowed.  Already indications of increased contacts with other people, although we do not speak of a new artistic period-style until the new elements predominate in the next century.  The Boston, MFA, doe with a suckling fawn and a bird perched on her rump (pure fun, again) comes a different workshop at about the same date.  She is nozzle-nosed and has compass-drawn eyes; the same compass-drawn concentric circles are used as spots all over her, even on the antlers.  Notice that Late Geometric artists feel quite free to place the fawn at an angle to the doe (when I make a point like that one, it is based not only on this one piece that we have in the Prints but on others, too).

[M 187] In the early Iron Age, Greece is not the only region with a "geometric" style, a style based on non-representational elements that can be drawn rather mechanically (i.e., with straight edges and compasses).  Phrygia in Asia Minor, the island of Cyprus, and some of the ancestors of the Etruscan and Roman peoples in Italy have generically geometric pottery styles.  The last may have been culturally and linguistically related to the Hallstatt culture of central Europe, north of the Alps; if the Hallstatt people, as many think, were proto-Celtic, and if the Villanovan people in Italy were Italic in speech, since Celtic and Italic are closely related groups in Indo-European language.  Here is a beautiful Hallstatt vessel with incised and excised geometric decoration.  There is no reason to suppose that there should be any causal connection among any of these generically geometric styles, except, perhaps, between Hallstatt and Villanovan; the Greek and Cypriote styles, however, may be related in having a common ancestor, since Late Mycenaean pottery was made in Cyprus when Mycenaean colonies were founded there.  None of these other geometric styles has the diagonally hatched maeanders that are the hallmark of Greek Geometric, until, ca. 700, the Etruscans come into trading relations with Greeks and we see some obvious imitations of Greek Geometric.  The point is that using the same generic adjective, geometric, for two styles has no further implications; all over the world many people make geometric designs--the Maori, for example.

London, British Museum, from Nineveh Lion Hunt Wall

[M 22] [M 21] [M 20] The Seventh Century B.C.  First, back to Assyria.  The art commissioned by the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (669-626), centers on the middle of the 7th century; he built a new palace at Nineveh (Kuyunjik), not the first one to be built there.  Then we shall consider Greek orientalizing, when the Greeks went out and borrowed enthusiastically, like magpies, and absorbed it all, mixing and changing all that they borrowed.
Although the Assyrian Empire would disintegrate shortly after Ashurbanipal's reign, the reliefs from his palace at Nineveh are the finest of all, the culmination of three centuries' development.  The book of Jonah in the Bible calls Nineveh "that great city".  Once again the dadoes with hunting and warring subjects.  The famous "Dying Lioness", a textbook staple, is only one little animal in a great Lion Hunt that in the British Museum covers a wall the size of the side wall of this auditorium; the animals, male and female, alive, dying, and dead, are scattered over the open field of the relief's surface.  There is no landscape.  We have the feeling that higher up on the dado probably means farther away (if only because that's what we're accustomed to), but there is no horizon, and each animal has a short line of its own to stand or lie on.  The artist does want to convey the idea that the lions are dispersed far and wide: narrative space.  