Investigating artistic environments in the ancient Near East

Abstract

Near Eastern art collection at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, scholars representing a variety of disciplines gathered there in spring 1988.This volume of their papers shares v^ith us their learning, ideas, and intuitions on a complex set of questions concerning the social, political, economic, and aesthetic circumstance of artistic production in the ancient Near East.Unlike other periods of Near Eastern history, or of most other cultural spheres of comparable richness and complexity, relatively few written documents are known from that region that deal explicitly with processes of artistic production.Instead, investigations of artistic environments in the ancient Near East require a multidisciplinary approach that combines the evi- dence and methodologies of historians, art historians, archaeologists, and others.Introducing an exploration of the social contexts of ancient Near Eastern art, I am driven to pose what seems to me the underlying question relating to the purpose, function, and institutional setting of all ancient art: To what extent was art distinct from craft, artist from artisan?To answer this, we must both narrow our focus from the societal to the individual level and broaden our inquiry to include investigations of self-conception and motivation.Reflecting on the historical development of design allows us to consider new strategies for studying the individual creator, and his or her self-conception and motivation.The word "design" has a baffling array of only loosely connected uses.Running through them, however, is almost always a motivational component.Also implied is a conscious, intentional, and to a considerable degree autonomous, human actor.The designing species is Homo faber.I believe it would be generally conceded that the work of archaeologists and art historians concerned with pre-classical periods for the most part has rested on quite different premises or assumptions.Not primarily related to the importance of self- directed elements of design at all, these premises instead reflect the limitations of our available material.While our data permit us to detect and explain some patterning of behavior in fragmentary textual or archaeological residues of human artistic activity, they can, after all, tell us essentially nothing directly of the activity's intended goals.Save on rare, exploratory occasions such as the symposium that prompted this volume, therefore, the introduction of a consciously motivated, designing Homo faber may well seem too speculative to be helpful.at least in prehistory, is discoverable.Not surprisingly, human figures are later and cruder than those of other forms of life in essentially all cultural traditions.And when they first do occur toward the end of the Pleistocene, they take vaguely generalized and distorted forms such as "mother goddesses" that lack any elements of human portraiture.That generalization can stand unchanged even after the introduction of agricul- ture and the beginnings of town life.Individualized portraiture first seems to have been associated with deities or with ambiguous or mediating figures like shamans directly in touch with the supernatural, whether or not represented in human form. Only subsequently does the field broaden to include representationsof "real" people, presumably at first ruling elites for the most part.Am I correct in my impression that the creative powers of individual artists and craftsmen failed to achieve notice in our surviving textual records from the ancient Near East?At least, in the cuneiform tradition, craft production processes remained entangled in depersonalized, ritual formulas in spite of their technical versatility.A tantalizing but only partial exception, prior to the handful of noted artists and/ or artisans of classical Greece, is the Egyptian vizier Imhotep.Coinciding with the earliest and most creative flowering of Egyptian civilization during the Old Kingdom and long afterward the prototype for the Greek figure of Aesculapius, he stands out strikingly among senior officials.Unique among the autobiographical tomb inscrip- tions, his concludes a long list of successively greater administrative responsibilities with the simple phrase, "carpenter and sculptor."Design, invention, scientific discovery, and artistic achievement have some- thing in common.They are usually outcomes of directed, creative processes.Alfred Kroeber long ago noted that these processes tend to occur in bursts.Praxiteles, Euphronius, Archimedes, Thales are representative figures in the first such eruption to survive in Greece, at least in a form we can still recognize.Were we able to detect similar clusters in the earlier Near Eastern textual corpus, that observation alone might provide us with powerful insights into the relative autonomy and conscious- ness of individualized creativity that characterized what otherwise seems to have been an undifferentiated amalgam of art and craft.Along with the emergence of individually known creative figures-Thales, we know, was not only a philosopher and mathematician but also foretold an eclipse (with the aid of a Babylonian astronomical table) and made a killing cornering the olive oil market-it is perhaps no accident that the classical Greeks were the first to sign or otherwise take or be given credit for their own works .The preoccupation with one's place in and contribution to the stream of recorded time and achievement -"a sense of history" -was also apparently Greek in its first inspiration.The next great cluster coincided with the general uncoiling of energies at the outset of the Renaissance.Once again the technical, the scientific, and the artistic joined, or at least overlapped, in ways that for modern tastes are disconcerting: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Copernicus, Galileo, Gutenberg.Yet there was a forward thrust to this, prefigured by the cult of the saints, differentiating it from the pattern of classical antiquity.David Landes and others have written of the obsession of many major Renaissance figures with machinery, especially with clockwork.^Essentially,human artifices appeared during the Renaissance as a gestalt for the universe itself.

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