Sumer: Art & Architecture

The fourth millennium BC was a time of tremendous innovation in monumental architecture, the organization of urban space and developments in the visual arts in southern Mesopotamia. As settlements grew into city-states, monumental architectural works transformed the landscape. New technologies of metallurgy, casting, the mechanical reproduction of images, stone sculpture and seal carvings emerged alongside the invention of writing, a technology first documented in the city of Uruk, the place of the setting of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Sculpted images and monuments began to be inscribed with texts that reveal a great deal about the ontological and agentive, the aesthetic and the order of the divine. The lecture introduces students to these extraordinary developments in early art and architecture of ancient Sumer (southern Iraq). Lectures will discuss votive statues, portraiture, image rituals, and the visual manifestation of the gods. The lectures also introduce the extraordinary developments in architecture and monuments.