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Hello and welcome to Insider Insights.
I'm Ann Meisinger, Assistant Educator in Public Programs and Creative Practice at The Met.
In this virtual series, we take a closer look at objects in the collection and in our special exhibitions.
Today, I am joined by Michael Seymour, Assistant Curator
in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art as he gives insight into how ancient people
imagined and coped with the uncertainty
of illness, natural disasters, and war, among other turbulent events.
Michael, thank you so much for joining us today.
I'm very much looking forward to your presentation.
Thank you very much, Ann
and thank you everyone for coming to listen to this Insider Insights.
We’re recording this in the summer of 2020, and I think it’s fair to say this year
hasn’t gone as anyone expected.
It's been a hard and, um, even painful year for so many people and in different ways.
And so I wanted to turn to the area I work on,
the ancient world, and specifically, um, ancient Mesopotamia, so modern Iraq,
parts of Syria and Turkey.
And to reflect a little on how people in that ancient environment, um, faced and dealt with uncertainty.
And in some of the ways that that comes about in art, that we can still see today.
We can begin in the realm of medicine.
This is a tablet written in, um, Babylonia, ancient southern Iraq, in the late first millennium B.C.
It’s an incantation addressed to Gula, the goddess of healing
and Marduk, the head of the Babylonian pantheon.
And it has a specific purpose.
It's for use when a patient is sick because the patient is being attacked by ghosts.
Ancient Mesopotamia had a very rich supernatural world, and many otherwise unexplained circumstances
in life, good and bad, um, were dealt with in - with reference to supernatural forces
to gods, monsters, demons, ghosts.
For this reason, although ancient Mesopotamian medicine involved a lot of very practical knowledge
um, and treatments, it also involved religious and magical components, that were
considered at least as important.
So, the incantation on this tablet is to be performed by an exorcist, in the hope of
drawing this harmful ghost out of the patient.
Other dangers could potentially befall huge numbers of people at once.
This tiny fragment is part of a - a narrative about a great flood in the distant past, very similar
to the biblical flood story,
with only, um, one family surviving as this natural disaster wipes humanity out.
The Noah figure in the Babylonian story is called Atrahasis.
There's no mystery to the seriousness with which, um, people in ancient Mesopotamia regarded floods.
Their world, and especially in the south of Iraq where there is not enough rain to support agriculture
without irrigation, depended on a huge network of canals.
These canals, and an equally complex system of drainage, required constant maintenance, and the
building and opening of barriers around fields to control the ways in which water was fed
to crops.
A sudden or unusually large flood could potentially ruin crops for whole communities at a stroke.
So floods were a natural disaster that people were familiar with and worried about in their own lives.
And here we see them en - enshrined in Mesopotamian mythology.
In addition to floods, you had other natural disasters to consider
things like crop disease and crop failure. Um, issues like war or raids from outside,
or even, um, crime or abuse of power from within your own community.
In all of those spheres, addressing the threat was to some degree part of the responsibility of kings,
whose legitimacy
flowed from approval by the gods and their ability to, on some level, mediate
um, between human and divine realms.
Here we see an image of Shulgi, who is the king of a large state, even a proto-empire
centered on the city of Ur in southern Iraq, a little before 2000 B.C.
The statue is one of several made to be buried in the foundations of a temple
at the city of Nippur, again in southern Iraq
and shows Shulgi performing a pious act. He's carrying the first basket of earth for
a temple building or renovation project.
By maintaining the temples and the cults of the gods in this way, rulers aimed to guarantee prosperity,
safety, and abundance for the cities they ruled.
That dynamic of humans seeking divine protection can also be seen in many cylinder seals.
These are miniature carvings in stone
whose images, cut in negative into the seals themselves,
appear when they're rolled out across a clay surface.
This seal, also from Nippur and in fact from around the time of Shulgi’s reign, shows
a human, priestly figure, we don’t know for certain that it’s a king although
many of the human figures in these seals are,
um, pouring out a libation on an altar before a seated god.
We're probably looking, um, not at the depiction of something that went on in a temple.
Although it's easy to imagine a scene like this being physically played out
in front of the god's cult statue.
But it's something, um, conceived as occurring in the supernatural realm
with the king, or the human figure, before the god, um, himself.
One reason we think that, is that, um, there's another divine figure in the picture.
Behind the human is a goddess, called a Lama goddess.
