The Graven Image: Representations in Babylonia and Assyria

ZAINAB BAHRANI

The Graven Image: Representations in Babylonia and Assyria

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Pres 2003 256 pp 28 b/w ills. $4995

Zainab Bahrani undertakes in The Graven Image to locate and describe the fundamental status of imagery for the "Assyro-Babylonian" tillage of ancient Mesopotamia. This is a courageous and elevated ambition, which, as she points without has not been systematically tackled before. It took her ten years to write the work with chapter 2 first appearing in 1994 and chapter 6 in 2000 In it, Bahrani engages with a number of scholarly disciplines, including art history, philosophy, philology, and religion. She has defined sum of two units distinct audiences for the work: art historians precipitoused in the postmodern discourses of representation and signification and scholars of ancient Near Eastern agricultures who, she believes, have not adequately problematized representation in postmodern boundarys Reflecting these concerns, the work is divided into two almost equal sections, the first offering a critique of novel scholarship and the second arguing her thesis about representation in Mesopotamia, or ancient Iraq, as she sometimes prefers

The inquiry of dead civilizations is difficult, frustrating, and, ultimately, a thankless piece of work whose results are invariably heaped with criticism. Bahrani, an Iraqi through birth, locates her efforts within this scholarly tradition by means of beginning with a critique of the work that has gone before her. In the first three chapters, she considers the disclosure of the discipline of art history, the research by Western scholars of the ancient tillages of modern Iraq, and postmodern theories of representation, with special attention given to Jacques Derrida's notion of difference. Her characterization of previous scholarship of the ancient Near East, especially art historical considerations, as hopelessly mired in the Western binary dialectic of Greek/Barbarian=good/bad=civilized/uncivilized=freedom/despotism come ups here as a constant theme.

The next to the first half of the book at hands her theoretical investigation of image making and general [i]or[/i] abstract notions of signification (both visual and verbal) in a civilization where of the like kind notions evolved free of "post-Greek metaphysics and ideas of representation as mimesis or shut copy." She bases her theory extensively upon the work of the brilliant French Assyriologist Jean Bottero whose work Bahrani (together with Marc van de Mieroop) has translated into English. (1) Among Bottero's contributions that are fundamental for Bahrani are his emphasis upon the potential for multivalence inherent in the cuneiform writing a whole and the understanding of the down-reaching importance of divination in these ancient agricultures Readers from both audiences will benefit from reading Bottero before tackling Bahrani.

In part 2 the core of the work, Bahrani make knowns her thesis of meaning end three focused discussions. The first is a consideration of the Akkadian word salmu, the next to the first is the phenomenon of the destruction of images of lords after the collapse of their power, and the third is the reach forthed critical evaluation of a canonical record of the Middle Assyrian period. All three discussions be pendent extensively on the multivalence of meaning and the importance of divination end the appearance of signs.

Bahrani presents a single underlying paradigm that, according to her analysis, determined (and limited) the range of meaning for imagery produc in a highly varied cultural tradition that stretch outed for more than three thousand years. For Bahrani, that paradigm is have the direction ofed by the cognitive pattern established by means of the peculiar nature of cuneiform, the indigenous writing combination of parts to form a whole used to render the various dialects of the languages nuncupatory in the region. The script is not alphabetic on the contrary rather a mixed system that exercises ideograms that were originally derived from "pictograms" and that carry the meaning of a word or an idea as well as syllables or phoneme which carry the value of unhurt What is special about the cuneiform combination of parts to form a whole is that single signs potentially carried the couple ideographic meaning(s), originally from the Sumerian language, and their multiple phonetic values that referr to Akkadian. This is to say that individual signs had the potential for many meanings that could be ascertained alone through the context of their use.

Whereas the cuneiform script disentangleed and changed over the more than three millennia of its use, its dual character was fundamental from its invention about 3200 BCE in Uruk in southern Iraq by the agency of Sumerians. According to Bottero, this dual character explains the fashion of thought, the episteme, the mentality, that underlies AssyroBabylonian agriculture Bahrani extends this idea as the primary and fundamental principle underlying the Assyro-Babylonian visual agriculture and the making of images. She maintains that the mixed a whole of writing created a combination of parts to form a whole of meaning that was potentially unstable because greatest in quantity cuneiform signs had more than individual signification. While it is unlikely that there was literally an "unending chain of semiotic meaning," of the like kind multivalence is one of the features that not rarely confounds the Assyriologist's understanding of the ancient body s Indeed, some of the more esoteric Assyro-Babylonian body s use this feature as the basis for elaborate witticisms and other wonderful verbal gymnastics. Bahrani's proposal is a true interesting one that holds considerable potential for delving into the meaning of Mesopotamian imagery. Her presentation, however, assiduously eschews extensive and rigorous documentation, making it difficult smooth for the specialist to evaluate.