Sumerian Art
' The Development of Sumerian Art. By C. Leonard Woolley. (Faber. 3es.) ' The Development of Sumerian Art. By C. Leonard Woolley. (Faber. 3es.)
TIIE first of these two books is a companion to M. Zervos' volume L'Art en Grece, published by the Cahiers d'Ari last year, and it needs no better recommendation than to say that it is at least as good 'and slightly larger than
' its elder brother. The photography is perhaps even more brilliant and the size and quality of the reproduc- tion exactly as good as before, so that once more the real quality of the objects illustrated is conveyed by the plates. ' In fact we have only one complaint to make about the presen- ' tation of the matter, which is that the size and the medium of the objects should have been stated in every case and not only on casually selected occasions. The book has even a certain advantage over its companion, since it covers a subject less well known than Greek art and one for which no decent anthology exists. The period covered runs from approximately the end of the fourth to the middle of the second millennium
B.C., and the civilizations of which the art is discussed are the Elamite, the Sumerian and the Akkadian, though the three are so closely connected that they can for convenience all be
classed as Sumerian. • The characteristics of Sumerian civilization can best be isolated by a comparison with other early'Oriental traditions, • particularly the Egyptian and the Assyrian. Egyptian 'religion laid all its emphasis on the supernatural, on the
soul and on the importance of a future life which was to be in some sense a continuance of earthly existence. The gods who controlled the lives of men were represented on earth by one of their number, the King, who was therefore divine and all-powerful. To him belonged absolutely all the land and possessions and lives of hiS people. Corresponding to thiS situation we find an art concentrating entirely on the super- natural and the superhuman, and mainly uninterested in the physical world for its own sake. It was an art _based on superstition and devoted to the gods, including, of course, the King. According to the faith of the Sumerians the future life was to be one of motionless consciousness, and their religion was therefore more concerned with the things of this world. Hence the very strong moral element in their system, and their passion for such useful parts. of religion as divination and magic, which led to their great advances in science. Further, their King (at any rate before the time of Sargon) did not claim to be a god, but only to be the representative of the gods on earth. He was there- fore of the same kind as his people, and to this corresponds in the social structure the admission, even theoretically, that people other than the King could own property. Unlike Egyptian art, therefore, Sumerian sculpture is human and material rather than supernatural, and it was devoted to a class, the King and the wealthiest of his people, rather than to the gods. The latter, of course, frequently appear, but
they are rendered in the same realistic spirit as are human beings, not in the lofty and spiritual manner of the Egyptians.
Compared with Egyptian art, Sumerian art therefore is realistic. Instead of the disembodied, almost aethereal figures on Egyptian bas-reliefs, the Sumerian statues are emphatically conceived as lumps of solid matter, and their creators seem to have thought more easily in purely three- dimensional terms than any other sculptors except the negroes. These statues are also realistic in their brilliant observation of character as shown by feature and gesture, and in the directness with which these observations are rendered. But if Sumerian art seems realistic compared with Egyptian, it has not the naturalism of Assyrian sculpture. This art, produced by a frankly militaristic civilization which showed a dangerous hankering after the past, added only this naturalism to all it borrowed from the Sumerian and Hittite cultures. Features such as its delight in minute decorative detail and in the rendering of such things as the museulation of lions or the structure of foliage seem almost decadent compared with the economical realism of the best Sumerian art. Another singular quality in Assyrian art is the predominance of effects of physical pain, conveyed always by details of contortion and blood. Their battle scenes compare unfavourably with the Sumerian versions like the stela of Naram-Sin in the Louvre, where great intensity of emotional agony and fear is rendered by choice of pose and gesture only, and their hunting scenes, with dying wild beasts, show a different attitude from that of the Sumerians, who prefer to depict the domestic animals and to depict them with sympathy. It is, in fact, to be hoped that M. Zervos' volume will do much to readjust the balance between the arts of Sumer and Assyria in popular estimation by demonstrating the little known qualities of the former.
Mr. Woelley's approach to his subject is entirely different from that of M. Zervos. He writes purely from the archaeolo- gical point of view, and his purpose is therefore to give a plain account of the development of the arts in Mesopotamia up to about the year 2000 B.C. against a background of history. He is concerned at least as much with architecture as with sculp- ture, and he devotes much attention to that curious luxury art represented by the finds in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, many of which are reproduced, not very happily, in colour. As a summary of archaeological information about Mesopotamia the book is excellent, but when Mr. Woolley makes aesthetic judgements he is sometimes, less .convincing. He seems to approach Sumerian art with a set of definite standards which lead him to condemn wholesale, for instance, the art of' Lavish under Ur-Nina. This art is, of course, bad if judged on the principles of the art illustrated in the Royal cemetery finds, but what is more relevant is that it is a different kind of art from the latter, with different aims and therefore to be ap- proached in a different way. It seems likely that the limestone bas-relief to Ur-Nina in the Louvre fulfilled its function just as well as the stela of Naram-Sin fulfilled its different function
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