The Early Bronze Age (part two)

Louvre.  The priest Ibihil from Mari on the Euphrates (see below).
By Early Dynastic  III, such notable people have lapis lazuli for their inlayed eyes, which came from Afghanisatan.

EARLY BRONZE AGE MESOPOTAMIA

 [MG 211] Let's go to Mesopotamia and, remember, we're dealing right now with only southern Mesopotamia.  The gulf has silted up since the Bronze Age; what is today Iraq hasn't been losing land as we are in the present cycle; rather, the silt carried down the river has been creating land the way that the Mississippi was, incidentally, doing in the same geological era.  So the cities that we're looking at, like Ur and Uruk, were right down on the coast, even though today they're about 80 miles inland.  But the city that we're going to look at first, because it has this magnificent temple, is much further to the north.  There is a river called the Diyala that comes down from the hills separating Iran from Iraq and flows into the Tigris River from the east, entering the Tigris River somewhat north of Baghdad.  At the time that we are talking about, which is the Early Bronze Age contemporary with the Great Pyramids at Giza in Egypt, this part of Mesopotamia was not yet literate, and apparently the people up here were not Sumerian.  They didn't speak the Sumerian language.  We think they spoke a Semitic language, ancestral to Akkadian; we can't be sure because they weren't writing it yet, but they have been exposed to and absorbed the Sumerian civilization of the south.  At these sites on the Diyala River, north of Baghdad, the University of Chicago, working with the Iraqis back in the '20's, excavated at the town of Khafaje a great urban temple complex.  This reconstruction drawing with houses and little people markers all over it shows how big and imposing it is.  Of all of this complex, which was enlarged to enclose more space subsequent to its first building, only this is the temple itself, raised on a platform as always but not on a ziggurat--this is the in-town kind of temple which doesn't have a ziggurat.  It's basically the same kind of temple as we saw at Uruk, way back in 3,100 B.C.  This is 500 years later; this is contemporary with Khufu's pyramid and with the statues of Rahotep and Nofret.  If this on the platform is all that is temple proper, what is all of the rest?  It's storage rooms and priests' quarters--mostly storage rooms.  As I said in the syllabus, the Sumerians regarded the town and the land as belonging to the god.  The ruler called himself a steward; he didn't call himself divine.  And if everything belongs to the god, then guess where the Internal Revenue Service is?  But this is a long time before money, so it follows that the temples need a lot of storage for grain, for hides, for everything that they collect in taxes.  All of this is built of sun-dried brick--this is a photograph (now 70 years old) from when they were excavating it, and you can see real people, and here are the walls, the temple itself is back there.  You can see that the bricks are handmade, like little loaves of bread the size of poor-boy buns.  They made paddy-cakes out of clean clay, then they laid them on a board to dry, so they're flat on the bottom and shaped like a little loaf of bread on the top.  They are called, for that reason, plano- (flat) convex (rounded) bricks, and wherever you see them and you're excavating in Mesopotamia, you know you're dealing with this period--the Early Dynastic Period.  Every city had its own dynasty--this is not like Egypt--but all collectively are called the Early Dynastic Period.  The greatest architectural temple of the period is this temple with an oval enclosure wall at Khafaje, which we just call the Temple Oval--it's not an oval temple, it's a temple with an oval, a temple oval, at Khafaje, about 2,600.

[M 195] [M 196] Also from the Diyala River valley, at another site, Tell Asmar--remember, a habitation mound or a tomb mound is called hüyük in Turkish, but in Semitic language countries, whether you're speaking Hebrew or Arabic or whichever, it's called tell--a manmade mound.  In the town that the Asmar tell contains (its ancient name is Eshnunna), there was a rather small square temple (not so rectangular or elongated as most temples), dedicated to a local god named Abu, and underneath the floor of that temple was found a cache of 13 votive statuettes.  The biggest one is only about 20 inches high.  By votive I mean like votive candles--worshipers dedicated them in the temple.  They left the statuette basically to embody their prayers just as you might, if you're Catholic, leave a candle lit for the light of your faith behind you.  We don't know if they're all worshippers or if, perhaps, the two biggest ones, a male and a female, might possibly be representations of a god and a goddess--it doesn't really matter.  These curious-looking statuettes date from the time of King Zoser, about 2,700, and you see how different this art is from Egyptian art.  Remember, though, that Tell Asmar is a little provincial--this isn't the heartland of Sumerian culture--so the crudity of the statuettes is partly because of where they come from.  In fact, I have to tell you that the huge eyes of the largest statue and the curious shape of the mouth are not found again anywhere else--they're unique.  All of them are in worshipping postures with the shoulders hunched up and the angular elbows that we saw earlier in protoliterate Uruk, and they're all wearing fleece skirts, which is what you wear when you come into a temple to pray--they're not like the priests in the protoliterate vase from Uruk, they're not nude; that disappears by now.

