The Conventions of Relief Sculpture and the “Stories in Stone”; Iconography in Relation to the Development of Cuneiform Writing
Various scenes, carved in flat reliefs and painted, covered the walls of temples in Ancient Egypt. Egyptian artists reduced any volumetric three-dimensional body to two-dimensionality, refusing an illusory-perspective image. All specific and borrowed scenes, recreated in Egyptian reliefs and paintings, acquired the character of a sacred rite because they reproduced life after death (Cothren & Stokstad, 2016). Scenes carved on the walls of Egyptian tombs and temples most often depict the gods, accompanied by the ruler, making offerings or performing other ritual actions. Thus, each relief represented a particular story, usually ritual, which has been saved to modern times thanks to the eternal preservation on the stone’s surface.
The earliest known writing, Mesopotamian cuneiform, was invented in Sumer, around 3200 BC. The primary iconographic sources of the ancient Egyptian religion are images of scenes, both of ritual and mythological character, carved in relief or painted on the walls of Egyptian temples and tombs, and numerous images and statues of gods and pharaohs. In addition, there are many objects of ritual or practical use, decorated with carved or painted religious motifs that represent images of gods, religious symbols, and ritual objects. Cuneiform writing also gradually evolved from pictorial writing. Cuneiform got its name due to the similarity of the shape of its signs with horizontal, vertical, and angular wedges, the combinations of which first depicted words, then – syllable signs consisting of two or three sounds.
Spiritual Beliefs of the Near East Expressed through Cultural Objects
The religion of Mesopotamia and Persia was a complex set of religious beliefs that arose as a result of the formation of the agricultural civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, the Elamite kingdom, Babylon, and Assyria. It was a process of liquidation of some deities and cults, their merging with each other, and the formation of mythological plots that formed the basis of the Mesopotamian religion. Most of the gods had an anthropomorphic appearance, and only a few bore zoomorphic features, a kind of recollection of totemic ideas of the distant past. The Egyptian gods had many zoomorphic features and signs, and the Egyptians revered many animals as sacred. The mythology of Mesopotamia is also rich and very diverse. It contains cosmogonic plots, stories about the creation of the earth and its inhabitants, including people molded from clay, and legends about the exploits of great heroes, primarily Gilgamesh.
Religious beliefs largely determined the objects of culture created by the ancient peoples. Perhaps the first step in separating artistic consciousness into an independent sphere was constructing a “house of God” – a temple. Near the main local temple, there was usually a ziggurat – a high tower. A classic example of such architecture is the ziggurat in Uruk, one of the most important centers of Mesopotamian religious and artistic culture.
The appearance of pictographic and cuneiform writing meant a new phase in the development of artistic culture. At the same time, along with writing, a way of transmitting information in visual images was developed. Thanks to cuneiform writing, many monuments of Mesopotamian literature were written on clay tablets, and almost all of them managed to be read. These are hymns to the gods, religious myths, and legends, in particular, about the emergence of civilization and agriculture. Sumerian-Babylonian literature goes back to oral folk art in its deepest origins, which consisted of folk songs, ancient “animal” epics, and fables. However, a special place in Mesopotamian literature was occupied by the epic, the origin of which dates back to the Sumerian era. The plots of the Sumerian epic poems are closely connected with myths that describe the “golden age” of antiquity, the appearance of the gods, the creation of the world and humankind.
Reference
Cothren, M. W. & Stokstad, M. (2016). Art: a brief history. Pearson.