Compare and Contrast 3 Elements of Egyptian and Sumerian Art

Sumerian Art
History, Characteristics of Sumer Civilization.

The Guennol Lioness (c.3000 BCE)
Limestone. Private Collection.
Rare Sumerian sculpture of an
lioness-woman, establish virtually Baghdad.
In 2007, it sold at Sotheby's for
merely over $57 million.

Sumerian Art (c.4500-2270 BCE)

Contents

• Introduction
• Characteristics of Sumerian Culture
• Sumerian Arts
• The Stele of the Vultures (c.2800 BCE)
• Architecture
• Relief Sculpture
• Statues
• Decorative Fine art
• Cylindrical Seals
• Related Articles on the Arts of Artifact

NOTE: For more about the primeval cultures and civilizations,
please run into: Ancient Art (2,500,000 BCE - 400 CE).

Ram in a Thicket (c.2500 BCE)
British Museum.
One of a pair excavated from
the Great Death Pit, at Ur.
A rare and exquisite case
of Sumerian metalwork of the
Third Millennium BCE.

Antiquity
For the Greco-Roman era of
early civilisation, please meet
Classical Artifact (c.800 BCE)

Introduction

Sumer (also known every bit Sumeria) was responsible for the earliest art of Antiquity. The Sumerians were the starting time civilizing people to settle in the lands of southern Mesopotamia, draining the marshes for agriculture, starting merchandise, and establishing new forms of ancient pottery (first mass-produced bowls made at Uruk, about 4000 BCE), along with crafts like weaving, leatherwork and metalwork. These belatedly forms of Neolithic art benefited significantly from the surge in population that resulted from the stable food supply and settled nature of Sumerian life. Sumerian civilization outshone all others within the region at the fourth dimension - including Egyptian civilisation - due to their advanced laws, inventions and art. But aboriginal Anatolian sites, such as Gobekli Tepe (c.9500 BCE) dating to the era of Mesolithic art, might exist said to have yielded before signs of pregnant civilization. Sumerian civilisation flourished during the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, before beingness overrun by the Semitic-speaking kings of the Akkadian Empire effectually 2270 BCE.

In a nutshell, up until about 3500 BCE, Sumerian fine art only actually excelled at pottery - albeit of a type and quality which was far superior to any grade of Greek pottery produced up to that point. Thereafter, nosotros come across the emergence of free standing sculpture, along with early bronze statuettes, archaic types of personal jewellery and decorative designs on a broad range of artifacts. Bear witness of advanced copper and statuary casting techniques emerges during the Third Millennium, with some bronze sculpture existence made by the complex cire-perdue process. Excavations at Ur accept revealed a huge number of rich tombs, containing gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and decorated shell objects as well as gaming-boards, harps, weapons and cylinder seals. Clay steles (tablets of relief sculpture) began to be used by the educated classes to narrate stories.

Characteristics of Sumerian Civilization

Sumeria was an aggregate of at least 12 city-states on the Euphrates, close to the Persian Gulf, each ruled by a Male monarch. They included: Adab, Akshak, Bad-Tibira, Erech, Kish, Lagash, Larak, Larsa, Nippur, Sippar, Umma, Uruk and Ur. The Sumerians are no longer supposed to take been the earliest inhabitants of the region, but rather "invaders," though it is still undecided from where they came and who exactly they displaced. At the dawn of known history they were dominant, contributing the earliest and nearly lasting of the written languages of the region (the Sumerian pictograph writing was father to the cuneiform characters that were to spread over so much of the Near East); developing skills in metallurgy earlier their neighbours (the first employ of copper occurred in Sumer, equally far back as five,000 BCE); inventing the potter'due south wheel (c.4500 BCE), likewise as the first e'er wheeled transport (3,200 BCE); and taking epochal steps forwards in civic organization, warfare, police force, and the arts. Information technology is possible that they came from the Iranian Plateau to the e, bringing these achievements with them from some still undiscovered Persian or Scythian birthplace of culture.

