Historic Ancient Near East, Mesopotamian Art at Akkad, Sargon?,

Portraits of rulers communicate how a ruler was understood during their lifetime and how they were treated after death. What happens to a portrait once the ruler is gone often tells us as much as the image itself. The bronze head usually identified as Sargon of Akkad is a good example of this problem. Many scholars want it to be a portrait of Sargon of Akkad, partly because Sargon fits the profile of a powerful founder figure. According to later texts, he began his career as a cup bearer to the ruler of Kish, then rose through military command, and eventually created the Akkadian Empire through conquest. That story makes the identification appealing, but the archaeological evidence does not confirm it.

 

The head was found in 1931 during Iraqi excavations at Nineveh, and it was not uncovered in a palace or shrine. It appears to have been reused as fill in a much later Assyrian layer and was found face down in debris. There was no architectural setting that suggested it was displayed or honored. More importantly, the damage was deliberate and happened before burial. The eyes were gouged out, the ears were cut off, and the nose was broken at both the tip and the bridge. The head was also separated from the body. This kind of targeted damage is usually described as iconoclasm, meaning the intentional destruction of an image for political reasons. When eyes, ears, and nose are destroyed, it is often understood as a way of “killing” the image and dishonoring the person it represents. Similar actions have taken place in much more recent history when statues of fallen leaders were torn down.

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There is no inscription naming the ruler, which is another reason the identification remains uncertain. Even so, the object matches what we expect from royal portraiture in Mesopotamia based on material, scale, and technique. The head is cast in bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, which required access to raw materials, skilled labor, and high temperatures. Bronze objects were expensive to produce, and the fact that this one was not melted down later suggests it had some continuing meaning, even if that meaning became negative. Stylistically, the facial features follow Mesopotamian conventions. The eyebrows form strong arched shapes made from repeated patterned lines. The beard and hair are arranged in regular, geometric striations. These patterns recall earlier stylization, such as the eyebrows seen on the votive figures from Tell Asmar, but the modeling of the face is more naturalistic. The cheeks, mouth, and jaw show a closer observation of human anatomy than earlier stone figures.

 

The eyes are large, which fits established conventions rather than individual likeness. Earlier figures used enlarged eyes, possibly linked to ritual attention or simply to a shared visual system. This kind of exaggeration works much like modern cartooning styles, where certain features are emphasized because artists are trained to repeat them. The head covering is also debated. Some scholars describe it as stylized hair, but it may represent a cloth headdress. There is a clear band across the forehead, with patterned forms falling below it. Students often notice that this resembles a wrapped head covering, similar to a shemagh, rather than loose hair. Comparable head coverings appear later on sculptures of rulers such as Gudea, suggesting a long tradition of formal royal headdress rather than individualized hairstyles.

  

The technical process used to make this head helps explain why it mattered. It was produced using the cire perdue method, also known as the lost-wax process. First, a full model of the head was made in clay. A thin layer of wax was applied over that model to define surface details. Wax rods were added to create channels for air and molten metal. The wax-covered form was then encased in an outer mold of clay or plaster. When heated, the wax melted and drained away. Molten bronze was poured into the empty space left behind. After cooling, the mold was broken open, the metal channels were cut away, and the surface was finished with tools. If the sculpture was hollow, the core material inside was broken out through an opening at the base. Each step required time, fuel, tools, and trained workers, which means the process itself was a form of investment in the person being depicted.

 

Taking all of this together—the uncertain identification, the costly material, the careful casting, and the later mutilation—it is reasonable to think this head represented a ruler who later fell out of favor. The damage does not look accidental, and the reuse of the object as construction fill suggests a deliberate loss of status. Whether or not the head represents Sargon specifically, it shows how portraits could be used, attacked, and discarded as political power shifted.

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c3,000 BCE-c100 BCE, Historic Ancient Near East, Context and Writing (Cuneiform)

 

When professors, textbooks, and disciplines talk about the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near East, the terminology can shift depending on context. A safe and widely accepted term is the ancient Near East, described as historic because these cultures developed writing. Another common and practical term is Mesopotamia or Mesopotamian civilization. This term refers to a region located between two rivers—the Tigris and Euphrates—an area that today falls largely within modern Iraq, with parts of Syria, Turkey, and Iran. The word Mesopotamia comes from Greek: meso meaning “middle” and potamia meaning “rivers.”

