Sumerian Sculpture

This seminar introduces the sculpture of ancient Sumer (south Iraq), with a focus on ancient practices and ontologies of art, the related processes of making and technological innovations, as well as image rituals and the visual manifestation of the divine. Seminar topics include historical monuments, statues of the gods, architectural sculpture and foundation images placed in the ground, and votive portrait statues dedicated in temples. In the fourth millennium BC new technologies of metallurgy, casting, the mechanical reproduction of images, and seal carvings emerged alongside the invention of writing, a technology first documented in the city-state of Uruk, Iraq. Sculpted images and monuments were inscribed with texts that reveal a great deal about the ontological and agentive, the aesthetic and the order of the divine. The seminar will study the genres of Sumerian sculpture alongside their ancient texts. It also explores an important era in the historiography of ancient art and archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century. At the time when Sumerian sculpture was first unearthed and collected, antiquity and ethnography, ruins and ancient statues became subjects of interest for Modern artists and art movements, not only for their aesthetic forms but also as areas of scholarly investigation. Archaeologies of ritual and the sacred, Sumerian and Pre- Columbian antiquity, were topics of great interest in the first half of the twentieth century, among European artists and art movements, but also for Iraqi Modernist groups such as the Baghdad Group of Modern Art and the Ruwad.

Prerequisites: Students will be expected to have previous coursework in art history, archaeology or anthropology. Reading knowledge of French preferred. Applications required. Permission of the instructor is needed for registration.