Art History For Dummies. Jesse Bryant Wilder

shell, lapis lazuli, and red limestone. No one knows how it was used.

Apparently, the visual narrative strips in the Standard of Ur should be read from bottom to top, because the battle is in full swing in the bottom register, and the king collects prisoners in the top band. Notice how the artist overlaps the wild asses (known as onagers) pulling the chariots in the top and bottom bands of the war side. And notice how awkwardly he illustrates the dead men trampled by the animals in the bottom strip.

      The peace side (refer to Figure 5-4) depicts what must be an after-the-battle gala. Reading again from the bottom up, men convey what may be battle booty to the feast. In the middle band, the food-and-gift parade continues. The top strip shows the banquet, people eating and drinking before the king while an entertainer plays a lyre.

      Universal History Archive/UIG / Bridgeman Images

      FIGURE 5-4: This is the peace side of the Standard of Ur.

      Despite all the activity, the Standard of Ur is static, frozen in time. A thousand years later, in northern Mesopotamia, the Assyrians dramatically improved visual narrative, giving it an action-movie feel (see “Unlocking Assyrian Art,” later in this chapter).

Stalking Stone Warriors: Akkadian Art

      In about 2334 BC, a powerful king finally united Mesopotamia. But he wasn’t Sumerian. Sargon I, an Akkadian king from an area north of Sumer, conquered Mesopotamia, northern Syria, and possibly part of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), creating one of the first empires. Now the devout Sumerians had a new kind of leader who put politics before religion and introduced some changes:

       A new use for art: Under Sargon, art became a propaganda tool or another gear in his war machine. He used it to promote his ambitions rather than to honor the gods. Yet Sargon and his Akkadian successors still respected the Sumer religion. Sargon’s daughter even became a priestess of Nanna, the moon-god of Ur.

       A new language: Sargon replaced the Sumerian language with Akkadian. Sumerian culture was on the way out, though it had a brief rebirth before its final fizzle.

An example of Sargon’s new art is the head of an Akkadian ruler from Nineveh. The king is depicted as a godlike but secular ruler (not a shepherd of the people). He appears calm but with a seething battle-ready energy behind his imposing features. The style is similar to Sumerian sculpture. The artist coifed the beard like those of the statuettes of Abu Temple, but the modeling of the face is much more realistic and brilliantly executed, especially the superb contours of the lips and slightly hooked nose.

Stamped in Stone: Hammurabi’s Code

      The Akkadian Empire lasted about two centuries, until tribes from the northeast overran it in 2112 BC. Urnammu, the Sumerian king of Ur, which had remained independent, ejected them about 50 years later and reunited Mesopotamia for another century, until a new wave of conquerors swept the Sumerian kings away forever. These centuries of turmoil produced no great art.

      Finally, in 1792 BC, Babylon emerged as a great political and cultural power in southern Mesopotamia, under King Hammurabi, its greatest and most famous ruler. Art and Sumerian culture resurfaced. Hammurabi respected the Sumerian gods so much that he created a code of divinely ordained laws —the first detailed written law code in history — to help carry out their moral commands on earth. He wrote the code in cuneiform, the Sumerian script.

      Like Moses, Hammurabi claimed to receive his law code directly from God. On the stele (a carved or inscribed upright stone slab used as a monument), Hammurabi meets the sun god Shamash, not on his knees like Moses, but standing, eye to eye. Under the image, Hammurabi writes a powerful introduction to the laws:

      Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people [the Sumerians] like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.

      Hammurabi’s law code prevented judges from arbitrarily handing down sentences based on personal bias. Nevertheless, many of the laws seem brutal to modern ears:

       If a son strike his father, his hands shall be hewn off.

       If any one steal cattle or sheep, or an ass, or a pig or a goat, if it belong to a god or to the court, the thief shall pay thirtyfold; if they belonged to a freed man of the king he shall pay tenfold; if the thief has nothing with which to pay he shall be put to death.

       If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out [similar to the Hebrew “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” code].

      

In spite of its occasional severity, Hammurabi’s Code was the beginning of civil rights or, as the U.S. Declaration of Independence calls them, “inalienable rights.” Hammurabi must have known that writing the code in stone would make the laws last. (The expression “written in stone” derives from this practice.)

Unlocking Assyrian Art

      In 1596 BC, about a hundred years after the death of Hammurabi, the Hittites conquered Babylon. They produced no great art. Not long after, the Kassites overran Babylon. About the same time, in northern Mesopotamia, the brutal Assyrians grew from a city-state called Assur into a vast empire that lasted from about 1363 BC to 612 BC, when the Persians and Scythians overran them. With their iron weapons, the Assyrians terrorized their neighbors and mercilessly destroyed all challengers.

      The Assyrians created a macho art that glorified their rulers and intimidated their enemies. Each Assyrian king built a bigger-than-his-predecessor’s palace to flaunt his power.

      Five-legged creatures called lamassu (half bull, half man) with mile-long beards guard the gates of the Citadel of Sargon II. The fifth leg makes the creature look like he’s striding when viewed from the side, while from the front, the lamassu appears to stand firm. More important, to depict their military exploits and staged hunting expeditions (the animals were released from cages and then killed), the Assyrians gave visual narrative an action-movie feel by inventing continuous visual narration. In other words, their picture stories “read” like a film strip with one event leading dramatically to the next.

      

To appreciate the Assyrian’s action-movie-feel contribution, compare an Assyrian storytelling relief to the Standard of Ur (refer to Figure 5-3 and Figure 5-4). The victory that the Standard of Ur describes is told in chunks — discrete strips. Not only does the story get stuck at the end of each band, but the events within the band have no dramatic momentum — one action does not propel the next. The Assyrian relief of King Ashurnasirpal II Killing Lions (see Figure 5-5) is cinematic and roils with dynamic energy. You can feel the lion’s awesome power as he leaps at the king, and you pity the dying lion under the horses’ hooves after it’s been shot. Note: In Assyrian art, rank is no longer indicated by physical size (as in the Standard of Ur, where the king is larger than soldiers and prisoners appear frail).

      Francisco