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Mesopotamian civilization begins when people settle into large, permanent urban communities, roughly between 4500 and 4000 BCE, with some of the earliest major cities reaching their height around 3000 BCE. Depending on the textbook, Mesopotamian history is often said to extend as late as 100 BCE. You may also see the term Fertile Crescent, which refers to the arc of fertile land stretching from the eastern Mediterranean through Mesopotamia. While accurate geographically, that term can be confusing because it is sometimes used to describe much earlier prehistoric Neolithic sites such as Jericho, Göbekli Tepe, and Çatalhöyük, which existed before writing. Once writing appears, historians classify these societies as historic rather than prehistoric.

Mesopotamia was never a single unified culture for most of its history. Instead, it was made up of many independent city-states, including Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Girsu, Nippur, Akkad, Babylon, and Susa. Each city-state had its own government, patron gods, rulers, and traditions. These city-states remained politically separate until periods when empires emerged and conquered them, such as under the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, or Persians.

 

By around 3000 BCE, Mesopotamian cities ranged in size from roughly 1,000 people to over 10,000, making them among the largest urban centers in the world at the time. These societies had agriculture, organized religion, specialized labor, long-distance trade, and systemsof law. While later cultures built on earlier ones, each Mesopotamian civilization was distinct in language, political structure, and artistic style.

Art historians usually approach Mesopotamian material using three related methods of analysis. The first is context, which looks at where an object was found, how it was used, who made it, and what was happening historically at the time. Context includes geography, religion, economics, politics, and even literature. The second approach is form, which focuses on physical characteristics such as material, size, shape, surface, and how an object was made. This includes descriptive terms like texture, scale, and construction methods. The third approach is iconography, which deals with subject matter, symbols, and imagery that can be identified through written records or repeated visual patterns. Because interpretation can easily drift into speculation, starting with context and form helps ground analysis in verifiable facts.

In survey courses, the main Mesopotamian cultures usually introduced first are the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians. The Sumerians are especially important because many foundational developments appear in Sumerian cities first. One of the most important of these is writing, known as cuneiform, which emerges around 3500–3200 BCE. Later cultures continued to use cuneiform even when they spoke different languages, such as Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian. This reuse of religious ideas, symbols, and writing systems across cultures is often described as syncretism.

 

Agriculture and irrigation played a central role in Mesopotamian life, but these were not entirely new inventions. Earlier Neolithic cultures already practiced farming. What changed in Mesopotamia was scale. Large irrigation systems supported dense urban populations, which required administration, record-keeping, and systems of law. The unpredictable flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates—sometimes destructive and sudden—made life difficult. Unlike the Nile in Egypt, Mesopotamian floods could arrive at dangerous times during planting or harvest.

The landscape itself offered few natural defenses. Mesopotamia is mostly flat, with open plains that made invasion relatively easy. There was little stone or timber, so buildings were primarily made from mudbrick and reeds. Summers could reach extreme temperatures, often over 40°C (104°F). These environmental pressures shaped daily life and religious practice. Many Mesopotamian texts describe a world in which the gods are powerful, distant, and unpredictable, and humans must constantly work to appease them.

Among Mesopotamia’s documented innovations are the potter’s slow wheel, early plows, sailboats, wheeled vehicles, and beer, which was a common way to process grain into a calorie-dense food. Mesopotamians also developed advanced mathematics. They used a base-10 system for counting and a base-60 system for time and measurement. This base-60 system survives today in 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes. They created calendars, mapped the stars, and tracked celestial cycles to guide agriculture. Some mathematical tablets demonstrate knowledge of geometric relationships that predate Greek mathematicians like Pythagoras by more than a thousand years.