It is truly anti-art-historical to isolate the one lioness, beautiful though it is, as if it were a framed picture by itself, entitled "Dying Lioness", which, as the general view makes clear, it is not.  Note how irrelevant many of the "titles" that we use are; what we want to remember is that she is a detail from Ashurbanipal's Lion Hunt at the Palace at Nineveh of the middle of the 7th century B.C.  The Hunt includes as usual the king in his chariot.  Some of the other lions are as fine and tragic as the textbook one.  She, however, does repay analysis.  The wonderful tense curve from her lower jaw down through her foreleg; the combination of clarifying simplification and significant, closely observed features, such as the expressive line of her back.  Much more closely observed and natural than the lions in Ashurnasirpal II's palace.  It is clear, not only from the lions but from hunting dogs, camels, onagers, and, of course, horses that the artists loved animals.  How many artists were at work here?  The style is so consistent that we forget about individual personality, and none of our records mention any artists' names.  Yet not since the tomb reliefs from Dynasty V in Egypt have we seen animals so closely observed and sympathetically rendered.  In her agony, the lioness (released to be hunted by the king) would make a great animal rights poster; to make her, the anonymous artist must have felt the anguish of her dragging her paralyzed hindquarters, whatever the king's point of view.  Yet it is not the pain that makes it artistically great, but how the artist managed the contours to express it beautifully as well as memorably.  Otherwise it would be just gratuitous violence.  Here again, the artist is fulfilling his own agenda and the patron's both at once.  The artist takes visual values seriously, whereas the patron often is concerned mostly with the symbolism.  I doubt whether Ashurbanipal cared one way or the other about the eloquent curve from the lioness's chin down to her paw.  The relief with Arabian archers, almost naked, shooting from camel-back, mounted two on each hump and being thrown when a camel stumbles to its knees, is almost miraculously vivid and is typical of the war scenes from Nineveh; the more you study the camels the more you are in awe of the knowledge and the sensitivity to their particular forms and way of moving that went into carving them.  Brilliant work.  The Royal Banquet scene is more conventional: remember the Victory Banquet on the "Standard" from the Royal Cemetery at Ur?  This also is a victory banquet, part of one of the battle campaign friezes.  The king and queen feast in a grape arbor; servants fan them with fly whisks--just outside the frame of our photo there are human heads hung in the tree!  Another indicator of the social gulf between them and us; we may relish victory still, but we blame any war lord with so strong a stomach as Ashurbanipal, at least symbolically, is represented as having.  Notice the furniture design.  The male reclines to drink and dine on a banqueting couch; his queen is upright in an armchair with the honor of a footstool; the three-legged table was portable, brought in by servants course by course.  All the furniture legs have lions' feet, here with pine cone shapes under the lions' feet.  The only females that lie down on the couches with the males are the ones that are . . . paid for it.  North Syrian Aramaean princes adopt these fashions in furniture and customs in dining.  The Greeks pick it up from them, which is why Greek banqueting scenes (which are not symbolic victory banquets) resemble this one.