Professor C. Leonard Woolley, who has done more than any other, as archeologist and author, to dig the Sumerians out of obscurity and place them prominently in the get-go episode of the story of human civilisation, is willing to give them precedence over the once vaunted Akkadians, or truthful Babylonians, every bit founders of Mesopotamian fine art and culture. He then goes further, placing them before the Egyptians, equally pioneer lawgivers, every bit inventors, and every bit artists. He points out that in the period when the communities of Sumeria were flourishing - say, from 3500 BCE - Egypt withal had no metals, had not invented or discovered the potter's wheel, and owned no written linguistic communication.

Sumerian Arts

Equally to the legendary origins of the Sumerian arts, Professor Woolley quotes a Babylonian named Berossus, of about 300 BCE, who stated that the towns of Sumeria were founded by a race of half-men, half-fish, who came out of the Persian Gulf nether the leadership of Oannes; and "all things that make for the amelioration of life were bequeathed to men by Oannes, and since that time no farther inventions have been made." And Berossus, in fact, mentions merely those accomplishments which modern historians count most critical in the rise of man: agriculture, utilize of metals, and writing. It is probable that these advances developed together, in i push forward of the homo intelligence; and the primeval datable evidences of them are found in Sumeria.

Excavations at Tepe Gawra in Republic of iraq in 1936-37 brought to light the foundation walls of a "pre-Sumerian" acropolis, dated earlier 4000 BCE, and relics indicating that the "Painted Pottery Peoples," long considered primitive except in their mastery of ceramic art, "enjoyed an advanced and balanced culture." At that place is also show of planned community building, even of monumental architecture, with interior piers and pilasters; of religious activities centered in temples; of seals; of the beginning datable goldsmithing in the class of gold beads, and thus the first datable jewellery art of the region; of musical instruments; of an earthen jar bearing "the kickoff mural painting" - all ascribed to a fourth dimension five hundred years or more earlier the date previously accustomed as marking the dawn of history and civilized art. In other words, Sumerian culture - which previously had been considered to be on a par with tardily Prehistoric fine art - is now known to take possessed many of the cultural attributes ordinarily associated with later Egyptian civilization, amid others.

Note: while Sumerian civilisation flourished, it'due south worth remembering that Europe remained in Rock Age darkness, beset by savagery and obscurity.

The Stele of the Vultures (c.2800 BCE)

Out of the excavated ruins of Lagash, a Sumerian city-land, archeologists recovered fragments of a stone tablet (or stele), sculpted in low relief, which had been commissioned as a state of war memorial by Male monarch Eannatum. On one side the monument recounts in pictures and text the military successes of the all-conquering Male monarch Eannatum. He is depicted oversize, leading his soldiers into boxing. Nearby are heaps of expressionless bodies belonging to their enemies, while vultures fly overhead carrying away dismembered parts of the slaughtered. The other side of the tablet shows the approval of the Gods. It depicts a god holding the heraldic symbol of Lagash while neatly destroying its enemies. This item of narrative relief sculpture is believed to be the primeval known case of a story told in pictures, of sustained visual art: its theme existence "war" - one of four main themes of the solar day; the others beingness Kings, Gods and Hunting.

The Stele of the Vultures is an of import example of Mesopotamian sculpture from the belatedly Sumerian menstruation, but is less representative (of Sumerian art every bit a whole) than the piddling fauna figures, in the round and in low relief, the shell plaques and the seals, all of which are more than in grapheme as products of the early city-states' studios. The spirit is in full general more than homo and more appealing than anything in the later on and larger cultures (like Assyrian art) into which the Sumerian was to be absorbed. In these figures there is more decorative art, and less exhibitionistic and violent narrative; more ornamentation and more love of miniature refinement. And, curiously enough, there is in ane phase of art in early on Sumeria a degree of unforced realism, of allegiance to surface nature, non to exist surpassed until Greek times. That is, in the centuries earlier 3000 BCE men were making statuettes and reliefs and then characteristically "lifelike" that not until the appearance of Greek Loftier Classical sculpture (c.400 BCE) would imitative skill go higher. The art works that survive take to do mostly with gods and kings and nobles. They are votive figures, reliefs commemorative of honours paid to the gods, and articles of luxury and bear witness.

