THE CANON OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN ART CATALOGUES OF EVIDENCE B: THE URUK STANCE 6. CATALOGUE B: THE URUK STANCE © ASIA HALEEM 2015 SINCE SO PIVOTAL TO ALL OTHER CHAPTERS IN THE CANEA STORY THIS PARTICULAR CATALOGUE IS DEDICATED Firstly, to my parents, who first introduced me to Persepolis on two occasions during the time they worked for the UN in Iran; Secondly to my ex-husband Professor Muhammad Abdel-Wahhāb Abdel-Haleem who locked me into the Middle East for ever (though in the end I preferred to travel much further back in time), and Last, but not least, Professor A D H Bivar, who set me off on the road to research, unaware of the goldmine he gave me! ________________________________________________________________________________________ DEFINITION OF THE URUK STANCE ATTACK IN REAL-LIFE From behind the prey the lioness rears on her hind legs, raising her forepaws to grasp it from behind. This form of attack is so called because it was most common on artefacts from protohistoric Uruk at the height of its power, and probably invented there, as the catalogue reveals. In real life it is the most usual type of attack from the rear when the prey is larger than the lion, whereby the lion or lioness (in some cases substituted by griffin or leopard) rears up onto its standing victim (usually a bull, but sometimes deer, antelope or goat) from behind, making an arc of its forelegs as it rears up so that its paws are just about to, and mostly do, seize the prey’s spinal ridge and/or hind haunch zone. The photographs below come close to capturing this move, even though in both the paws reach further forward than the basic type: Ill.6- 1: Photos Martin Harvey (L) and Dereck & Beverly Joubert (R), Nat. Geog. Magazine Sep 2005/Dec 2010 On artefacts the attack in Uruk Stance mode was at times stylised into a balletic, even heraldic, icon of arrested movement. From watching this common type of lion attack in real life (or on film and TV), the prey is immobilised from behind while still upright, with the lion or lioness almost at a loss where to start - whether to pounce on its back, trip it up, or start biting it (see lower drawing in Ill.6- 2, where George Schaller ‘s study of lionesses at play and with prey records the basic action). In real life if the predatress (males rarely hunt) has been chasing from behind (the usual case) she still has to reach her prey’s throat or face LION AND PREY, CANEA AND CALENDAR 1 PDF processed with CutePDF evaluation edition www.CutePDF.com THE CANON OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN ART CATALOGUES OF EVIDENCE B: THE URUK STANCE to deal the death bite, but immobilisation is the first half of the battle, sometimes done by biting the back leg tendons before getting to the head. There are other types of Attack from the rear as the drawings below suggest – two of which are treated separately from the Uruk Stance in the next two catalogues. There is a more general type of Rear Attack, studied in Catalogue C, where the lion does not rear up, being a vaguer, diagonal version of the Uruk Stance because the prey is either smaller, or crouching. On the other hand in the Back Lunge (the subject of Catalogue D) portrayed in the second drawing below, the leaping lion leaves the ground, landing on the back of its victim. Ill.6- 2: Lions hunting or at play - from: G B Schaller: The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations 1972 The Uruk Stance swung round to the side, as it were – as in the bottom group of Schaller’s drawing - is seen once or twice on Mycenaena seals (Urusta-29), usually with the lion facing, from behind the bull. LION AND PREY, CANEA AND CALENDAR 2 THE CANON OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN ART CATALOGUES OF EVIDENCE B: THE URUK STANCE INTRODUCTION TO THE CATALOGUE In this Catalogue we study a distinctive composition which started in the Susa and Uruk region, in the original cluster of 4M stone pots an iconostasis with cultic meaning. The Catalogue entries show how, by the end of its history over two and a half millennia later, the image endured in the region to enjoy a second lease of life, now in the archaeo-astronomical context of Persepolis to the south-east. The material in this catalogue is the most distinctive of all the lion and prey material, not only because of its use in both Egypt and Sumer in predynastic times and then millennia later under the Achaemenids, but also because of the high standard of workmanship on the key pieces. We choose the latter period for the next Chronological Focus, given the Predynastic period has already been scrutinised in the Chronological Focus for Catalogue A, also very much pertinent to the material