[M 162] These are fairly early and fairly crude but when you come down to about 2,600, the date of the Temple Oval at Khafaje, and you look at the small figure of a priest from Khafaje itself, you see that the features are more rounded but the elbows are just as angular and the shoulders are just as hunched as in the foregoing.  Notice that they have inlaid eyes, with black pitch to make the eyebrows, meeting over the brow, which is a feature regarded as handsome or beautiful in that part of the world.  Notice that the Khafaje priest has a shaven head, a round, plump face and an exceedingly pleased sort of expression on it--very, very characteristic of Early Dynastic Sumerian art, as we shall see at Ur.

[M 197] Even further to the north, there was a remarkable site that was first excavated after WW II.  Mari is way up the Euphrates River--so far up that it's not in modern Iraq at all but in Syria; of course, the modern borders do not correspond to ancient cultures.  From Mari we have some really interesting statuettes.  This seems to be a Sumerian outpost (for one thing it's literate--there are inscriptions on these statuettes).  This one named Ur-Nanshe (he, but maybe a eunuch) is designated a musician--some kind of musical instrument was in his hands--and they have tried, but not quite succeeded in, showing him in a cross-legged seated pose.  Admittedly, Egypt is much more skillful in naturalism at this date, and yet I don't think you can say that this art is inferior; for one thing, its vivacity is quite striking (Egyptian art is not nearly so spunky as Sumerian art and we don't have any temples from Egypt, really, except for the funerary temples, at this date--no big urban temples) and as for the technical crudity (the angularity of the arm here, for example), these people did not have their own sources of stone; they had to import stone in glacier-polished boulder shape; they didn't get to work from lots of grand, fresh-quarried stone.  Thus, they didn't have that long tradition of stone-working that the Egyptians, by this date, did have.  The masterpiece of those pieces found at Mari is a statue, again from about 2,600 B.C., of a priest named Ibihil.  Here you have a statue way up the Euphrates River, purely Sumerian in style, clearly descending from the style that you saw beginning at Uruk, but the man's name is not Sumerian but Semitic.  In the statue of the priest Ibihil, and they've learned to use a running bow drill to open up the beard, the features are more rounded; he has fingernails and little wrinkles on his fingers, too, though they're not very good at bones and joints, as the Egyptians are.  The carving of the fleece that the priest wears and the basket-work of the stool that he's sitting on are also notable, and, as evidence for their economy and trade, look at his eyes--lapis lazuli, which comes only from Afghanistan.  Its use means that, at least through intermediaries, these people are trading as far as Afghanistan to get something that they really love--this intensely blue stone, the original ultramarine, lapis lazuli (blue stone).  This folded hand gesture is a gesture of prayer, just as the palm-to-palm gesture is in western Christianity.

We've started out with various things, none of which come from the center of Sumerian culture.  In order to show you where this culture is coming from, I want to make clear that the richest place in the Early Dynastic period in Mesopotamia is the city of Ur, about 2,600 to 2,500 B.C.  The rulers in Mesopotamia didn't call themselves kings, but this cemetery shows royal wealth and power and, furthermore, the whole court was put to death with the ruler.  Here is a lady-in-waiting with her gold-leaf head ornaments and her lapis lazuli and gold beads.  This is a reconstitution--exhibited in the Iraqi museum in Baghdad.  But they found numerous ladies-in-waiting, so the British Museum also has one set of jewelry and they have placed the jewelry on a wooden egg-shaped head.  Just Search 'Ur' for the pages of images on line).  The English archaeologist, Sir Leonard Woolley, directed and published the excavation for the British Museum jointly with the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Iraqi archaeological service.

