12. The question of ekphrasis in ancient Levantine narrative

As a subtype of the broader question of what we might term artistic synaesthesia – in which the consonance and dissonance of verbal, visual, aural, haptic, and even olfactory modes of expression are constantly explored and challenged in their boundaries – ekphrasis and physiognomy provide occasion to think specifically about speech (or script) and sight in ancient practices of (re)presentation. Well known as it is in the study of classical and postclassical literature and its relation to the visual arts, modern discourse about ekphrasis makes its way into the study of the ancient Near East rarely, even less in the study of Northwest Semitic traditions. As we shall see, however, this is not because of the lack of relevant phenomena, but perhaps rather because of the lack of explicit theoretical discourse in the sources themselves. This should not preclude the investigation of ekphrasis or ekphrastic practices any more than the relatively late articulation of ekphrasis as a rhetorical strategy in the Progymnasmata should prevent the admission of Homeric evidence for such practices. Rather, the emergence of ekphrasis in the Second Sophistic and its many subsequent iterations have galvanized modern discourse on the verbal and visual arts in a way that heuristically provides a vocabulary for exploring and attending to the ways ancient authors and artists navigated the constraints of their art. Similarly, these questions are worth our attention even for earlier times and different places because of their potential for elucidating different configurations of the relation between the two. Indeed, this volume has provided the means for thinking about the transformation and sublimation of the visual in the literal in ancient Mesopotamia, and I wish here to extend the discussion to consider some ways in which the Northwest Semitic world demonstrates that, even without an explicit technical vocabulary or discourse, Levantine authors and artists were impelled “to breach the supposed boundaries between temporal and spatial arts.”1 If we define ekphrasis with most modern scholarship primarily (and roughly) as words about art objects (real or otherwise), Northwest Semitic examples of the Bronze and Iron Ages are easy to produce.2 What we do not find is any kind of explicit