Writing was the most significant development for historians because it created permanent records. Cuneiform writing takes its name from the Latin cuneus, meaning “wedge,” referring to the wedge-shaped marks made by pressing a reed stylus into soft clay. Early writing began as simple pictographs—drawings of objects representing those objects directly. Over time, these images became more abstract and standardized.

 

The earliest writing systems were used for accounting. Small clay tokens and tablets recorded quantities of grain, animals, or goods. These pictographs evolved into logograms, where a symbol stood for a word or concept, and later into syllabic signs representing sounds. Eventually, cuneiform combined logograms and phonetic elements, though it never became a fully alphabetic system.

Clay tablets could be reused while still wet or fired in kilns to create permanent records. Fired tablets survive in enormous numbers; archaeologists have recovered tens of thousands from Mesopotamian sites. Some tablets were enclosed in clay envelopes and sealed using cylinder seals. These small carved cylinders, usually between 1 and 5 centimeters long, were rolled across wet clay to create a continuous image. Made from materials such as lapis lazuli, carnelian, or limestone, cylinder seals functioned as signatures, security devices, and status markers. Once sealed, a document could not be opened without breaking the seal, making forgery difficult.

Literacy in Mesopotamia was rare. Estimates suggest that fewer than 1% of the population could read and write. Writing was mostly limited to trained scribes, priests, and administrators who studied for years in schools called edubbas. Written texts include economic records, religious hymns, legal codes, treaties, scientific observations, and literature.

 

One of the most famous Mesopotamian texts is the Epic of Gilgamesh, written on clay tablets in Akkadian and compiled in its standard form around 1200 BCE, with earlier versions dating back to at least 2100 BCE. The epic was discovered in fragments, most notably in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the 7th century BCE. These tablets are now housed primarily in the British Museum. The epic provides direct written evidence of Mesopotamian ideas about kingship, mortality, friendship, and the limits of human life.

Together, Mesopotamian cities, technologies, artworks, and texts show how early urban societies organized labor, religion, government, and memory. Because so much of this evidence survives in clay—tablets, seals, and pottery—Mesopotamia offers one of the most detailed archaeological records of the ancient world.

Sources commonly used in survey courses include the British Museum collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and translations of Mesopotamian texts by scholars such as Andrew George and Samuel Noah Kramer. Dates and population estimates are based on archaeological consensus published in standard references such as The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East and The Ancient Near East by William Hallo and William Kelly Simpson.

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c8300-7000 BCE Prehistoric Art, Neolithic Art, Jericho

  

 

When we study Jericho in an art history course, we are looking at one of the earliest places where people built permanent architecture and experimented with representing human faces long before writing or large stone monuments. The site we call Jericho today is Tell es-Sultan, an ancient mound near a permanent spring in the southern Jordan Valley. Excavations show many layers of occupation reaching back to the Natufian period, roughly the 10th–8th millennia BCE. By about 8300–8000 BCE, people had built a thick stone wall and a tall stone tower. Later, in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB, about 7500–6000 BCE), they made mudbrick houses, plastered floors, and plastered human skulls that count as some of the earliest portrait-like sculptures in the world.

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The environment around Jericho helps explain why people settled there so early. The site sits next to a reliable spring that supplied fresh water even when the wider region became drier after the last Ice Age. This created an oasis zone with wild cereals such as emmer wheat and barley, as well as shrubs and trees, surrounded by more arid land. Natufian groups used the spring as a seasonal camp as early as 10,500–9,500 BCE, leaving microlith tools and stone sickles for harvesting wild grain. As the climate warmed, some of these groups stayed longer and eventually lived there year-round in small round houses. During the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A(PPNA), people constructed circular houses about five meters across using sun-dried mudbricks of clay and straw with mud mortar. They roofed these structures with wood, reeds, and packed earth. By the later PPNA, the settlement covered a large area and included a stone wall over three and a half meters high and about two meters thick, with a tower more than eight meters tall and an inner staircase. Population estimates vary, but Jericho was a substantial community for its time.