And she appears frequently in these presentation scenes.
Supporting or even leading by the hand the human figure.
Her role is to mediate and facilitate the human petition to the great gods.
She's a protective goddess in what was a dangerous and liminal space, even for kings,
and her presence says something to us, I think, about
the Mesopotamian conception of the unknown and facing the unknown.
The gods themselves weren't necessarily safe, weren't necessarily on your side.
And so you had to do all you could to - to win them over,
to protect yourself and your community.
That question of who protects the king can also be seen in the palace.
Moving a long way forward in time and to northern Iraq,
to, um, Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, not too far from modern Mosul,
The kings of the Assyrian Empire in the first millennium B.C.
built palaces that were the political and conceptual
centers of their sovereignty of their empire.
The whole system hinged on the king, and he and the palace needed protecting both physically
and supernaturally.
These terracotta figurines are examples of, um, the kind that were found
under doorways in the palaces.
Um, they probably represent beings known as apkallu, wise sages from before the time of
the Great Flood who helped humanity do things like establish cities.
Doorways were considered particularly vulnerable entry points for demons or for malign spirits,
so we see extra supernatural protection placed there.
That said, the protection extended to the walls of the palaces.
Here we're looking at figures flanking stylized plant motifs.
This is, um, an image that today we call the Sacred Tree.
We’re going to zoom in on that top register.
We don’t know exactly what the Sacred Tree is.
It's not, um, a depiction of a single living plant, though it contains elements
of multiple plants.
It also features what sometimes look like streams of water, um, and I should say in addition,
the particular form it takes also varies quite a lot.
We do know that it was an important symbol, certainly in this palace, where it appears
again and again in many locations, including in the throne room apparently behind the throne itself.
We think broadly that the tree represents the fertility and abundance of Assyria
and thus the success and wellbeing of the Assyrian state.
It's typically flanked, as here, by supernatural figures.
Um, they resemble those found under the doorways
although we don’t know that they represent quite the same thing in these contexts.
And all of this imagery is about protection and security.
In it's playing out both the abundance of Assyria and the protection of that abundance
on the walls of the palace.
Now, the king in turn was supposed to protect the people.
This must have gone better or worse at different times, there must have been better or worse, um,
kings in that sense, but it's very hard for us to see.
In their inscriptions, kings always described themselves as just,
occasionally they described their enemies as tyrants, in very clearly politically motivated ways.
But with those sources, it can be very, very hard to get to what was really going on.
This is a votive cone, it's actually a descendant of,
um, things like that foundation figure of Shulgi we saw earlier
both in it's, um, purpose and in it's physical form.
It was dedicated by Lipit-Eshtar, king of a city, um, called Isin, again in southern Iraq,
at a temple called the House of Justice.
Lipit-Eshtar, um, is famous as the creator of one of the world’s oldest, um, lists of laws,
older even than the famous code of Hammurabi from Babylon.
Scholars of these texts don’t actually like to refer to them as law codes,
because that's not quite they are in the modern sense,
but they are lists of, um, lists of judgements, lists of crimes and consequences
And their purpose was to show, um, the kings as just rulers, to show
in their own words, in the words of Lipit-Eshtar on this cone,
how the king, “established justice in the land”.
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Ultimately, though, even the rule of kings was dependant on the gods.
In the realm of law and justice specifically, the shared belief in ancient Mesopotamia was
that justice was the province of the Sun God, called Utu or Shamash.
This small plaque, that was originally part of a votive model chariot,
um, shows the Sun God and I think specifically shows the Sun God rising at dawn.
The scale pattern beneath him represents mountains and we could say
that it really represents the mountains of Iran which lie to the east of Mesopotamia
where, of course, the sun rises.
In Mesopotamian mythology, the Sun God cuts his way up through the mountains in the morning
using that serrated blade you can see him holding.
The central idea was that the sun is omniscient and could see everything
and therefore it was an appropriate vessel for the concept of - of justice and the truth.
In a sense, that higher power, that more abstract concept of justice itself, was there in the
sky above you every day, even if its instruments on earth were human and fallible.
I think it’s a very powerful idea, and it's one that speaks to the idea of people
in really fundamental, important ways, not very
different from us, trying to make meaning and
looking for security in what could often be an uncertain world.
So, thank you very much for listening to this talk, um, take care everyone,
and thank you.