Understandably, the U Prints gave this breathtaking object one of their few color prints (which beginners tend to like, too), but it is far too interesting in detail for dot-process mid-20c reproduction.  So when I got a chance in the British Museum I held my breath and took snapshots.  Above, the Battle; below, the banquet with a musician (like UrNanshe, above)

[1502]  Among the objects found in the Royal Cemetery at Ur was a rectangular object with trapezoidal ends, though it was broader at the bottom than at the top, and we don't know what it is.  It was nicknamed the "Standard" of Ur (certainly wrong)--it may be the soundbox of a musical instrument, but we don't know.  We usually keep the nickname "Standard" for it (in quotes).  It is an extremely interesting object; it has on one side a scene of warfare and on the other side a victory banquet and religious rites to celebrate the victory.  The art is very interesting--we see the same short, round-headed figures that we saw much earlier on the alabaster vessel from Uruk and in the little round-headed priest from Khafaje.  We see that kind of people, we see that style, and the people who are in the religious procession are wearing the same fleece skirts, we see the same big ears and big eyes and the hunched shoulders, even though this is not sculpture, and very small (2 or 3 inches high), little inlaid figures of shell.  Like the eyes of Ibihil up at the Mari, the background is inlaid in mosaic "tiles" of lapis lazuli.  It's also interesting from other points of view: this is a chariot; it's not a 4-wheeled cart, since we know that this is a way of showing a 2-wheeled vehicle.  It's not perspective; rather, "it's got 4 wheels, so I'm going to draw 4 wheels".  We've seen this before.  We know it's that, because the front and the side of the chariot are unfolded, more or less like something printed on the back of cereal box that you cut out and folded, but it was printed unfolded.  Notice that the chariot wheels are absolutely solid, made of 2 half-rounds of wood doweled together and placed on a wooden axle.  In the poetry, we may read of the heroes of Early Dynastic Ur riding into battle "like the wind", but even the most cursory examination of those chariots shows that they are riding clunkity-clunkity creek-creek across a bumpy plain at perhaps approximately a mile, or half a mile, an hour.  Notice, too, that the animals are not horses or donkeys.  You know that famous phrase I used to love in Sunday school--"the jawbone of a wild ass"?  That's what they are; they're onagers.  They were used for chariot animals until horses were brought down into this part of the world, not until around 2,000 B.C., the exact time varying from one place to another.  So they tamed wild asses, onagers, and used them for chariot animals.  Lest you despise these wheels, remember that these are the first wheels we've seen.  They may be the first wheels in the world--somebody had to invent the wheel.  For all their brilliance, the civilizations and cultures of North and South America (and look at those Mayan temples) did not have the wheel, and there's some argument to be made that the wheel was diffused from here (since you see other things, like sections of log, rolling downhill, it might seem obvious to invent the wheel, but quite a few people have not done so). In fact, that is why this "Standard" is in every 9th-grade world history book, because of the wheel.  This is the battle side--there's some warriors and some prisoners of war.  Notice that the onagers have their reins strung through a double ring fastened to the pole between their heads that goes to the axle of the chariot.  This is called a rein ring, and you'll see in a moment why I brought it to your attention.  The other side of the "Standard" of Ur shows the victory banquet and victory rites after the battle.  It's a little less lively than the other side but equally interesting.  Here you have all of the elders of the society in those fleece skirts and with their shaven heads and shaven chins.  The figures at Tell Asmar had beards, but that's one reason we think that those people are not ethnic Sumerians, since ethnic Sumerians seem not to wear beards.  Look at this man on a fancy throne and, see, there's an animal leg on the furniture here, too, so it's not just the Egyptians who use animal legs for furniture.  This man is holding a harp and playing it, and the harp has a soundbox with a bull's head on it, like the one in your Print.  The harpist is one of those long-haired figures like the cross-legged Ur-nanshe at Mari--you'd think it was a lady, because of the long hair, but women don't wear this kind of fleece skirt, and you may have here a eunuch, or someone who is clothed to be a singer and bard rather than a warrior.  In this slide you can clearly see the actual hunks of lapis lazuli inlaid in bitumen.

