The “Art” of the “Ancient Near East”

By general agreement, ancient Near East designates the region extending from modern Turkey to Afghanistan, from the Black Sea to Yemen and Oman. Sometimes it includes Egypt, and it may thus correspond approximately to the current term Middle East. But precisely what it encompasses, how it functions as a rubric governing description and analysis, and where its antiquity begins and ends, are matters of some debate. How did this area come to comprise a distinct and independent cultural sphere in the modern scholarly imagination? Are we justified in continuing to treat its material record as a meaningful unit, and if so, why and how? In short, what is our purview? And when we speak of the “art” of the ancient Near East, do we use a label or concept consistent with prevalent or persistent notions in its constituent cultures, or do we impose an anachronistic (and thus inappropriate) modern construct? In this chapter I distinguish two aspects of this issue, because they entail different sets of questions and have been approached by different groups of specialists. The first involves the critical reception of Near Eastern antiquities in the West, especially following the nineteenth‐century rediscovery of Mesopotamian antiquity. The objects initially recovered from archaeological explorations were incorporated into existing aesthetic frameworks established primarily for histories of ancient Greek art, and evaluated accordingly. The “Art” of the “Ancient Near East”