Ancient Near Eastern art for beginners

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

About five thousand years ago, in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, roughly present-day Iraq, people built the first cities. With them came writing, kings, temples, armies and art made on a new scale. Much of that art had one great subject: power. It showed rulers chosen by gods, enemies defeated and the order of the world as fixed and good.

Mesopotamia means “between the rivers”, the Tigris and the Euphrates. It was never one civilization but a sequence of cities and empires that shared much of their culture, from Sumer to Babylon, followed by the Persian Empire to the east.

Three layers

Historical What the objects and inscriptions show. Later tradition What later religions and writers made of these gods and kings. Modern How people use the images in practice today.

Uruk and Sumer

Historical Uruk, in southern Iraq, was one of the first true cities, and some of the earliest writing appears there around 3200 BCE. The Uruk Vase, an alabaster vessel about a meter high from roughly 3200 to 3000 BCE, is carved in bands: water, plants, animals, men carrying offerings, and at the top a procession bringing gifts to a female figure, probably the goddess Inanna or her priestess. Read from bottom to top, it is a picture of the whole ordered world rising toward the divine.

Standing male worshiper, about 2900 to 2600 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (40.156). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

The Sumerian city-states made votive figures like this one at the Met: men and women with clasped hands and wide eyes of shell and stone. They were placed in temples to stand in endless prayer for the people who gave them. The Royal Cemetery at Ur, dug in the 1920s and 1930s, produced gold, lapis lazuli and the inlaid box called the Standard of Ur, now in the British Museum, with war on one side and a banquet on the other.

Akkad and Babylon

Historical Around 2300 BCE Sargon of Akkad united the region in what is often called the first empire. The Victory Stele of his grandson Naram-Sin, in the Louvre, breaks the old bands: the king, much larger than anyone else and wearing a horned crown that signals divinity, climbs a mountain over his enemies. That size rule, hierarchical scale, is one you will meet again and again.

The Code of Hammurabi, about 1750 BCE, is a basalt stele topped by a relief of the king before Shamash, the sun god of justice, with nearly three hundred laws below. Image and text work together: the laws carry divine authority.

Assyria: palaces and guardians

Human-headed winged lion (lamassu), about 883 to 859 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (32.143.2). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical From the ninth to the seventh century BCE, Assyrian kings lined their palaces with carved reliefs of hunts, battles, sieges and tribute. At the gateways stood lamassu, colossal guardians with the bodies of bulls or lions, wings and crowned human heads. The Met’s pair comes from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, about 883 to 859 BCE. Look at the legs from the side: many lamassu have five, so they look complete from the front and from the side.

These reliefs lined the routes foreign ambassadors walked. They were meant to impress and to frighten.

Babylon’s blue gate and Persepolis

Historical Under Nebuchadnezzar II, Babylon’s Ishtar Gate, about 575 BCE, was faced with glazed blue bricks showing dragons and bulls in relief. Its reconstruction is in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which is closed for a long renovation.

The Achaemenid Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BCE, stretched from Egypt to the Indus. Darius I began the ceremonial capital of Persepolis around 518 BCE. Its staircases are carved with delegations from across the empire, each in its own dress, bringing gifts to the king. It is tempting to read them as a documentary record. They are better read as an ideal picture: an empire of many peoples, peaceful and orderly, all moving toward one ruler. Persepolis burned in 330 BCE during Alexander’s conquest.

The esoteric angle

Historical Mesopotamian religion was full of protective magic: incantation texts, amulets and figures buried under thresholds. The lamassu were part of that world. They guarded a doorway in both a physical and a spiritual sense.

Later tradition Many later figures of Western magic have roots here, often through long and winding paths. The Lilith of Jewish folklore is linked by many scholars to the Mesopotamian lilû and lilītu spirits, and Babylonian astrology shaped the zodiac. My Lilith course follows that thread carefully, including the famous clay relief often called the Queen of the Night.

Modern Some modern practitioners honor Inanna or Ishtar. If you do, I suggest reading translations of the actual hymns, such as those to Inanna, so your practice grows from the sources rather than from internet summaries.

Try it yourself

Open the Met’s lamassu page and look at the figure first from the front and then from the side. Count the legs. Then write who would have walked past it when it was new, from what distance and in what light. How does seeing it on a screen change its meaning?

Before and after

Before this: Prehistoric art.

After this: Ancient Egyptian art.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.