[M 161] There are four of these harps that were found in the excavation of the Royal Cemetery at Ur.  Like the lady's skull, in what was a very innovative technique for that time in archaeology (this was 70 years ago), these, because they were all crushed and the wood was all powdery, were lifted out of the earth by first pouring in wax on top of them, then lifting them out all in one piece, then taken to the laboratory (because, of course, the wood that you see here, whichever of the museums you go to, is modern).  Because of the technique of lifting the pieces, they were able to reconstruct them with much greater accuracy than otherwise would have been possible.  They're all different--some of them have silver heads, this one in Philadelphia has a gold head, some of them have silver or gold beards (the one in Baghdad, for example, has a gold beard), but this one has a beard made of huge pieces of lapis lazuli--they really loved that stone.  We don't know how the harp was tuned, we can't hear the music--that's asking a little bit much--but notice the bull's head.  It's not naturalistic in the same way that an Egyptian one is, but it has a very bovine quality about it.  They've gotten the essence of the animal, so well that you pull yourself up short and say, wait a minute, bulls don't have beards!  They've made you accept the beard by their art.  That is what Mesopotamian art is supremely good at--making beautiful monsters.  That's not the only thing they're good at, but they're supremely good at that.  The Egyptians, for all of the beauty of their art, if they make a cat-headed goddess, it looks like a cat's head on a human woman.  On the front of the Philadelphia harp is this panel where you see the hero with two animals arranged heraldically on either side of him.  This time they are bulls, but man-headed bulls--here you've got the metamorphosis a little bit different.  Animals like this, incidentally, are the ultimate ancestors of what the Bible calls cherubim--don't think of them as little pink babies.  We'll see what seraphim are later--they're even wilder.  Down below you have something very interesting; for one thing you have another picture, on the harp, of a bull's-head harp, but it isn't being played by a human being but by a jackass, and he has the dubious help of a big bear.  Is this work the ultimate ancestor of Walt Disney?  Yes!  That is, we have here probably the ultimate ancestor of things like Aesop's fables which, in turn, are, at long range, the ancestors of Donald Duck and all those other critters.  You have here, in other words, animal fables in which human beings are represented as animals.  This hyena, for example, with a dagger in its belt is carrying sacrificial meat to a feast and the acolyte is this noble-looking lion--we don't know these stories, but it's obvious that there are very clever, delightful stories that go with this.  It's always true, isn't it, that these ancient civilizations really are mysterious to us.  We have so much, we relate to it so directly, this is so delightful--we can almost hear the harp being played and the singer singing in the other picture.  And then we're reminded that it's a society where they believed it necessary to kill the whole court and put them in the tomb to serve in eternity in the afterlife, and you realize that you are dealing, in many respects, with a very barbaric society.  As I said in the syllabus, by the standards of the Greeks (and our own) all Early Bronze Age societies are rather barbaric, which is to say they're very early.

[M 199] In the British Museum, which has the best light for photography, this animal, which is about half lifesize, is almost certainly an offering stand.  You have a spike here, and a rush light or an offering of some kind could be impaled on that spike--that's all that we can think of.  This also we owe to the technique of using wax to lift the whole thing out in one piece and then take it to the laboratory to study it and then put it together.  Once again, all of the wooden skeleton inside has had to be restored.  I brought these slides because this is what is really looks like.  This is the real color of it--some of the color reproductions are wildly different.  It's a goat, a long-wooled goat, standing up on its hind legs the way animals do; animals, goats and sheep, do put up their front legs and eat from the branches that way.  The belly of the ram is silver (very much oxidized), its genitals are added in gold, the fleece is made of shell except around the shoulders where it is, again, made of lapis lazuli, and the eyes are inlaid in lapis lazuli.  The royal cemetery, I must say, is a real knockout--no one expected to find this kind of wealth in a society which, otherwise, does not give much priority to tombs.  Other Sumerian cities, so far as we know, didn't do this, later or earlier.  But here it is--for a couple of hundred years, the rulers of Ur lived like kings.  Even if it isn't wrinkle for wrinkle and wart for wart, even if it isn't line for line like a living goat, the artist got the quality of a goat, the expression of a goat.  And it's beautifully stylized, with the flat planes meeting each other, making delightful shapes--these objects are perfect models of good design.

[No print]  Now I've brought you a lagniappe.  One of the things that suggests that wheels were a relatively new invention is the fact that one of the royal ladies, a queen, that was buried in the royal cemetery, had in her tomb not a chariot to ride in but a sledge, a little like the vehicles that the Plains Indians had for their people--not with wheels.  We're not quite sure we've got the runners reconstructed accurately, but the height and the shape of the box is correct, and this provides a place to mount all of the things that were found, the little lions' heads--of course the pole and the reins are modern leather, but look right here.  In the tomb, with this sledge, was found a real rein ring, which will make very vivid to you the rein rings on the "Standard".  Here's the silver rein ring; the diameter of the pole, incidentally, is given by the curvature of the mount on the rein ring (an example of how we get such information).  The little newborn baby onager colt is made of electrum, natural white gold.  Look at the stumbling charm of the baby onager colt.  These are in the British Museum in London--the ram and this and the "Standard" of Ur, and two of the bull's head harps.

For whatever reasons, Ur lost her leadership around 2,500 B.C.  The whole Early Dynastic period (and we haven't even looked at the other cities) decisively came to an end.

