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19. the ICONOGRAPHY of ANCIENT ASTRONOMY © Asia THE CANON OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN ART 19: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ANCIENT ASTRONOMY 19. THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ANCIENT ASTRONOMY Asia Haleem So gut wir nun aber auch über die Benennung und Ausdehnung vieler Sternbilder im Alten Orient unterrichtet sind, so wenig wissen wir noch über die Art der bildlichen Vorstellungen, welche die Babylonier mit den einzelnen Sterngruppen verknüpften.[Ernst Weidner: ‘Eine Beschreibung des Sternhimmels aus Aššur’ AfO IV] In preceding chapters of this book we have pieced together the main images of the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art (which we shall usually abbreviate by the acronym CANEA) by focusing on one recurring group in its sequence - the lion and prey symbol - not only to demonstrate its enduring significance over time, but also to use it as a prime indicator from which to build up a picture of its distribution and art historical phases. It was through its juxtaposition with a variety of other images that we were able to build up the likelihood of the existence of a canonical cycle of images that in part or in whole takes centre stage in Mesopotamian art over at least three millennia, and is probably as important an invention as writing was for the same period. My aim, once you have seen evidence, is to be able to decode CANEA iconography extremely easily. Only by knowing how to measure the year and monitor the pattern of days, months and years was it possible for the great agro-urban civilisations of the Fertile Crescent to manage the rising complexity of their trading interaction with lands around them. Centres in Egypt and Mesopotamia at this time began to come to grips with true control of the calendar in order to predict the timing of the seasons and thus plan ahead to sustain a regular economy. THENCE AROSE THE LITURGICAL YEAR, ADHERED TO WITH THE HELP OF IMAGE, TEXT AND RITUAL. In fact, this chapter stands outside the cumulative process followed in the CATALOGUES and SYNTHESES sections preceding it, since it uses the analysis of five artefacts outside the main CANEA to solve some identification issues concerning key stars in Mesopotamian cosmology in order to be able to read its visual imagery more accurately. It still needs refinement, so check the website for updates. I have put it on the Layish/CANEA website now, presenting the fruit of the tree ahead of the tree that bore it, since digitising the Catalogues is time-consuming. It covers the content of two papers presented at an ARAM conference in 2010 so attendees can follow up references as given in the footnotes (the entire Bibliography and cross- references will not be ready until the book is complete). Comments and feedback are welcome, and I can answer specific questions if contacted by e-mail - and if you quote me, please acknowledge me! It is a study in itself to look extensively into the tap root of this tradition which really goes back into the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods, so I embarked on an intense study of this subject only where there is a dramatic increase in evidence from the proto-historical period onwards (starting c.4500BC), where the case for use of calendrical images can start to be put forward plausibly. Knowing I cannot take it for granted that readers will have the requisite astronomical background, the narrative in this and Chapter 22 (which finally interprets the full Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art) is punctuated by interludes intended as short ‘tutorials’ in naked-eye astronomy that at times, with apologies, needs must spell out the obvious. PURPOSE OF THIS CHAPTER WITHIN A BOOK OF 22 CHAPTERS Having studied the cycles of other religious iconography from later times (such as the Life of Christ or the Labours of Hercules) it struck me an approach no scholar of the Ancient Near East (AncNME) had taken before, was to interpret the main body of Mesopotamian visual arts as an embodiment of that civilisation’s 1 PDF processed with CutePDF evaluation edition www.CutePDF.com THE CANON OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN ART 19: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ANCIENT ASTRONOMY central astronomical preoccupations1.The invention by unknown people of this great cycle of imagery at the heart of the arts of the ancient Near East is remarkable, and must have started in the Neolithic period2. Scholars such as Henri Frankfort, Anton Moortgat and Thorkild Jacobsen, archaeologists with a solid German art history training, took the first steps towards interpreting many of its aspects, but I go further in declaring its main content overall to be a series of astronomical images embodying the key nodes of Mesopotamian religion3 as punctuated by calendrical turning points. Its staying power has been borne out by how some of its icons were perpetuated even into the visual arts of mediaeval Islam and Christianity long after the urban civilisations of Sumer and Egypt had sunk into oblivion. Proving my case through textual