Echoes of Eternal Persian Art

Epigrams succeed where epics fail – Persian proverb

In the summer of 1958, whilst clearing away the remains of a collapsed ceiling from one of the rooms in the fortress of Hasanlu, the archaeologist Robert Dyson came upon a man’s hand, the finger-bones covered with verdigris from the plates of a warrior’s bronze gauntlet and from a solid gold bowl, eight inches in height and eight in diameter.

The fortress of Hasanlu, the headquarters of one of the local rulers, was besieged and sacked, at the end of the 9th century BCE or the very beginning of the 8th century. The gold vessel which the warriors of the palace or temple guard were trying to save was a sacred object. Around the top are scenes of three deities on chariots, with mules harnessed to two of the chariots and a bull to the other, whilst a priest stands in front of the bull with a vessel in his hand. These probably portray the god of thunder, rain or the sky, the national god wearing a horned crown, and a sun god with a solar disc and wings. In all there are more than twenty different figures on the vessel – gods, heroes, beasts and monsters, scenes of sheep being sacrificed, a hero battling with a dragon-man, the ritual slaughter of a child, the flight of a girl on an eagle.

In 1962, the Archaeological Service of Iran sent a scientific expedition to Gilvan, about nine miles west of the settlement of Roodbar. The archaeologists discovered fifty-three graves on the hill of Marlik in the form of four distinct types of “stone boxes”. They uncovered golden goblets – some remarkably large – as well as gold and bronze vessels, bronze weapons, horse-harness fittings, pottery, and various ornaments.

For the first time, we are encountering an example of the formation of Persian art as a whole. Based on this example, it is already possible to suggest that Persian art was created from heterogeneous quotations taken out of context, from elements of religious imagery, from various ancient eastern civilizations reinterpreted and adapted by local artists to illustrate their myths or to depict their deities.

In 1946, a massive hoard was accidentally unearthed near Hasanlu and Ziwiye, and by 1950 the so-called “Ziwiye fashion” had taken hold. Antique dealers soon dispersed its treasures into private collections, while others found their way into museums in the United States, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan. A significant portion of the hoard remained on display at the Tehran Archaeological Museum until the 1980s.

The entire hill had been riddled with holes dug by treasure seekers. Remains of the walls of a small fort which once stood on the hill have been found. Judging by the pottery found there, it was built between the end of the 8th and the middle of the 7th centuries BCE. One of those who studied the hoard remarked: “Unfortunately, what is left in an empty stable after a horse has been stolen merely tells us that a horse was once there, but it does not identify the horse.”

Amongst the objects from Ziwiye are many ivory plaques with various designs. Some of them, fashioned with unusual artistry, are undoubtedly Assyrian, similar to those discovered in the Assyrian palaces of Arslan Tash, Nimrud or Kuyunjik. These are all prestigious items. Richly decorated weapons, insignias of a king’s or courtier’s power, such as a pectoral, a diadem, a gold belt and so on. On nearly all these objects the composition is based on heraldic principles, symmetrical scenes depicting mythical creatures are displayed on either side of the Tree of Life. There are no less than ten versions of the Tree of Life from Ziwiye, consisting of standard S-shaped curves woven into a complex pattern. The representations of the Tree of Life on Urartian bronze belts of the 13th-7th centuries BCE form the closest parallel. The fabulous creatures depicted at the sides of the Tree of Life on objects from Ziwiye are not very numerous – a dozen in all.

Thus, the craftsmen of Ziwiye created prestigious objects such as symbols of power (ceremonial weapons, a pectoral, a diadem, a belt, etc.), employing the pictorial language of Urartu, Assyria, Elam, Syria, Phoenicia and, lastly, the “animal style” of the Scythians, so that their own pictorial language was again created from elements extracted from various alien contexts to produce a new text. They also employed many older metalwork techniques.

Some of the objects from Ziwiye were produced for Iranian, and in all likelihood Median rulers. The metalworkers, successors to the Hasanlu and Marlik “school,” produced works of art on the same principle as did the Marlik craftsmen, depicting in a single object image of “evil demons” and “good genii” extracted from the context of various religious pictorial systems. In making the selection, no great importance has been attached to the symbolism these images possessed in their own pictorial systems.

It is only in late Zoroastrian works that we find faint hints of anthropomorphic representation. In fact, only a single Iranian goddess – the goddess Anahita – is depicted anthropomorphically. All the other deities of the ancient Iranian religion are represented abstractly, only through their incarnations, chiefly as certain birds or beasts. The Yasna Haptanhaiti – one of the oldest parts of the Avesta, the ancient Iranian sacred text – mentions the worship of mythical creatures such as, for example, the sacred three-legged donkey Khara and a few others.

This probably explains why, when the need arose to depict the Iranian gods, artists had to seek a suitable iconography amongst examples of ancient eastern art. It was entirely natural for the Median kings to use the very rich figurative art of Assyria, Urartu and Elam as their basis, and especially the art of that region in which their state developed historically and culturally. At Marlik and Ziwiye a native Iranian representational language was created on the basis of foreign representational languages; this was, in effect, a native Persian art which, by the Ziwiye stage, one can justifiably term Median.

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