[M 203]  You recall those northern people who weren't Sumerians?  The ruler of one of them established himself at Akkad, a place where we've never actually found a site and excavated it yet.  A king named Sargon not only made himself king in the whole region of Akkad, which is the region around Baghdad and Babylon, the middle of Mesopotamia, but he conquered the south, the north, the west and may have even conquered, or at least had power over, people as far away as Asia Minor--modern Turkey.  He certainly had a great deal of economic power as far as modern Syria, because we have archives with Akkadian correspondence at the site in Syria called Ebla, which Italian and Syrian archaeologists excavated some 30 years ago.  For once, now we have real dates--it's almost dead certain that this man, Sargon of Akkad, came to the throne in 2,340 B.C., and his descendants ruled after him until 2,180.  This is the Dynasty of Akkad and, as I've just pointed out to you, it isn't just a kingdom.  Different words have different meanings--when one kingdom conquers and rules over other kingdoms, then you call the resulting entity an empire.  An empire can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on local circumstances--it can be a way of spreading literacy and civilization (the Roman Empire, for example) or a way of spreading your idea of the rule of law; the Roman Empire did that, too.  It may be sheer exploitation.

[M 203]  We are not sure that this portrait is a portrait of Sargon the Great of Akkad, but it's either he or his son, so just to be safe we call it "Head of an Akkadian Ruler".  To show how strongly later empires felt about this man, consider the fact that this head was carted off to Assyria up in the northeast and was actually found in Nineveh.  Once again, as with the portrait of Zoser, someone at some time has gotten freaked by the eyes or else, if they were made of precious stones, just plain wanted them--either way, someone has just cruelly gouged and gashed out the eyes of this statue.  You can imagine the anger or the terror in the way that it's been done.  The head is an exquisite masterpiece.  It is cast hollow.  You can't cast bronze that big (it's lifesize) without making it hollow because, if you do, as it cools from the outside while the inside is still hot, it will crack like the Liberty Bell.  So you cannot make solid bronze statues past the size of a table-top statuette.  To make a hollow-cast statue, you have to make a core, usually clay, and then you have to put on wax where the bronze is going to be, put in pins, then put on more clay, then bake it to let the wax run out as it melts( with the pins holding the shell and the core in the correct relationship to each other), then you pour in molten bronze to fill the cavity between the shell and the core.  This is the original and simplest way of making a hollow-cast statue.  Remember Pepy I and his date (about 2,300)?  Let's admit right away that when it comes to casting and chasing and handling metal, we've got to hand it to the Mesopotamians--this wins.  No other bronze of the Early Bronze Age is nearly so magnificent and so skillful as this one.  The language, Akkadian, was written with Sumerian characters--cuneiform writing (wedge-shaped) that had developed out of early pictographs--but the Akkadian language is a Semitic language, in fact it is the classical language of the ancient world in the Middle East just as Arabic is the lingua franca and, in the Middle Ages, is the classical language of the Middle East, Arabic being a later language that is cousin to this one.  So the Akkadian language is the lingua franca of the whole Near and Middle East in the Bronze Age.  If you wanted to trade, and you wanted to correspond with people, you did it in Akkadian, the language of this empire and of Sargon.  They just borrowed the writing from the Sumerians and wrote their own language in it.  They borrowed a great deal else from the Sumerians; for example, the royal wig that this king is wearing is the same kind of wig as a Sumerian steward would have worn, and their gods and goddesses have their own names, but it's the same mythology and the same gods and goddesses.  They have, for example, a male god of the moon--the Sumerians called him Nannar (he is the god of Ur) and up here they called him Sin, but it's the same god with the same story.  Those bearded people, in the votive statue group from Tell Asmar, were probably also these people.  Sargon (or his son) wears a beard.  And these people have narrower heads and longer noses--they look a little different from the round-faced, thin-lipped Sumerians--they're different people, a different genetic isolate, and they're certainly a different linguistic group.

[M 12] The grand-nephew of Sargon of Akkad, the other great ruler of the dynasty, was named Naram-sin.  This stele, of Naram sin, which can be seen in the Louvre in Paris, is a great hairpin-shaped stone stele showing a victory.  The interesting thing is, you see, that this art of the dynasty of Akkad is so revolutionary.  The technique of that bronze head was a breakthrough, and in the Stele of Naram-sin, you don't have a victory done in little rows of people as on the "Standard" of Ur or all the Egyptian art we looked at.  Here they show the fact that the battle took place on a hillside by sort of spacing figures out as if they were on a hillside and then they emphasize it by putting some trees here and there.  The large figure is either the king or, more likely, I think, because of the horned headdress, the god leading them into battle.  You know in the Bible how Yahweh/Jehovah/The Lord leads the Hebrews in battle--in the early books of the Bible, not in the later books, but in Genesis--so if the city belongs to the god, and the city goes to war, it's obvious that the god who owns the city is going to war for them.  Not only do you have figures represented going from left to right upwards and not in strict rows but in staggered arrangement, which is just the beginning of trying to draw something the way it looks, but you also have human fear and pain, and the act of falling, and here somebody turning around and saying "Look out", all of which we've never seen before, either here or in Egypt.  At this date, that means anywhere in the world, because, I assure you, it doesn't happen this early in China, either, and there was little population, widely distributed, in the Americas and southern Asia and the rest of Africa at this date.  Some of the rock-face paintings in Africa are of this date, but they don't have battles on them; those people did not maintain regular armies, because they were living in smaller groups.