Jericho sits at an important point in the shift from hunting and gathering to early farming. Earlier scholarship assumed that large settlements only developed after full agriculture was established, and that walls and towers were signs of a later stage of society. Revised dating methods and comparisons with sites like Göbekli Tepe show that this assumption does not hold up. Jericho shows permanent settlement and large communal building activity before farming was fully developed. The term Natufian comes from Wadi en-Natuf, a nearby site where similar tools and structures were first identified in 1928. Archaeologists later used the term for other early settlements in the region, including Jericho. This kind of naming practice is common in prehistory and reminds us that cultural labels often come from excavation history rather than from what people called themselves.

The way Jericho was excavated is also part of what makes it important in an art history course. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many archaeologists searched Near Eastern sites hoping to confirm stories in the Hebrew Bible or classical literature. Jerichoappears in the Book of Joshua as a walled city conquered by the Israelites, so early excavators tried to match physical remains to that narrative. Later, in the 1950s, Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations used careful stratigraphic methods and radiocarbon dating to show that the earliest walls and tower at Jericho date to around 8300–8000 BCE, thousands of years earlier than the biblical story. She also showed that Jericho went through many phases rather than being a single occupation. Her work helped shift archaeology away from “biblical archaeology” towardmethods based on physical evidence even when that evidence contradicts written tradition.

 

Stratigraphic excavation is now a standard method for understanding long-occupied sites like Jericho. The idea is straightforward: deeper layers are older than those above them, so documenting each layer and its contents makes it possible to build a sequence of occupation. At Jericho, the method works through a series of steps:

1. Divide the mound into labeled grid squares.
2. Excavate each square slowly, layer by layer, using small tools.
3. Screen soil to catch small artifacts and bones.
4. Record the depth and exact location of every find.
5. Keep the vertical profiles visible and draw the layers.
6. Use radiocarbon dating and comparisons with other sites to estimate calendar dates.

Using this process, Kenyon traced Jericho’s history from early Natufian camps through PPNA and PPNB villages and into later Bronze Age towns.

 

From an architectural point of view, Jericho shows the earliest large-scale use of mudbrick and fieldstone construction that later becomes common in Çatalhöyük and early Mesopotamian cities. Builders made sun-dried bricks by mixing clay-rich mud with sand and straw, shaping them in simple molds, and leaving them to dry. Because this period is still Pre-Pottery, bricks were not fired, and there were no ceramic vessels. To assemble walls, workers stacked the bricks in horizontal rows with wet mud as mortar. Inside houses, they sometimes burned limestone and mixed the resulting lime with water to make plaster for floors and interior surfaces. They also used uncut fieldstones in the lower parts of walls, with mud as the binding material. This does not count as ashlar masonry, because the stones were not cut into uniform shapes. Roofs used a basic post-and-lintel arrangement with wooden beams, reeds, and packed earth. Some towers at the site include internal stone staircases, which show careful planning even without arches or vaults.

 

You can think of Neolithic construction at Jericho as another short process:

1. Mix clay, sand, and straw into a workable mud.
2. Shape the mud into bricks and dry them in the sun.
3. Lay a simple stone foundation if needed.
4. Stack bricks in even courses with mud mortar.
5. Cover floors and walls with lime plaster.
6. Add wooden beams and reed mats for the roof and cover them with earth.

Jericho also appears in art history classes because of the plastered skulls found under house floors in PPNB layers. Around 7000–6000 BCE, some skulls were cleaned of flesh, filled with lime plaster, and modeled to recreate facial features such as cheeks, noses, lips, and eyelids. Shells were placed in the eye sockets. The plaster followed the shape of each bone structure, which makes these skulls some of the earliest portrait-like objects known. They were buried under domestic floors along with other burials and household material. For comparison, modified skull fragments at Göbekli Tepe—dating to about 9600–8000 BCE—show deep carved grooves, drilled holes, cut marks from defleshing, and traces of red ochre, but no plaster modeling. At Jericho, skulls seem connected to households and early farming groups, while at Göbekli Tepe the evidence comes from a ritual site built by hunter-gatherers. Seeing these examples together helps students understand how early communities used architecture and human remains to build social identity during the long transition from mobile foragers to settled agricultural societies.

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