The choice of where to begin a narrative of ancient Mesopotamian art remains bound up in the contested definition of art itself as well as in the question of whether to include prehistoric material. However, most scholars include in the canon the carved reliefs and sculptures of the proto-historic Late Uruk period (3500-3000 bce).
Figure 21.1a and b The Warka Vase, Iraq Museum, Baghdad, two views.
Source: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Vorderasiatisches Museum
Foremost among these is the so-called Warka vase, a tall, cylindrically shaped stone vessel carved around its exterior in low relief, and not surprisingly, it appears in all standard treatments of Near Eastern art (see Figures 21.1 and 21.2). At first glance, the vase appears simple: a series of registers, or areas divided by lines, rise from undulating water at the bottom, through paired crops and sheep, nude male offering bearers, to the topmost register depicting a female figure facing a mostly broken person who can be reconstructed as a male authority figure typically known in the scholarship as a ‘‘priest-king.’’ The vase was found in a hoard in Level III of the Eanna temple precinct at Uruk. That it was broken and repaired in antiquity, in addition to its style, has suggested to many scholars an earlier date in Uruk IV, which places it more or less contemporary with the first appearance of writing and cylinder seals (about 3300 bce). A small fragment of an identical second vase preserving part of an attendant from the upper register was bought on the art market, a pairing that was echoed in the self-referential depiction of two such vases on the Warka vase itself.
Since its excavation, the Warka vase has assumed a preeminent place as exemplar of late fourth millennium cultural characteristics from the stylistic to the religious. Frankfort wrote, ‘‘By its subject and style it allows us to perceive the spiritual climate
Figure 21.1c The Warka Vase, Iraq Museum, Baghdad, detail. Courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Vorderasiatisches Museum
In which the art of this period came into being’’ (1954: 11). Most scholars have associated the imagery with rituals of the sacred marriage of the goddess Inanna, whose symbol of a curving reed bundle appears twice directly behind the female figure and in whose sacred precinct the vase was discovered (Groenewegen-Frankfort 1951: 151; Frankfort 1954:10; Parrot 1961b: 71-2; Moortgat 1969:12-13; Amiet 1980: 70; Hansen 1998: 46; Bahrani 2002; Hansen 2003a: 23-4). The sacred marriage, understood as the event ofthe upper register, provides the agricultural abundance shown in the lower registers. From a slightly different but complementary point of view, the lower registers have been read as foundational for the event at the top: the water provides life for the crops and herds that in turn supply the offerings to be presented to the goddess.
The Warka vase provokes fundamental questions about narrative, the nature of representation, and the relationship between art and complex society. The compositional structure of the vase, its superimposed registers that encircle the cylindrical body, has been hailed as the earliest representational narrative. Groenewegen-Frankfort writes, ‘‘The vase offered an ideal surface for the representation of a cyclic event and the liveliness of the figures is unimpaired by their rhythmic sequence in a broad strip which seems a self-contained spatial world’’ (1951: 152). Amiet characterizes the depiction as an ‘‘unfolding procession’’ (1980: 70), and Parrot
Figure 21.2 The Warka Vase, line drawing. Source: Ernst Heinrich, Kleinfunde aus den archaeischen Tempelschriften in Uruk, Berlin 1936
Notes, ‘‘the reliefs can be read from top to bottom or vice versa... ’’ (1961b: 70). From a structuralist perspective, the registers order the natural, human, and divine world into a purportedly harmonious and hierarchical whole (Winter 1983). The production of the vase predates known textual narrative by several hundred years since the earliest written narrative is on the Stele of the Vultures from the reign of Eannatum in the twenty-fifth century bce, but its conception at the same time as the explosion of early record-keeping at Uruk may be linked to an emerging desire to store information in a format that could be retrieved by third parties (Pittmann 1994: 191-2).
Consideration of figurative narrative leads to issues about the nature of representation in Mesopotamia in general, particularly since it was during this period at the end of the fourth millennium that increasingly complex imagery was first produced. The connection with information storage is one possible motivation for this sudden appearance, but it does not fully explain the specific choice of Mesopotamian representational styles.
Discussion of the Warka vase contributes to this issue with the debate surrounding the identification of the female figure, which has occupied most scholarly discussions about the work. For the most part, the debate has revolved around whether she represents the goddess Inanna or her priestess, a question considered pressing because of what Groenewegen-Frankfort describes as the ‘‘almost weird concreteness’’ and ‘‘curious actuality’’ of the scene and the unfortunate ancient breakage of the figure’s headdress, the ancient Mesopotamian locus for divine identity from at least the mid-third millennium onward (1951: 151). It is not, in fact, certain whether the conventions for indicating divinity with horns, known from the third millennium, were already in use in the fourth millennium. Moortgat, however, offers a perceptive alternative that obviates the need to choose between one or the other possibility: ‘‘we may perhaps come nearest to the truth if we simply avoid this sharp distinction between Myth and Reality’’ (1969: 13). In a similar vein, Bahrani argues that the ambiguous nature of the representation contributes to a referential loop that ties the imagery to both the ritual enactment by a human priestess and a human king (that is, Moortgat’s reality) and the myth of the sacred marriage of gods (2002). The discussions concerning the identity of the female figure recall a much more recent work of art, Rene Magritte’s La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), the earliest version of which dates to ce 1929. The oil painting consists only of an illusionistically rendered image of a pipe, under which, in elegant script, flows the phrase, ‘‘ceci n’est pas une pipe’’ (‘‘this is not a pipe’’). Magritte’s painting warns us of the deceit of images, because while they may contain a certain concreteness or actuality, they are always somehow something other than the thing itself. The Warka vase figure, and for that matter all Mesopotamian figurative representation, may occupy a very different relationship with the real from what we are used to considering (Bahrani 2003).
World History
