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A Mesopotamian Trilogy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

M. E. L. Mallowan
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I. La Civilisation d’Assur et de Babylone. By Dr G. Contenau, Conservateurdes Antiquités Orientales au Musée du Louvre. Paris: Payot, 1937. 30 francs.

Fouilles de Telloh: sous la direction de H. de Genouillac. Vol. II, Époquesd’Ur IIIe Dynastie et de Larsa. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1937. Vols. I and II. 400 francs.

The Music of the Sumerians. By F. W. Galpin. Cambridge University Press, 1937. 18s.

These three works, all published in the same year, form a trilogy with the Tigris and Euphrates as a background. The Land of the Two Rivers, as historians have aptly called it, was from the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C. a focus on which man converged from the cardinal points of western Asia. The earliest settlements were composed of farmers and hunters: in the south their pottery and the art of painting suggest that they were predominant with the Syrian hinterland and eastern Anatolia. Sometime before 3000 B.C. the invention of the wheel, of metal-working and writing produced an industrial revolution, which brought the young civilization of these early farmers to maturity. The beautiful painted pottery of A1 ‘Ubaid and Tall Halaf died out, partly because, as de Genouillac says, the invention of cuneiform writing made the pictorial writing of clay vases obsolete, and no doubt caused the skilful artisans of painted ceramic to apply themselves to the more paying craft of metallurgy, much as in western Europe in the first quarter of this century a horde of stable hands left the paddock for the garage and forsook the horse for the motor car.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 13 , Issue 50 , June 1939 , pp. 159 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1939

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References

1 Mallowan, M.E.L., ‘The Bronze Head of the Akkadian Period from Nineveh’, Iraq, 1936, 3, part 1. (See note on p. 170 of this article).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Frankfort, H., Archaeology and the Sumerian Problem. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, no. 4.Google Scholar

3 cf. The Patesi from Lagash in the British Museum, BM.122910 (PLATE III) and the Statues of Gudea in the Louvre.

4 Antiquaries Journal, VII, no. 4. Note the suggestion by Sir Leonard Woolley who denies the theory of infanticide, and that the infant burials in the Ur houses were consecrated to a particular patroness of little children. One of the Ur houses contained the bodies of 32 infants.

5 Contenau, G., La Civilisation Phénicienne. Payot, 1926. pp. 137–140, ‘Sacrifices humains’.Google Scholar

6 Antiquaries Journal, XI, no. 4, and for Parrot’s description of the mausoleum at Telloh, cf. RA. XXIX, p. 45 ff.

7 Stanford, C.V. and Forsyth, C., A History of Music. Macmillan, 1937. On p. 19 Mr Forsyth describes the interest of Babylonian music as merely antiquarian.Google Scholar

8 BASOR, no. 64, Dec. 1936, fig. 5, and no. 65, Feb. 1937, p.8.

9 Seligman, C.G. and Beck, H.C., ‘Far Eastern Glass : some Western Origins’. pp. 31. Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, 1938.Google Scholar