Sumerian Compages

Architecture yields up only ruins besides bitty to warrant detailed speculation regarding the "looks" of awe-inspiring or domestic buildings, though it is a fact technically of great significance that the Sumerians were using rudimentary arches and vaults some 3000 years before Roman architecture left its mark across Europe. The common edifice material was the dirt brick, since the Tigris-Euphrates manifestly lacked both stone and wood in whatsoever abundance, and the architectural forms were doubtless apparently and blocklike, like most early brick construction. The primeval feature of awe-inspiring building seems to have been the temple tower, perhaps an artificial substitute for the hilltop from which the gods had been worshiped, and this may have been the ancestor of the Assyrian ziggurat, Moslem dome and minaret, and Christian campanile and steeple. The ziggurat at Ur, as well as after ones in Babylon and Assyria, was constructed in successively smaller stories, the ane at the elevation begetting an altar. Access from the ground (or platform) below was commonly by ramps. The "edifice" was actually a shaped hill, without rooms - except for the temple on top - a sort of stepped pyramid. Archeologists in Sumer take also discovered numerous raised buildings with buttressed walls. These buttresses were structural besides as decorative and became a feature of Sumerian architecture.

For a comparing with Egypt, see Ancient Egyptian Compages and also Egyptian Pyramid Architecture (c.2650-1800 BCE).

Sumerian Relief Sculpture

Low relief sculpture was freely used on edifice walls and, in materials less heavy than stone, equally decoration on luxurious furniture; and the contained tablet-monuments, or stelae, gradually became common. Information technology is likely that the earth's treasure of sculptured works from Sumeria will be greatly increased, since only a few sites take up to now been excavated - the about important beingness at Ur, Lagash, Eridu, Kish, and Nippur - just from the examples that take come to light 1 can already course a picture of societies that delighted in refined workmanship in metals and rock and beat out, and in colorful ornamentation and intricate pattern; and at that place are a few examples that indicate a considerable sense of sheer plastic invention.

The reliefs commonly known as early Sumerian - such equally the Tablet of Ur-Nina - and made well before 3000 BCE, are rather inept and uncraftsmanlike. Simply the frieze of figures of men and animals once affixed to a wall of a temple at al'Ubaid near Ur, fabricated of limestone reliefs ready into darker stone panels, is uniquely effective and engagingly decorative. The facade seems to have been extraordinarily enriched with diverse types of mosaic art and stone sculpture. Examples of terracotta sculpture accept been found, as well as remains of several of the limestone friezes, and there were extensive copper reliefs, including a large hammered panel over the door, depicting a panthera leo-headed eagle and two stags, and a pictorial frieze in copper. Around a ledge below these relief features was a row of oxen in the round, fabricated of browbeaten sheet copper over forest. The building is of the centre of the xxx-get-go century BCE.

While monumental works of an earlier date are defective, in that location is some indication that this art had been preceded past a long evolution of mature drawing and carving. The shell-plaques attached to gameboards, musical instruments, and furniture afford evidence of exceptionally spirited patterning, with figures at once characteristic and cunningly conventionalized for heraldic effect. Sometimes these are in carved in low relief against a contrasting groundwork. There are as well patterns made upwards of squares of beat with spirited linear designs engraved or incised. The lines were filled with a red or sometimes black paste to make the cartoon stand up out clear and crisp, by a process paralleled forty centuries later in European niello work.

Statues

There are statues in the round, of the true Sumerian period, which give evidence of an bent for the full-sculptural medium, although there is aught that approaches the nobility and the subtle aesthetic expressiveness of the figurative Egyptian sculpture of the Onetime Kingdom period. Indeed from the xxx-first century, downwardly to the time of King Gudea, about the 20-5th century, there appears to have been very petty change in the conventions of the art, and certainly no great comeback in skill. Some of the subsequently full-length statues of King Gudea are massive, effectively simplified and reposeful, but there is piddling of the inner sculptural life, of the plastic expressiveness, that so distinguishes contemporary rock-carving along the Nile.