The kingdom of Akkad was brought to an end as usual, partly, by internal dissension but also partly by raids of people coming down out of the foothills of the mountains that lie between Iraq and Iran.  Some of these people are called, in the written sources, Guti.  But basically, whenever you've got urban civilizations and you've got tribal people living on their borders, the tribal people usually do not want to give up their freedom and settle down in cities, but they do want the ancient equivalent of VCR's and washing machines and sports cars, so they raid and they get all these goodies and then pretty soon you find them settling down in turn and becoming civilized.  I don't say they weren't "nice" before, but civilized, remember, means living in cities.  These Guti really made themselves unwelcome--they ravaged the cities of Sumer and they probably played some part in the falling apart of the empire of Akkad, as I said, in 2,180.

[M 8] For whatever reason, one ruler, the steward (patesi) of the city of Lagash (the biggest collection of these is in the Louvre in Paris because the French excavated it--and I would say, yes, to learn where you go to see what, is part of the course, so that next time you go to this or that city, you will know what you can see there), managed not to get ravaged by the Guti.  All over the statues are long inscriptions of the most ponderous piety explaining why Gudea is prospering because the gods love him, because he does this and that and the other thing and is so reverent to the gods--in other words, it's as if a political candidate here were to say "And furthermore, owing to my piety, God, through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, has just ended this recession."  Now that's the kind of inscription that Gudea's statues have on them, and, needless to say, we think there may be more to it than that--either he's paying the Guti baksheesh or something, because he's not getting raided and the others are.  For whatever reason, he had a very prosperous rule, and the city of Lagash did not get raided, and furthermore they no longer needed to worry about being under the thumb of the dynasty of Akkad.  This is what is called the Neo-Sumerian period. It is the last time when the cities of the ancient Sumerians were independent and free and had power in their own right. Gudea ruled around about 2,100 B.C.  What you see here is your traditional round-faced, narrow-lipped Sumerian with the angular elbows and the hands clenched in worship and if he took off his hat as he does on some of the other statues, you would see that he has a shaven head and no beard.  It very clearly says "I am a Sumerian--I am not a bearded Akkadian king".  The fleece hat, incidentally, makes him shepherd of his people, a term we still use, particularly in the Church, for the shepherd of the congregation--the pastor, shepherd.  That's why he's wearing the fleece hat--it's symbolic.  But then when we look at the technique and the style we think, Goodness!  This is made of diorite, the same hard stone as Chephren's statue with the hawk on the back of it.  I have to tell you, though we're not seeing them in this course, that the dynasty of Akkad also used diorite for statues, and that's where they're getting the technique from.  And also you have the fishbone- or herringbone-patterned eyebrows and the detail and the naturalism of the king of Akkad combined with the style and iconography of a ruler of Sumer--so the Neo-Sumerian art is clearly distinct from, and yet easily identifiable with, the Sumerian art of the Early Dynastic period.  This is at a period when Egypt is in a mess; it's the First Intermediate Period.

On the tablet in Gudea's lap, beside his stylus, is the plan of the temple or palace enclosure.  Whichever, it is a wall showing wall thickness, showing the recessed paneling at the gates and (as all modern architects do but never Egyptian or almost any other ancient ones do) it is done to scale and all like a plan, as if you cut off the building at grade level!  That is both intellectually and practically remarkable: a builder can work from such a drawing.

Paris, Louvre (in gallery with Gudeas).  Statue of an Akkadian king.  Here, by one sculptor and never again, the sculptor has found the means of rendering twisting drapery--in diorite, too.  Elsewhere, even later for Hammurabi, only folds at the underarm are attempted.

