Ancient Near Eastern Art: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v ...

of fired clay was first understood in the
seventh millennium B.C. From that point
on, pottery was the most common type of
object to come from the ancient ruins of
Near Eastern civilizations. In the Chalcolithic
period of the fourth millennium B.C.,
painted decoration on pottery flourished,
particularly in Iran. Artisans first painted
geometric designs in dark brown or black
on buff clay vessels, which were made on
a slow wheel. Gradually they included
more and more animal figures in their
decorative schemes. A large storage jar
(fig. 58) is similar in shape, fabric, and
painted decoration to ones found at the
central Iranian site of Tepe Sialk in
levels III 6-7. It has on its side schematic
silhouettes of three mountain goats, whose
enormous ridged horns arch majestically
57 over their bodies. The zigzag-and-band
Clay, so abundant and useful a resource, decoration separating the goats is typical
was developed and exploited throughout of Sialk pottery of this early period.
Near Eastern history. The great potential More than a thousand years later, from
the site of Tureng Tepe in the Iranian
Gurgan Plain just to the east of the Caspian
Sea, a completely different but
equally successful variety of pottery
(fig. 57) was produced. Its gray-colored
surface-the result of firing in a reducing
rather than oxidizing kiln-is textured
with six registers of crisscross patterns
made by burnishing the surface to a
high polish.
During the second millennium B.C. the
technology was developed for both the
glazing of pottery and the manufacturing
of glass vessels. A large jar (fig. 59)
glazed with green, blue, brown, yellow,
white, and black and decorated with petals
above bulls kneeling before trees is
one of three in the Museum's collection
reportedly from the early first-millennium
B.C site of Ziwiye in northwestern Iran. It
is similar in shape and decoration to
examples excavated at the Assyrian city
of Assur on the Tigris. H.P.
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