W
hen humans first gave up the dangerous and uncertain life of the hunter and gatherer for the more
predictable and stable life of the farmer and herder, the change in human society was so signifi-
cant that it justly has been called the Neolithic Revolution. This fundamental change in the nature of daily
life first occurred in Mesopotamia—a Greek word that means “the land between the [Tigris and Euphrates]
rivers.” Mesopotamia is at the core of the region often called the Fertile Crescent, a land mass that forms
a huge arc from the mountainous border between Turkey and Syria through Iraq to Iran’s Zagros Moun-
tains (MAP2-1). There, humans first learned how to use the wheel and the plow and how to control floods
and construct irrigation canals. The land became a giant oasis, the presumed locale of the biblical Gar-
den of Eden.
As the region that gave birth to three of the world’s great modern faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam—the Near East has long been of interest to historians. But not until the 19th century did systematic
excavation open the public’s eyes to the extraordinary art and architecture of the ancient land between
the rivers. After the first discoveries, the great museums of Europe, consistent with the treasure-hunting
spirit of the era, began to acquire Mesopotamian artworks as quickly as possible. The instructions the
British Museum gave to Austen Henry Layard, one of the pioneers of Near Eastern archaeology, were
typical: Obtain as many well-preserved artworks as you can while spending the least possible amount of
time and money doing so. Interest heightened with each new find, and soon North American museums
also began to collect Near Eastern art.
The most popular 19th-century acquisitions were the stone reliefs depicting warfare and hunting
(FIGS. 2-22and 2-23) and the colossal statues of monstrous human-headed bulls (FIG. 2-21) from the
palaces of the Assyrians, rulers of a northern Mesopotamian empire during the ninth to the seventh cen-
turies BCE. But nothing that emerged from the Near Eastern soil attracted as much attention as the trea-
sures Leonard Woolley discovered in the 1920s at the Royal Cemetery at Ur in southern Mesopotamia.
The interest in the lavish third-millennium Sumerian burials he unearthed rivaled the fascination with the
1922 discovery of the tomb of the Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamen (see Chapter 3). The Ur cemetery
yielded gold objects, jewelry, artworks, and musical instruments (FIGS. 2-8to 2-11) of the highest quality.
2
THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
2-1ABeaker
with animal
decoration,
Susa, ca.
4000 BCE.