Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

THE PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATIONS 25
Some of these monuments, however, even later examples such as the
well-known palette with three rows of animals and one of trees,
preserve the primitive features of earlier productions : worth noticing,
the resemblance in the treatment of trees on this palette and on the
Maikop vases. But the primitive scheme on the Maikop vase is made
more complex by the introduction of two rivers and a lake, of trees
and mountains . In early Babylonian and Egyptian art, the introduction
of landscape elements into the increasingly complicated representations
comes comparatively late : in Babylonia not earlier than the
reign of Naramsin, on his celebrated stele and on contemporaneous
seal-cyHnders : in Egypt, during the earliest dynastic period, for
instance, on the mace-head of * King Scorpion '. A glance at the
monuments will show that the treatment of the landscape is entirely
different from that on the Maikop vase. It must be noticed, however,
that in the stylization of water the Maikop vase is akin to the macehead
of King Scorpion, while both differ greatly in this particular
from the Babylonian monuments with their system of transverse,
instead of longitudinal, lines : although the system is more advanced
on the mace-head, where the Hnes are undulated, than on the Maikop
vase, where straight lines are disposed in triangles. In the abovementioned
Babylonian and Egyptian monuments, the landscape is
subordinated to the figures, and an effort is made to combine both
elements into a whole, whereas on the Maikop vase landscape and
animals are merely juxtaposed, the only exception being the bear
climbing the tree. This very primitive treatment of landscape is by
no means unknown in the earliest artistic monuments of Egypt. It is
particularly interesting to compare the landscape on the Maikop vase
with painted scenes of the same type on the ovoid clay pots of predynastic
Egypt. On the neck of such pots we often find a representation
of a chain of mountains, and on the body rows of animals in the
desert or by the Nile, sometimes in combination with trees, and
beneath the animals what are probably ships floating on the river,
though some scholars prefer to recognize fortified villages. The most
detailed representation of the kind, comprising a great number of
human figures, was found painted on the walls of a prehistoric
tomb at Hierakonpolis. The transition to the later system of
landscape treatment is seen in bone objects, on which an elephant is
sometimes portrayed standing on a mountain. The Maikop vase
shows the same transitional character : here we find a survival of
prehistoric motives, a juxtaposition of two entirely distinct schemes
of ornamentation, and a first timid attempt to subordinate landscape
to figures.
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