Art Appreciation Homework Page 2.

• Chatal Huyuk was a city in Anatolia (modern day Turkey) with a population of about 5,000 during 65oo BC to 5500 BC.

• They developed a thriving trade based on Obsidian.

• The single story buildings were densely clustered around courtyards that were used as garbage dumps.

• There were no streets or plazas.

• The city was easy to defend because the entire outside was a continuous, unbroken wall.

• People moved about by crossing rooftops and entering houses through the roof.

• Many interior spaces that have been discovered are highly decorated and appear to be shrines.

• On some walls are pictures of women giving birth to bulls…we don’t know what this means, possible a fertility goddess.

• Chatal Huyuk was abandoned suddenly for unknown reasons and never reoccupied.

• Sumer is in Southern Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

• Sumerians invented the wagon wheel and plow

• They could cast objects of bronze and copper.

• They developed a writing system called cuneiform.

• Cuneiforms are symbols made with a stylus in clay.

• The most impressive buildings of the Sumerians were their ziggurats.

Ziggurats are stepped pyramids whose structures may have resulted from repeated rebuilding at a sacred site, with rubble from one structure serving as the foundation for the next

• Ziggurats proclaimed the wealth, prestige, and stability of a city’s rulers and glorified their gods.

• They functioned symbolically as a bridge between earth and heaven.

• Some were given names like “House of the Mountain” and “Bond between Heaven and Earth”

• The temples within them were known as ‘waiting rooms’ because the priest and priestesses waited their for the deities to reveal themselves.

• The exteriors were decorated with elaborate clay mosaics and reliefs.

• It was said the gods were pleased by this work because they disliked laziness in their people.

•

A tall carved alabaster vase found near the temple complex of Inanna in Uruk shows how stories were told.

• Pictures were organized into registers or bands, condensing the narrative much like comic strips.

• Lower levels show the natural world, water, plants (fertility symbols)

• Size was associated with importance in much ancient art.

• This convention is called hieratic scale.

• The figures are stylized.

• They are shown simultaneously from the side and profile.

• These are limestone images dedicated to the gods.

• They show an ancient Near Eastern practice of placing small statues of individual worshipers in shrines.

• Anyone who could afford it would commission a self-portrait and dedicate to a shrine.

• It was important to approach a god with an attentive gaze…hence the wide open eyes.

• Each sculpture would serve as a stand in, at perpetual attention to the god, always making eye contact.

• The faces and bodies were simplified and cylindrical is shape.

• Generally, hands were clasped in respect.

• When the Akkadian empire invaded Sumer one city-state remained independent, Lagash.

• It was ruled by Gudea.

• His image is one of the more familiar in ancient art as 20 small figures remain of him.

• Gudea restored many temples and placed votive statues of himself within them.

• They were made of diorite, a very hard substance.

• The statues portray him as strong, peaceful, and pious.

• His garment is made in such a way that it provides space to write in cuneiform that he dedicated this temple to the goddess Geshtinanna, the divine poet and interpreter of dreams.

• He holds a vessel from which life-giving water flows in two streams filled with leaping fish.

•

•