[M 60, right] In Greece, by about 680 B.C., the scales have tipped decisively; the art style is no longer one that can be called Geometric.  We call this Early Archaic style Orientalizing, aptly, since it is borrowings from the Levant that transform it.  Of course, if you let yourself get hung up on words, you might suppose the statuette dedicated to Apollo by Mantiklos is "less progressive" because it is more frontal and more formal than, say, the statuette of the doe and fawn a generation earlier.  But Near Eastern statuettes are usually more frontal and iconic, so those traits in the Mantiklos statuette are actually symptomatic of Near Eastern borrowings.  Besides, the Mantiklos statuette comes from Boeotia, never the most mainstream region of Greece.

[MA 42] [M 217] [MA 88, left] Different cities in Greece had different trading patterns and came in touch with different Near Eastern traditions in the seventh century.  Thus they came up with different Orientalizing styles.  One of these styles is called Daedalic.  This word is applied only to one kind of sculptural style within the Orientalizing movement of Early Archaic (7th century) Greek art: it is the style of the medium-sized limestone statuette (once brightly painted) in the Louvre (formerly in the museum at Auxerre, whence her soubriquet), probably made in Crete (which, of course, is no longer Minoan), and the small (about 5") ivory kneeling boy, probably part of a lyre, found in the sanctuary of Hera on the Ionian island of Samos but, by common consent, not made there; the great panhellenic sanctuaries attracted dedications, gifts from all over the Greek world.  The Samos boy is a little later than the Dame d'Auxerre, but not so late as the date on the Print.  First you notice the pseudo-Egyptian wig, with tresses tied at the ends, on both of them; then the short, narrow nose and sharp chin, reminding us of Amarna and Tutankhamen, the mouth with triangular corners, the almond-shaped eyes; they both wear the same kind of belt; both have hands with very large thumbs, with detailed nails and squared off.  Both are remarkably frontal.  Like the two goddesses with the baby from Mycenae earlier, the ivory boy had inlaid eyebrows; the Dame d'Auxerre is of limestone, but her eyebrows are carved to look like inlay (i.e., derive from inlay); that is a clue.  The style probably is inspired by ivories.  Not from Egypt; the Egyptian features are secondhand.  Finds from the Assyrian palaces of the 8th and 7th centuries include pseudo-Egyptian decorative art in ivory, much of it made to decorate royal furniture.  This Egyptianizing decorative art was mostly made by the Phoenicians, who were famous traders, and who exported it all over.  (It was from this pseudo-Egyptian Phoenician art that the Greeks borrowed the form of the sphinx, too; the Phoenicians made it so dainty that it looked female to the Greek artists).  Some of the ivory plaques show a woman at a window, with features resembling those of the Dame d'Auxerre.  The inlaid plaque from Nimrud, with a lioness attacking a Nubian boy in an "exotic" setting (a papyrus thicket--yes, this luxury art is deliberately exotic, like the Blue Willow ware with Chinese subjects made in the 18th century) is one of the masterpieces of the Phoenician luxury art.  Compare the delicately swelling pectorals and tiny waist and tapered wrists and ankles with the ivory kneeling boy from Samos (he is believed to have been made in the Peloponnesos of Greece).  What the Greeks have added of their own is emphatic formal clarity and the squaring of the jaw (just as they did a hundred years before in the Geometric ivory goddess from the Dipylon [MA 88, right]); also, in the Dame d'Auxerre, the body is not pseudo-Egyptian, and not Phoenician, at all.  The little cape may be a Cretan garment.  Even allowing that they stand on the shoulders of the Near Eastern models, so to speak, these works are remarkably naturalistic compared with Late Geometric art.

From its first publication, in color lithograph of drawings, which are accurate and present the colors well.

