On Art in the Ancient Near East – Vol. 1: On the First Millennium BCE (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East)

657 Pages·2009·17.27 MB·English

by  Irene J. Winter

On Art in the Ancient Near East
Culture and History of the
Ancient Near East
Founding Editor
M. H. E. Weippert
Editor-in-Chief
Thomas Schneider
Editors
Eckart Frahm, W. Randall Garr, B. Halpern,
Theo P. J. van den Hout
VOLUME 34.1

On Art in the Ancient
Near East
Volume I
Of the First Millennium B.C.E.
Irene J. Winter
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2010
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
On the art in the ancient Near East / edited by Irene J. Winter.
p. cm. — (Culture and history of the ancient Near East, ISSN 1566-2055 ; v. 34)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-17237-1 (hard cover : v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-17499-3
(hard cover : v. 2 : alk. paper) 1. Middle East—Antiquities. 2. Art, Ancient—Middle
East. 3. Sculpture, Ancient—Middle East. 4. Visual communication—Middle East—
History—To 1500. 5. Social archaeology—Middle East. I. Winter, Irene.
DS56.O5 2009
709.39’4—dc22
2009020832
ISSN 1566-2055
ISBN 978 90 04 17237 1
Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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printed in the netherlands
VOLUME I
OF THE FIRST MILLENIUM B.C.E.
CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................ vii
Acknowledgments ....................................................................... xiii
THE ASSYRIAN PALACE AND RELIEF CARVING
Chapter One Royal Rhetoric and the Development
of Historical Narrative in Neo-Assyrian Reliefs .................... 3
Chapter Two Art in Empire: The Royal Image and the
Visual Dimensions of Assyrian Ideology ............................... 71
Chapter Three Le Palais imaginaire: Scale and Meaning in
the Iconography of Neo-Assyrian Cylinder Seals ................. 109
Chapter Four Ornament and the “Rhetoric of
Abundance” in Assyria ........................................................... 163
BRONZE AND IVORY/LUXURY GOODS
Chapter Five Phoenician and North Syrian Ivory Carving
in Historical Context: Questions of Style and Distribution ... 187
Chapter Six Carved Ivory Furniture Panels from Nimrud:
A Coherent Subgroup of the North Syrian Style ................. 225
Chapter Seven Is There a South Syrian Style of Ivory
Carving in the Early First Millennium b.c.? ......................... 279
Chapter Eight North Syria as a Bronzeworking Centre in
the Early First Millennium b.c.: Luxury Commodities
at Home and Abroad ............................................................. 335
Chapter Nine North Syrian Ivories and Tell Halaf Reliefs:
The Impact of Luxury Goods upon “Major” Arts ............... 381
Chapter Ten Establishing Group Boundaries: Toward
Methodological Refi nement in the Determination of
Sets as a Prior Condition to the Analysis of Cultural
Contact and/or Innovation in First Millennium b.c.e.
Ivory Carving .......................................................................... 405
vi contents
INTERACTIONS OF TIME AND SPACE
Chapter Eleven Perspective on the “Local Style” of
Hasanlu IVB: A Study in Receptivity .................................... 433
Chapter Twelve On the Problems of Karatepe:
The Reliefs and Their Context ............................................... 467
Chapter Thirteen Art as Evidence for Interaction:
Relations between the Assyrian Empire and North Syria .... 525
Chapter Fourteen Carchemish ša kišad puratti ......................... 563
Chapter Fifteen Homer’s Phoenicians: History,
Ethnography, or Literary Trope? [A Perspective on
Early Orientalism] .................................................................. 597
INTRODUCTION
Anyone who has already done the task of gathering together previously
published essays aimed at heterogeneous audiences and intended for
different purposes into single volumes will know, and those who may
do it in future are likely to discover, that the reading through of one’s
own essays published over a 35-year period is as daunting, disorienting,
and humbling an experience as any in a long professional career. Not
everything could be included; hence, decisions relative to durability and
overall mission had to be made. Errors—since noted in the scholarly
literature and pointed out sometimes cordially, sometimes gleefully,
sometimes fi rmly—had to be endured, and changes/inconsistencies in
the readings of personal and geographical names, as well as advance-
ments in evidence and thought in the scholarly literature had to be
ignored, lest the project take on massive proportions of self-editing,
up-dating and contextualizing. In addition, some sense of the whole had
to be articulated in the framing of an Introduction that ideally would
be sustained once texts and images were re-formatted into a unit: one
that would, it could only be hoped, somehow convey both the integrity
of the parts and a broader picture generated by the whole.
Had two book-length studies once envisioned—the fi rst based upon
the dissertation on North Syria and Ivory Carving of the early fi rst mil-
lennium b.c.e. (1973) and the second on Public Monuments and Early
State Formation of the third millennium b.c.e. (1989)—ever material-
ized, the present volumes would not have been necessary. But it became
clear early on that I was an essayist, not a book-writer, and, despite a
good deal of soul-searching, I have remained true to that calling.
What has become evident in the course of the present exercise is that
“formation” in the French sense of intellectual training is discernable,
even when one thinks it is not explicit. Thus, I, at least, can see the
early anthropologist (B.A.), the Near Eastern archaeologist/regional
specialist (M.A.), and the art historian (Ph.D.) emerge at differing
moments and with different weighting, depending upon the problem
at hand. And I can also see how much learning takes place after one’s
formal schooling is over: particularly what one owes to those exchanges
that take place in the classroom as a teacher, as well as in the interna-
tional community of scholarship and the intellectual environment(s) of