NOTE: As in the example of Aboriginal Greece, virtually all Sumerian painting has been lost to the effects of vandalism or weather. Luckily some landscape painting has survived but there are no known examples of encaustic painting or tempera painting along the lines of the Egyptian Fayum Mummy Portraits (c.50 BCE - 250 CE).

Decorative Art

It is rather in the field of figurines, and particularly when animals are dealt with, that a distinctive excellence is achieved. There is, for example, the figure of a donkey (dated 3100 BCE) which Queen Shub-ad had attached as a mascot to the rein-guide on the yoke of her chariot asses. Information technology is a pretty flake of realistic sculpture, showing canny observation, merely with due regard to the effigy'southward use and placing. Sculpturally highly-seasoned likewise are sure bulls' heads in silver and copper. Some of these were ornaments on lyres and perhaps should not be judged independently. Only the values are of the sort that render the fragments effective even when wrenched from the original context.

Incidentally, the modern world owes its noesis of Queen Shub-ad'due south donkey and these bulls' heads, and the crush-plaques from game-boards, to 1 rich find at Ur, and their preservation to a custom common during early human culture. Co-ordinate to the etiquette of the Beginning Dynasty, about 3100 BCE, when the queen died a large number of her ladies-in-waiting were entombed in her burial chamber in the royal cemetery, to give her what aid and comfort they could in the afterlife. With them were walled in such earthly treasures as the queen's chariot and harps and chaplets and toilet articles.

The art in full general, of headdresses, jewellery, gold vessels, and statues, runs to excessive ornamentation and lack of taste in adapting observed natural particular to decorative or plastic purposes. It is, in fact, already a corrupt standard of art that we have here, of a fourth dimension when the ability to formalize beautifully, mutual to so many archaic peoples, had passed into florid overabundance and into a striving after exact representation for its own sake. Some of the discovered chaplets are like flowered wreaths copied directly from nature into gold and other precious stuffs. Each leafage is truthful to its botanical model; every vein is shown. Art is no longer creation nor selective adaptation, but faux of natural dazzler.

NOTE: Sumer is believed to be the birthplace of blast art around 3200 BCE, when men started colouring their nails with "kohl", a balm containing lead sulfide.

Cylindrical Seals

A miniature art originated by the Sumerians, and to be perpetuated through the Babylonian-Assyrian supremacy, was the sculpturing of cylindrical seals in depression relief. Writing in Mesopotamia was done on wet clay slabs, which afterward hardened into permanent tablets. It is owing to the indestructible graphic symbol of these tablet documents and "books" that the twentieth-century earth knows and so much of the details of Sumerian and afterward Mesopotamian literature and life. To sign the dirt, or mark it with his device, the important personage carried a personal seal, and this commonly was ornamental and pictorial. "Every Babylonian," wrote Herodotus, "carries a seal, and a staff carved at the top into the form of an apple, a rose, a lily, an eagle, or a like device."

A pocket-sized cylinder of hard stone, such equally obsidian, agate, or quartz, or of the softer alabaster, was carved as a "negative," in intaglio, so that the impression of it in the clay came out in relief. Information technology ordinarily showed a limerick with figures, and very often was a token of the owner's devotion to a certain god. Literally thousands of cylinder seals (not to mention apartment, ring, and cone varieties) have been recovered, too as innumerable clay documents bearing their impressions.

The early examples may prove roughly geometrical designs or solar images, and at that place are also archaic pictographic inscriptions. Certainly before long later 3500 BCE the figured seals brainstorm to reflect a considerable skill in relief picturing and a high sense of stylization. There is a sharpness, a crisp delineation of separated figures confronting uninvolved backgrounds, which perfectly belongs to this exquisite lapidary art.

Related Articles on the Arts of Antiquity

- Art of Aboriginal Persia (3,500 BCE onwards)
- Egyptian Art (3100 BCE - 395 CE)
- Aegean Art (c.2600-1100 BCE)
- Hittite Art (c.1600-1180 BCE)
- Etruscan Art (c.700-90 BCE)
- Sculpture of Ancient Greece

• For more about arts and crafts in Sumer, see: Homepage.

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ANCIENT Fine art
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