[MA 13] [MA 83] Just as the label "Daedalic" applied only to a certain kind of Orientalizing sculpture, the label "Protocorinthian" (short for proto-Black-figured pottery made in Corinth) applies only to Corinthian pottery, post-Geometric and not later than ca. 625 B.C.  Now, there is a perfume bottle in the Louvre, of ca. 650 B.C. that has a mold-made female head instead of a plain neck and mouth; the head is Daedalic, and the vase-painting is Protocorinthian.  In fact, the Dame d'Auxerre derives her dating from the little Corinthian head's being attached to a datable piece of vase-painting.  But their coexistence in one piece does not alter the principle, that we use "Daedalic" only for a particular style of sculpture and "Protocorinthian" only for vase-painting in Corinth in this period.  In Corinth, Geometric pottery had been nice but not so exciting as in Athens; on the other hand, Corinth began to be a commercial city earlier; she traded and colonized in the west very early; she picked up Orientalizing ideas earliest of all the cities on the Greek peninsula; she made art for export, likewise, earliest.  Protocorinthian fine pottery is export ware.  It is found in Etruria and all over the Greek-speaking world, especially in the western colonies of south Italy and Sicily [cf. MAP 1].  Many of the finest pieces are tiny perfume bottles with epic scenes at a miniature scale (the one in the Louvre with a Daedalic head is an example).  The figures are not just silhouette or outline; a silhouette is applied first, then the details are incised with a fine sharp point (perhaps inspired by incised drawing on metalwork), then added red (and sometimes white and yellow, occasionally mixtures of these) is discriminatingly added to heighten some parts.  This technique is what makes it proto-Black-figure.  The outstanding masterpiece of Late Protocorinthian vase-painting, dated ca. 650-635 B.C. (only a century later than the Dipylon krater), is the Chigi Olpe from an Etruscan tomb (thus well preserved; thus kept in Rome's Villa Giulia, which is the museum for Etruscan finds from the region just north of Rome).  An olpe is a round-mouth pear-shaped wine pitcher; this one is 26.2 centimeters, just over 11 inches tall, so the figures in the main friezes are about 2´" tall.  It is so exceptional a masterpiece, with much mixed added color, that it is not really typical of ordinary export-quality Protocorinthian, fine as the ordinary ware is.  Some have thought, and I think, that it was painted by someone who ordinarily did panel paintings (on smoothed gessoed boards, in full color).  Written sources (though they were written later, and cannot be regarded as wholly reliable) tell us that painting was "invented at Corinth", evidently unaware of Minoan and Mycenaean painting--and, of course, the ancient Egyptian tombs were sealed shut.  The remarkable thing about Protocorinthian figure style, and especially this artist, the Chigi Painter (whose real name we do not know, although in the scene below the handle on the vase he wrote very neatly the names of Alexander=Paris, Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite: the first picture of the myth of the Judgment of Paris in Greek art), is that the humans and horses and the lion are so elegant and neatly drawn, with such natural proportions, like the little kneeling boy from Samos, the lyre boy, only more so.  In fact, as comparison shows, they resemble a side-view photo of the Samos boy, especially the boy playing the flute at far right in the top frieze in your photo, the horsemen and lion hunters in the middle frieze, and the boy with a catch of hares on his back crouching behind a bush in the tiny lower frieze.  That is why the Samos boy should be dated no later than the Chigi Olpe.  Indeed, it must be admitted, the figures on the Olpe are the painting-and-drawing equivalent to the sculptural Daedalic style, which is not surprising, since Corinth was one of the places where Daedalic sculpture was done.  Notice the touches of genius (comparable to those we saw in the Tomb of Nakht): the stragglers in the phalanx running to catch up, the little flute player throwing back his head and seeming to be piping his lungs out, the crouching boy tensely in ambush with a hound behind a bramble bush.  Unlike the Tomb of Nakht, however, this is art for the living, art to delight, art to look at and talk about.  It was the Etruscans, not its Greek makers, who buried it as a gift in a tomb.  It is a new kind of art, reminding us that there is a positive sense to the word "commercial".