[M 202] [M 213] Another development of Neo-Sumerian art and architecture is justly very, very famous.  This is the monument that the archaeologists were particularly worried about several years ago during "Desert Storm", because it's right down there at Ur.  Ur had one final burst of power and authority and wealth in the 21st century B.C.  The king had a long rule--a good central date for him would be c. 2,050.  Note that this is also the date at which Egypt was being reunified.  This reign, though, is the last of Sumerian power, while in Egypt it is the beginning of a new period.  So this goes at the end of Early Bronze, the same date as the beginning of Middle Bronze in Egypt; it is a question of aspect.  One photo of the Ziggurat at Ur shows it with a vintage pale blue Cadillac in front of it; that gives you scale.  Persons look tiny.  Compare the White Temple on the Ziggurat at Uruk about 1,000 years earlier.  Here the ziggurat form is brought to architectural design maturity.  Built by Ur-nammu of Ur.  Over the last 50 years the Iraqi archaeological service has very carefully solidified it, filled some gaps, fixed the ramps, but not restored anything on top; we know there was a temple there, but we lack evidence for what it looked like.  From wind erosion, etc., the temple is gone, so we can't just make up a plausible one; that would be dishonest.  You can't make up history; if there's no writing, the history is gone forever.  A drawing in the prints suggests what it might have looked like.  This ziggurat differs from the early one in that, though it is mud brick inside, it is cased with fired brick.  "Weeper holes" (still visible) were provided to make sure that moisture trapped inside, making the mud brick swell, could escape and wouldn't produce cracks in the fired brick casing.
Ur-nammu also left us a stele.  Only bits are preserved, but in the upper registers, a scene dear to the hearts of these rulers, in which the god of the city is giving the king, in his fleece hat, a rod and a ring: we believe these are the rolled-up rope and the standard measure that a surveyor-engineer used (we saw them in the hand of Hesy-ra on his wooden door).  The idea is of measuring as a metaphor for correct justice, for meting out what is due and right, the first attribute of a good ruler.  Being divinely invested as a king is not purely a matter of privilege, but of empowerment to serve the god's purposes in "his" city.  Scenes of this type in Mesopotamian art are called Investiture Scenes.

EARLY BRONZE AGE IN ASIA MINOR AND IN THE AEGEAN

Alaca Hüyük, in the tombs of the ruling class, were found wonderful metal animals, with inlaid patterns, stags and bulls (is it an accident that they are the same two species that we saw featured at Çatal Hüyük?), and vessels and ornaments made of thin sheet gold, embossed: too weak for any kind of use, so purely tomb goods.  The style is strikingly independent of both Mesopotamia and the far more distant Egypt.  It also is culturely distinct from the west coast of Asia Minor, which looks toward the Aegean.

[M 211]  Asia Minor in the Early Bronze Age was less urban, especially in the interior.  In the lower levels of a site that we shall study later for its Hittite monuments (but the Hittites have not arrived yet),

[MAP 7] [Search for 'Troy' in Images and Commons]  In the northwest corner of Asia Minor is the site of Troy, where nine superimposed cities, from earliest Early Bronze to the Hellenistic Age and Rome, were built successively.  Whatever factual truth there is in Homer's Iliad, this is where it happened.  A hundred and thirty years ago, Heinrich Schliemann identified the hill called Hissarlik as the site of Troy and was the first to excavate it.  Troy II concerns us at this point.  It was rich; the building is fine, it was remodelled several times, the pottery is good, and there was gold jewellry (the gold made Schliemann think of Homer's description of Troy's wealth, but Troy II (ca. 2,500-2,200 B.C.) is more than 1,000 years earlier than the Trojan War period).  On the plan, "MAP" 7, notice the differentiation of Troy II and the larger, later Troy VI.  Troy I already was a walled citadel.  Troy II had fine walls with offsets and H-shaped gates approached by ramps.  In the center is a very distinctive form of ruler's residence (or palace, for it is large and well made): a long building with a porch formed by the extension of the walls, with a courtyard in front, the latter entered through an H-shaped gate; other, lesser long buildings are separate from but alligned parallel to the main one.  This is pretty much what in Mycenaean architecture of the Late Bronze Age a millennium later we shall call a megaron complex, and, since these are definitely pre-Greek, pre-Mycenaean people, we really cannot explain the similarity that is too complex to be accidental.  The pottery is distinctive, too: tall, tapered cups with long vertical handles on both sides.

Now we turn to the Aegean proper, where agriculture was rainfall-dependent and the development of real wealth a little slower.