in this one. The reader will have their own opinions on the often contradictory dating allotted to many items for the former (all dates are BC) but these can more or less be ironed out in our art historical and iconographical assessments of the material, because for the bigger panorama of the Fourth and Third Millennia the main story is self-evident despite differences of absolute dates - as long as sequencing and matches retain their order. Compared to the Belly Landing there is a vast increase in the number of items to assess under this compositional type. As in Catalogue A the key items, chosen because they are of known provenance, are given a separate catalogue number and then grouped with it are similar examples whose provenance is often unknown: these are given the same number with f, ff, etc. on following pages to indicate they are being grouped with the master item acting as benchmark for the group. Again the principal artefact is prefaced by a table1 summarising key information such as find-spot, date (or approximate date), material, object type, find and/or museum numbers and essential publication details. The Master Bibliography will come at the end of the book eventually, but in the meantime we have placed a short bibliography of the main seal catalogues consulted at the end for fuller information on references cited in our catalogue entries. For the 4-2M period Bibliographies 1 & 2 given at the end of Catalogue A applies, while a basic list of books covering the Chronological Focus for the Uruk Stance in the Achaemenid period is given as Bibliography 3 (still very much work in progress) - though the most important references are given in the footnotes of the main text. From this data the three Distribution Maps (roughly one for each millennium) give at a glance the geographical scatter for the material by catalogue number, indicating their spread in rough chronological order, whilst the Frequency Chart highlights at which periods the Uruk Stance was most used. In this particular catalogue it has not always been straightforward for the earliest millennia to lay out the material in strict chronological order2, and sometimes the comparative material under an entry jumps back and forward several centuries to establish short lines of evident linkage before doubling back to where we had originally got to on the main time-line. The central evidence is by implication Group A, constituting the archetypal Uruk Stance and simply left as the main content of the catalogue - against which three temporary variations based on fresh observation stand out. They occur in clusters over a short time-span, reverting to type after a few centuries - thus between the Protohistoric and Akkadian periods we have three brief sub-groups: B: a lunge with paws and torso well over the prey’s back, often reaching as far as its neck; C: a two-way grip of one of the lion’s forepaws on the rump and the other on back leg of the prey; D: human intervention in the attack by holding the lion’s tail. 1 When coming back to this document a decade later my upgraded software did not ‘like’ the old version, so some tables do not show grid lines, try as I might to get them back! 2 For instance, we could have interspersed the large vases with what seem to be contemporary seals and sealings, but in the end found it more coherent to group the stone vases together and then double back to deal with most related seals, other than in a few instances. LION AND PREY, CANEA AND CALENDAR 3 THE CANON OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN ART CATALOGUES OF EVIDENCE B: THE URUK STANCE We think this tracks new developments on the earliest material more intelligibly in that these short-term variations help with dating. The core Uruk Stance design (the A material) from its initial invention persisted all the way up to the Gutian invasions, though in fact even in the mature Akkadian period before that, use of the lion-prey symbolism was already going out of use. A quick look at the last page of the Chronological Table for Catalogue A (reproduced in this catalogue’s Art History Section for ease of reference) shows this ‘barbarian invasion’ to have been a major watershed - marking (as also in the case of the Belly Landing) the complete cessation of the use of the lion and prey image in any form - even in Syria - lasting two or three centuries. If its imagery is about what I think it is, then this hiccup would be an indicator of all kinds of calendrical and administrative chaos during that time, until the Ur III and Old Babylonian dynasties reasserted control, in the process devising a simpler, more formulaic pictography that moved on from the strongly animal-based iconography of Sumer and Elam.