The Corinthians not only sometimes put molded (plastic) heads, of humans or lions, on regular vases, but also specialized in making, for export, exquisite plastic perfume bottles in the shape of animals.  The Louvre owl (koukouvaya, the little Greek owl that is Athena's attribute) is one of a dozen or so; the Berlin duck is rarer.  There are scores of hares surviving and some lions.  The plastic vases are skillfully decorated, but not in proto-black-figure; no incision is used; it all is done with a fine brush.  The owl is just the right size and shape for a perfume bottle; it fits right in the curve of your palm.  These doubtless were sought after and prized much as Tiffany glass perfume bottles (and, like them, only for the best perfumes) were a century ago.  Again, commercial in the best sense of the word.

Berlin Mus.  Gate lions from Zincirli, 8th c. BC at left, 9th c. at right

Berlin Mus.  Slab showing King Barrakub (late 8th c.) with his secretary.  For the NW Semitic alphabet  used by this Aramaean king, see his name (find the three B's).

[M 214] [MA 61] There are very different kinds of Orientalizing in the 7th century, derived from trade in different places.  We can't go into all of them in this course.  The region we call North Syria (now partly in Syria, partly in southern Turkey) was inhabited by a mixed population; the ruling class were mostly Aramaeans, who used an alphabet so like ours that we can cipher most of the inscriptions and whose language was NW Semitic, but much of the population were non-Semitic (Luvian) in language and the bearers of leftovers of Hittite imperial culture (we already have seen the effect of their presence on Assyrian art).  The architectural sculpture from Carchemish with a colossal god on colossal lions (with a griffin man between them holding them by leashes around their necks!) is typical of this perhaps crude, but powerful and memorable stone sculpture.  Even more powerful are the similar lions from Zincirli in the Berlin Museum.  These are the first kind of lion that the Greeks came in touch with (that is why a lion of the same kind as at Nineveh, the natural-looking Assyrian lion, is so significant on the Chigi Olpe), and this is where the Greeks of the 7th century adopted the horse-eared, eagle-beaked, scaly-skinned middle-eastern monster that we call "griffin", because in medieval heraldry its later descendant is so called, which may really be the beaked fire-breathers that appears on Old Babylonian seals and may be sharappu--which is etymologically the same as seraphim (note that seraphim are red, whereas cherubim are blue).  Anyway, as with the sphinx, the Greeks were delighted by the monster and adopted it without knowing what it had meant.  The Carchemish and Zincirli lions are carved in hard basalt, but it was hammered bronze griffin heads by Aramaean craftsmen that the Greeks copied for their griffins (in an Etruscan tomb of this period there are some imported bronzes, including griffins, that are probably Aramaean work, and there are repoussé bronze reliefs at Olympia that also are probably Aramaean work).  At first the Greeks also made hammered-out (sphyrelaton) griffin heads and placed them around the shoulder of great bronze cauldrons (the type of cauldron was also borrowed from the Near East), but by about 650 B.C., evidently dissatisfied with the blunt forms of hammer-out griffins, they were making them in cast bronze, beautifully finished with chasing, and some of the examples, especially from Olympia, are quite large and utterly surpass as works of art any of their prototypes.  The cauldrons, although they go back to cooking pots (just as ceremonial maces go back to crude war clubs), in Orientalizing Greece were expensive gifts to the great sanctuaries of Greece: Olympia, Delphi, and Samos.  At Olympia they replaced the Geometric tripod cauldron for this purpose.  Later, families and cities dedicated bronze statuary in the sanctuaries.  From the 7th century hundreds of griffin heads and some rims of cauldrons (only one or two whole cauldrons, since the wall of the vessel was thinner bronze) are preserved, of which this example from Olympia is the greatest masterpiece, although one in the Metropolitan Museum in New York is nearly as fine.  If you study the griffin, you will see what makes it an artistic masterpiece of design: the tensely related curves, the play of chased linear detail against modelled forms, the play of sharp and soft forms against each other, the forward inclination of the delicately curved and tapered ear, the thoughtful shape and proportioning of the knob on top of the head.  So it is not only in the Daedalic style and in Corinthian vases that we find refinement in Greek Orientalizing art.  Yet this is quite different from those.  That's the point: in the Orientalizing Period (=Early Archaic), Greek art is wonderful and experimental but it has not yet jelled, so to speak, to become one art, although with many variants.  The various kinds of Orientalizing are largely independent of each other.

These are still far from the canonical Greek gorgon face (with Lydos drew in black-figure technique and which appears on some the the finest early Athenian coins); it is as if the artist knew how gorgons looked in children's nightmares and envisaged them accordingly.

