CHAPTER ONE
The "Art" of the "Ancient Near East"

Ann C. Gunter

Introduction

By general agreement, ancient Near East designates the region extending from modern Turkey to Afghanistan, from the Black Sea to Yemen and Oman. Sometimes it includes Egypt, and it may thus correspond approximately to the current term Middle East. But precisely what it encompasses, how it functions as a rubric governing description and analysis, and where its antiquity begins and ends, are matters of some debate. How did this area come to comprise a distinct and independent cultural sphere in the modern scholarly imagination? Are we justified in continuing to treat its material record as a meaningful unit, and if so, why and how? In short, what is our purview?

And when we speak of the "art" of the ancient Near East, do we use a label or concept consistent with prevalent or persistent notions in its constituent cultures, or do we impose an anachronistic (and thus inappropriate) modern construct? In this chapter I distinguish two aspects of this issue, because they entail different sets of questions and have been approached by different groups of specialists. The first involves the critical reception of Near Eastern antiquities in the West, especially following the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Mesopotamian antiquity. The objects initially recovered from archaeological explorations were incorporated into existing aesthetic frameworks established primarily for histories of ancient Greek art, and evaluated accordingly. They gained importance not only as material remains of biblical civilizations, but also for their perceived role as predecessors of Greek art. The second set of questions concerns whether, or to what degree, the modern Western concept of art is applicable to the ancient Near Eastern context. Does the term introduce an artificial or misleading view of ancient practices regarding image, representation, and process, suggesting an autonomous aesthetic sphere comparable to modern notions of "fine art"?

The complex reception history of Near Eastern antiquity involved national rivalries, contested sites of cultural and social authority, and unique institutional circumstances (Bohrer 2003). As sculptures, inscriptions, metalwork, and other finds began to enter western European museums, debates turned primarily on the historical significance of these objects and their aesthetic value as deemed by comparison with Greek art. If there is a general (if implicit and ambivalent) consensus today on what constitutes "ancient Near Eastern art," it is arguably due largely to modern responses to these artifacts initially generated by Western museums. Display practices, treatments in handbooks, and the circulation of photographs and casts of selected monuments, for example, privileged a relatively small group of objects (chiefly sculptures) as highlights of biblical civilizations and the predecessors of Greek art.

How the field defines or identifies itself, what it considers its core corpus and mission, and the kinds of questions it generates, are crucial; in turn, they determine which publications or professional groups serve to disseminate its research, and where the subject is housed in universities and museums. In recent decades, specialists in the ancient Near East have found new publication venues for their work outside field-specific periodicals, in journals such as the Art Bulletin and Art History. The ancient Near East, or at least Mesopotamia, is emerging alongside Egypt, Greece, and Rome as an independent field of ancient art, to judge from its representation in prestigious lecture series devoted to the history of art, globally conceived: the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at the universities of Cambridge (Irene Winter in 1996) and Oxford (Zainab Bahrani in 2010-11); and the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (Irene Winter in 2005).

Defining the "Ancient Near East"

The most commonly used designation for ancient southwest Asia reflects early modern labels for the regions east of Europe, beginning with the Ottoman Empire-the "nearest" East (or Orient)-along with their Eurocentric perspective. In 1916, the Egyptologist and archaeologist James Henry Breasted coined the term "Fertile Crescent" to emphasize the critical zone in southwest Asia that, together with the Nile Valley, was the cradle of Western civilization. That same era invented the Middle East to serve evolving Western geopolitical interests in the western lands of the Ottoman Empire (Scheffler 2003). The field of scholarship devoted to investigating its ancient material and written remains, developed in the nineteenth century, has largely retained the label that dominated its formative phase.

The ancient Near East is often defined as a geographical region whose precise borders fluctuated over time, expanding to embrace Egypt, Central Asia, or Arabia depending on historical period. But the subject its historians actually investigate is "the Sumero-Akkadian culture and its network of interactions with neighboring cultures," observes Guy Bunnens (2006: 267); "it is only a matter of convenience if we refer to its development as 'ancient Near Eastern history' because, contrary to what this phrase suggests, geography is not the main defining factor." Does this focus also extend to the material record revealed through archaeological investigations? Written and illustrated accounts documenting the ruins at Persepolis and other pre-Islamic sites in western Iran circulated in Europe long before the explorations in northern Mesopotamia that unearthed Assyrian palaces and associated sculptures (Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Drijvers 1991). But is what we now call "ancient Near Eastern art"-like "ancient Near Eastern history"-actually Mesopotamian culture and its network of interactions (as with Porada 1995)?

Henri Frankfort's influential survey The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, first published in 1954, explicitly defined the ancient Near East as the geographical region extending from modern Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean coast to Iran (Frankfort [1954] 1996). But its constituent parts were not equal, in his view; originality and artistic maturity required the political stability found only in the two distinct centers of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Frankfort's survey and interpretation assumed a Mesopotamian core surrounded by politically unstable "peripheral regions"-Syria, Asia Minor (Anatolia), and Persia (Iran)-whose accomplishments in the visual arts never matched their acknowledged literary achievements. This alleged lack of originality was especially true of Syria and Anatolia; "Persia alone among the peripheral regions possessed an individual style" (Frankfort [1954] 1996: 333). Another authoritative survey published in the following decade, Anton Moortgat's The Art of Ancient Mesopotamia (1969), while confined to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, presented a similar view of the "peripheral regions"-albeit without explicitly referring to Frankfort's book. Mesopotamian art, as Moortgat's subtitle announced, was the "classical art of the Near East." The unity of Mesopotamian culture, he asserted, emerged from its foundation in the Sumero-Akkadian religion and worldview, which persisted from the third to the first millennium BCE. Sumerian and Akkadian art, and its heirs the art of the Babylonians and Assyrians, formed "the central classical stem of ancient Near Eastern art, in comparison with which all the other arts, such as that of the Elamites, Hittites or Phoenicians, were of only peripheral importance" (Moortgat 1969: ix).

Employing the overarching rubric ancient Near East to describe and analyze its material remains offers advantages and disadvantages. It encourages us to treat this region as a unit from prehistory through historic times, although the longue durée perspective perhaps applies more convincingly to some areas than to others. For prehistoric times, for example, other geographical configurations may replace the unit embraced by "Sumero-Akkadian culture and its network of interactions." In the revised Propyläen Kunstgeschichte series published in the mid-1970s, Near Eastern antiquity was divided between two volumes. Frühe Stufen der Kunst addressed "the beginnings of art" across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East from the Aegean to the Indus Valley, including Egypt and "Africa"; a separate section treated the beginnings of art in Europe, from Paleolithic times to the Iron Age (Mellink and Filip 1974). Der Alte Orient covered historical periods, dominated by developments in Sumer and Akkad, Babylon and Assur, but also including chapters on the art of Iran, the Hittites, Syria, Cyprus, and Minoan and Mycenaean art (Orthmann 1975). A narrow focus on a geographical definition of the region also discourages attention to the broader impact of material culture beyond its ill-defined and fluctuating borders. Objects found too far outside the ancient Near East-however indisputably authentic and of Near Eastern origin-are often effectively ceded to the scholars who operate in that other cultural sphere. As a result, specialists in ancient...