evidence alone is not possible, but more oblique ways of pinning down its existence beyond reasonable doubt are available. As Elizabeth Baity expressed it4, some decades after Weidner’s perceptive comment at the head of this chapter, ‘there is a need for an international astro-iconographical index’. I trust I am making a contribution toward such an index, not simply by reconstructing the main features of the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art, but also by putting forward in the final chapter what emerges as a very obvious interpretation for it. FIVE ARTEFACTS WITH ASTRONOMICAL CONTENT For a conference at the Oxford Oriental Institute on Ancient Near Eastern Astronomy and Astrology in Art (8- 10 July 2010) in a paper analysing five artefacts ranging in date between 2500BC and the 2C AD I prepared the ground for proving my hypothesis publicly about the astronomical background to Mesopotamian iconography5 by showing literal instances of its use. Evenly spaced in this chapter and tagged for ease of reference as Icons A-E, they start with the latest and go back in jumps to Icon D at 2500BC (with a coda at of Etruscan date – Icon E) to provide stepping stones of certainty within a vast time-frame. CANEA’s main content is I believe calendrical, and based on the astronomical concerns of the time, though its use of imagery is not as obvious as on the artefacts I present in this particular chapter. For my overall hypothesis to be acceptable the presentation of the visual evidence assembled in the catalogue chapters has to be looked at and assessed - but this short preview of the Mesopotamian mindset is best precedes that longer process. Even by acknowledging the inclusion of the heavenly bodies in the iconography of ancient near eastern art in Icons A-E, we already in this chapter can begin to decode many other items bearing related images that refer to contemporary cosmology. At the outset we could identify it as ‘proto-Zoroastrian’ though we need to take into account how its initial view of the universe acquired much ‘foreign’ detail between the Fourth and First Millennia as changes in practice resulting from more detail in observing the sky phenomena overlaid the main values of primordial Zoroastrianism. But whatever the individual contributions of Susa, Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylon may have been, we must remember all the time that all these traditions experienced the 1 Neugebauer (1945) writes ‘In spite of attempts to make Egypt responsible for many forms, the predominant influence of Babylonian concepts on the grouping of stars into pictures must be maintained’. 2 Some animal symbolism, for instance, may go as far back as 10M Gobekli Tepe (Ill.19-15), let alone items of Palaeolithic art. 3 ‘In general the evidence appears to indicate that astronomical lore, astra and deity symbolism, and seasonal rituals set by astra events and considered essential to successful agriculture and stockbreeding were part of the Neolithic mixed-farming tool-kit travelling along with seeds and stocks, with an origin perhaps as early as the 9th millennium’ (Baity 1973 – see fn. 4 below) (NB her eccentric use of astra for astronomical). In her masterly overview of archaeo-astronomy she points out that a further factor in the culture included the search for and processing of minerals and semi-precious stones, to be woven into the worship of the planetary and stellar Gods. 4 Her synthesis of the state of Astroarchaeology was made in an extensive paper read to the 36th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Oklahoma, on May 8 1971 which fully lays out the many indications of Neolithic beginnings for that discipline - ‘Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy So Far’ Current Anthropology XIV 1973, 389-449 5 This chapter is the full version of that paper, to be published in the ARAM Proceedings of the July 2010 Conference, in the meantime accessible via this link on my own website archive http://www.layish.co.uk/astronomical_iconography_of_5_icons.pdf. 2 THE CANON OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN ART 19: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ANCIENT ASTRONOMY planets and stars as powers of the Gods and Goddesses, using conventions for depicting their qualities through animals, humans or composite creatures to mark what was to become a calendrical programme of rituals and Year turning points - many of which even survive in the sacred art of the Monotheistic traditions. Throughout this and the very last chapter (22) short interludes describe the basic characteristics of the practice of Astronomy in the region based on naked-eye astronomy, which I will call Sky Anchors. Once I have shown at what level of detail Mesopotamian Astronomy (with growing ability to predict the future and conduct divinatory practices) lies behind CANEA, finally in the last chapter we will demonstrate how the lion and prey group, our starting point on this odyssey, takes pride of place at a key juncture in the grand cycles of time measurement, becoming a cipher of prestige to those in charge of regulating the calendar.
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