[MA 82] We have not yet looked at Proto-Attic vase-painting, which differs greatly from Proto-Corinthian made only 65 miles away at the same time.  Athenian vase-painters did, however, adopt the use of the incised line, which put them on the road to black-figure technique, though they used it, as we see in this vase, mixed with outline and color-contrast, less consistently than the Corinthian vase-painters did.  One reason for the differences is that at this early date the Athenians were not colonizers, and they did not trade with the same places as the Corinthians.  Another is that they were not in the perfume business, so did not make miniature luxury perfume bottles.  Third, in the 7th century, the Athenians made their figured pottery for themselves, not for export, and certainly not yet for export to the Greek colonies or the Etruscans in Italy and farther west.  They did trade their wonderful olive oil, and at this date most of the Athenian pots found overseas are the relatively plain oil/wine jars in which those products were shipped.  The great figured amphora, nearly four feet tall, found in 1952 in a cemetery at Eleusis, where (already broken--perhaps it had first stood on top of a grave) it had been used as the coffin for a young child, reflects these facts.  It is called, variously, the Polyphemus Amphora, the Eleusis Amphora, the Menelas Painter's amphora from Eleusis--ancient works don't have the kind of Titles that modern works have.  The moment it was found and published, it became the favorite example of Middle Proto-Attic vase-painting in all the textbooks.  The subjects are two of the most popular stories in 7th-century Greek art: Odysseus and his men blinding the cyclops Polyphemus so as to escape his cannibalism (told in the Odyssey) and Perseus escaping the pursuing gorgon sisters of the gorgon Medusa whose head he has cut off and is carrying in a shoulder tote (the standing female with a spear is Athena, the goddess who assisted him, and this is the first picture of her that we have, unless one of the female deities from Bronze Age Mycenae really is Athena).  The back of the vase had only loops and flowers, and most of it is broken, too.  On the shoulder of the vase is a popular motif, the animal combat, carnivore attacking herbivore, here lion attacking boar.  It is a Near and Middle Eastern motif, and judging from the lion's jaws and paws, the Athenian artist has learned to draw a lion from North Syrian rather than Phoenician (let alone Assyrian) prototypes and perhaps at two or three removes from an original.  There were no lions in this part of Greece, so he surely did not draw from nature.  Compared with Corinthian drawing at about the same date, the drawing is a bit naive and farouche, but lively and memorable.  The same is true of the Polyphemus story on the neck of the vase, where the drawing seems almost child-like in its direct expressiveness, and the forms are bold, and Odysseus and the man behind him are differentiated by being one black, the other white (applied over black and now abraded, showing the artist's sketching underneath): this Middle Proto-Attic style used to be nicknamed "Black-and-White Style" for this reason.  Athenian clay was oranger, and white shows up well on it.  It looks as if he uses incised lines only where brush outline drawing won't work.  The running gorgons are our first full-length gorgons in a story picture in Greek art (Gorgon faces alone occur earlier at Corinth).  Literary sources describe Gorgons as having snaky hair and bug eyes and gaping mouths; the literature we possess is later, but it is obvious that our Proto-Attic artist was drawing, from scratch, just such a description.  The Gorgon sisters' faces remind me of children's own Halloween masks, with a toothy mouth from ear to ear.  It is wonderful drawing, unforgettable, but as fresh and new as a child's.  The Proto-Corinthian drawing is lovelier and more disciplined, but this has its own virtues, besides being the ancestor of very great Athenian vase-painting in the next two centuries.  The Eleusis Amphora is dated ca. 670-650 B.C.  We didn't see this kind of story-telling in Geometric art or, indeed, ever before, except perhaps for the animal fables on the sound box of the bull's-head harp from the Royal Cemetery at Ur.

[MA 43] Not all places had such pretty clay as Athens and Corinth.  Large figured vases with stories from the Epic Cycle of Troy (Iliad and Odyssey and the slightly later poems telling the rest of the traditional lore about the Trojan war and its aftermath, of which we possess only fragments and plot outlines) were made in Boeotia and the Cyclades Islands in molded relief (instead of proto-black-figure painting) in the middle years of the 7th century.  The most famous of these since it was found on Mykonos in 1962 is the amphora with Trojan women trying to protect themselves and their infant children from Achaean Greek soldiers who are sacking Troy, shown in panels on the body of the vase, and, on the neck, the episode that is in your Print: the Greeks getting into Troy hidden in the Trojan Horse.  This is by far the earliest picture that we have of this episode.  Much of what we said about the Eleusis Amphora is equally true here: the child-like eagerness to show that there really are men in the horse, the wheels on the horse's hooves, the vivid gestures.  Perhaps even more remarkable is the artist's concern to convey each Trojan woman's outrage and grief, with dignity, in the panels on the body of the vase; it is one of those remarkable instances of early Greek art anticipating the humane and personal concerns of later Greek art and drama, which are basic to all subsequent western art.  But the Mykonos amphora is believed to be no later than about 650 B.C.

[MA 12] There is some fine 7th-century Orientalizing figured pottery that we don't call "Proto-", because it is not on the way to becoming black-figure technique.  That doesn't mean it is "backward"; far from it.  Several of the best pottery centers in the eastern Aegean, in the Ionian part of the Greek world and the Dodecanese, made an elegantly decorative kind of fine table ware pottery, typically  oinochoai, decorated with animal friezes, beautifully drawn but without any incised lines at all; when they needed to show details, as for the wingbow of a bird or the shoulder blade of a wild goat, they reserved the line (as you refrain from cutting away a line that you want to print on a linoleum block).  Evidently, they thought the pot looked nicer done all in one technique.  Because the prancing mountain goat was their favorite motif, and because we aren't always sure exactly where variants of this ware were manufactured, we call it "Wild-Goat Style".  The Boston oinochoe in your Print was found in Rhodes and pretty surely was made there.