[A 6] [MA 59]  Early Cycladic is a separate culture.  Later, in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, it will be closely related to Crete and the Greek peninsula.  In Early Cycladic, it is completely independent; the archaeological finds are different (and we can't say more, because they have left us no writing).  The typical work of art is a standing female marble statuette with the arms folded across the torso.  Several of these islands are virtually solid marble.  Without hard metal tools, they used, with stone tools, another local resource, volcanic emery, to work the marble (trading valuable emery to Egypt may have familiarized them with basic techniques to work stone and make stone vessels).  No sign of the use of drills.  These methods, together with the long tradition of making these female statuettes (size ranges from 4-5" to nearly life size in a few cases), partly account for the severe but truly elegant style, especially of the best examples.  Modern sculptors in the first half of the 20th century greatly admired them (one reason for there being a lot of fakes; they were too fashionable!).  Yet the formal sense is so strong and distinctive that we must also allow for the development here of special artistic talent.  Exceptionally we have male figures, usually musicians; the ones that are greatest and certainly genuine are the Harp Player and the Flute Player in the Athens National Archaeological Museum.  Like the best standing females that have the same shape of back-tilted head and articulation of parts of the body, they date from about 2,500-2,200 B.C. (that makes them contemporary with the Dynasty of Akkad in Mesopotamia, with Dyn. V-VI in Egypt).  The musicians not only are valuable as outstanding works of art (though most of them have been excavated from tombs, and we do not know, in the absence of writing, what their exact purpose and meaning were); they also are evidence for a relatively sophisticated lifestyle: for music, they had a harp comparable to those of the river-valley civilizations and the double flute, and they made elegantly designed furniture (not just something to sit on), as we see in the Harp Player's chair.

[M 132]  From Crete (Early Minoan) in the same period, there is nothing like the marble statuettes we just looked at, but early pottery is very impressive and is continuous with the later (Middle and Late Minoan) culture.  The early stone vessels also show promise.  These also prove their early contact with Egypt, which is where Mediterraneans learned to make stone vessels (remember the Dynasty I pomade pot with a gold foil cover than I showed as a "lagniappe"?).  In Crete, caves are full of stalactites, and the Minoans very early realized that if you took a section of a large stalactite and made it into a vessel, it was easier to carve than breccia or granite, but it had pretty patterns on it, which obviously they liked.  They imitated such splotchy patterns on some of their pots: they covered some areas during the firing; they applied firebrands to the surface of the pot.  We think this was meant to reproduce in pottery the appearance of the stalactites.  It certainly was deliberate (can't happen accidentally, is a lot of trouble and requires great ingenuity).  2,500-2,000 B.C.  But the people who arrived in Crete, perhaps shortly after 3,000, are continuous culturally with the later Minoans.  Who were they?  Pottery shapes and place names suggest they may have come from southwest Asia Minor.  Names ending in -ssos and -nthos.  Non-Greek.  Found in southwest Asia Minor and in Aegean lands, especially Crete.  Knossos is one.  On the Greek peninsula Corinth (Greek spelling: Korinthos, but the name is pre-Greek) is one.  In Crete, later, we shall see the descendants of these pitchers with upthrust spouts, with a bead for an eye, so they look like beaks of hungry baby birds.

I can show you here a fine cup in the Argos Museum from the Lerna excavations.  I shall add a picture of a boxful of the tiles that give the building its name, if I can find it.

On the Greek mainland [see plan of building and sketch of "sauceboat" in supplemental illustrations at back of syllabus], at the site of Lerna (where Herakles in Greek mythology fought the Hydra), a ruler built a huge palace, more than just a big house.  Different from Troy II at the same date, not just a long hall.  In side rooms there are staircases partly preserved, so it had a second storey.  Well built, and, most remarkably, it was roofed with tiles, flat fired terracotta tiles, whence we call it "The House of the Tiles at Lerna", since we do not have their own name for the people/culture that built it, knowing only that the ancestors of the Greeks hadn't arrived yet (they began to come only about 2,100 B.C.).  It was tiles that required such strong walls, for their weight.  Here, again, archaeology surprised us; we did not expect a large tiled building here, at this date (the middle of the third millennium, about the time of Troy II, the end of Early Dynastic Sumer, the end of Dynasty IV or Dynasty V in Egypt).  Early Helladic pottery also is excellent.  This is, then, a real Early Bronze Age civilization, but the smaller population base and economic base meant that nothing in the Early Bronze Aegean was as big or rich or technologically advanced as in the river valleys (in China, Pakistan, Iraq, and Egypt) at the same date.  These "sauceboat" ceremonial vessels (we think that they actually were communal drinking vessels--communal in the same sense as a Communion cup or the Native American peace pipe) are Early Helladic pottery, contemporary with the House of the Tiles and with the two-handled tapered drinking vessels found in association with the palace/megaron/ruler's house that Schliemann excavated at Troy II.  But one exists of hammered gold: