CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Mesopotamian Art
Art of ancient Iraq and its neighbours, from Sumerian votive statues and cylinder seals to Assyrian palace reliefs and Babylon's Ishtar Gate.
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No open-access works for Mesopotamian Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Between the Tigris and Euphrates, in what is now mostly Iraq, the first cities grew in the 4th millennium BC, and their art served temples, kings and record-keeping. Stone was scarce, so builders worked in mud brick, raising stepped ziggurats such as the one at Ur (about 2100 BC), saving imported lapis lazuli and diorite for precious objects. Cylinder seals, rolled across clay, left tiny continuous friezes.
Sumerian worshippers set statues with huge inlaid eyes in temples to pray for them, and the royal tombs of Ur yielded the inlaid Standard of Ur and a goat rearing against a golden bush. The Akkadian king Naram-Sin had himself shown climbing a mountain over his enemies on a victory stele around 2250 BC. Assyrian palaces at Nimrud and Nineveh were lined with carved slabs of battles and royal lion hunts and guarded by human-headed winged bulls. Babylon's Ishtar Gate, built under Nebuchadnezzar II, glowed with glazed blue brick.
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