The Lost Treasures Persian Art. Vladimir Lukonin
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are, however, some remarkable metalwork objects amongst the Marlik finds, although these have not been precisely dated.[3] Judging by their technique and a number of stylistic features, they are attributable to the same school as the Hasanlu bowl, but evidently a considerable time elapsed between the production of these objects. None of the Marlik vessels bear narrative designs; in general they depict real or fantastic birds and beasts. Unlike the decoration of the Hasanlu bowl, the illustrations are clearly divided into registers.
One of the vessels – a large gold goblet (height: 20 cm, weight: 229g) – bears “the story of a goat”.[4] The supervisor of the Marlik excavations, Ezzat Negahban, describes its design as follows:
“In the lowest row, A, the young kid is suckling from its mother. In the second row, B, the young mountain goat, just beginning to sprout horns, is eating leaves from the Tree of Life. In the third row, C, is a wild boar (apparently the killer of the goat). In the fourth row, D, the body of the goat, now grown old – as indicated by the long elaborately curved horns – lies on its back with two enormous vultures ripping out its entrails. On the fifth row, E, a small creature, an embryo or a monkey, is sitting in front of a small stand. If this is an embryo, it indicates rebirth; if a monkey, it is telling the story. It is common in the ancient fables of Iran for an animal, particularly a monkey, to tell the story.”
In our opinion register A (the mother goat) is not a goat at all but a deer. This design, a deer with a suckling fawn, is copied almost exactly from ivory plaques in the provincial Assyrian style of the 8th century BCE. One finds exactly the same design on plaques from the famous treasure of Ziwiye. Register B is an ordinary goat. The design is typically Assyrian and known from numerous objects, especially cylindrical seals, and it has a particular symbolical significance in a local (Assyrian) religious context. Finally, register D is an ibex, but the composition – birds pecking a goat – is known from Kassite glyptics (14th-13th centuries BCE), Elamite cylinders and Hittite stone reliefs. In the above cultures this motif symbolises victory in war. Only the boar (register C) and the strange “embryo” have no direct iconographic parallel, although the latter is depicted in front of a typically Assyrian Tree of Life. They alone betray the artistic individuality of the craftsman.
Thus we have before us four different references to the symbolism of different religions (Assyrian, Elamite, Kassite and Hittite), but they have been removed from their context and brought together on one vessel by a local craftsman in a simple, guileless tale of life and death, lacking any of that complex symbolism and meaning which the separate components possessed in their own context. Who was this craftsman? An Iranian or a Mede? At any rate he was not an Assyrian, a Hurrian or an Elamite – he did not understand their pictorial language. To produce his tale he used representations on carved ivories, seals and signet-rings and possibly images from other vessels rather than those on works of official court art such as reliefs. However, the essential difference between what is depicted on the Hasanlu vessel and this goblet is that on the former all the images are used to create a single story which can be clearly deciphered on the basis of a single religious or epic tradition (Hurrian myths). The Marlik goblet, however, tells a new story with the help of old but very varied images. Taking the analogy of language, one could say that the craftsman of the Marlik goblet is employing foreign ideograms in order to create his own coherent text. Perhaps for the first time we are encountering an example of the formation of Persian art as a whole. We will return to this in far more detail, for a great deal of evidence will be required, but on the basis of 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 civilisations reinterpreted and adapted by local artists to illustrate their myths or (subsequently?) to depict their deities. This theory suggests the possibility of an Iranian interpretation of works that still consisted entirely of foreign ideograms, but only of those works where these ideograms are taken from various artistic languages. In the case of the Hasanlu vessel, it is unnecessary to seek an Iranian interpretation of the Hurrian myths depicted. The Marlik goblet is an example of quotations from several languages and periods where the search for another, Iranian, content appears to be feasible.
Khaju Bridge. Isfahan, Iran.
Persian carpet.
In 1946, an enormous hoard was discovered by chance near a high hill some 25 miles east of the town of Saqqiz, not far from Hasanlu. The story of its discovery was rapidly transformed into confused legends. For example, the story was told of two shepherds who accidentally stumbled on the rim of a bronze vessel whilst searching for a young goat. Trying to dig it out, they are said to have noticed a large bronze sarcophagus packed full of gold, silver, bronze, iron and ivory objects. All of this was distributed among the peasants of the nearby settlement of Ziwiye and in the course of the distribution many valuable objects were broken into several parts, shattered or trampled. At the same time, some of the objects appeared in Tehran in the hands of a few antique dealers. One of them, having first arranged to receive a share of the proceeds of scientific excavations, informed André Godard, then inspector-general of lran’s Archaeological Service, of the find’s whereabouts.
In 1950, Godard published part of the gold, silver and ivoryware, gave a confused account of the circumstances of the hoard’s discovery and suggested a date for the bulk of the items – the 9th century BCE. He defined these objects as “art in the animal style” of the Zagros region with elements from the art of Assyria and nearby regions – an art which was subsequently adopted by the Scythians and the Persians of the Achaemenid period. Godard noted that many objects in the same style had previously been found in this region, some of them at the site of the ancient town which he identified as Izirtu, the capital of Manna.
In 1950, the “Ziwiye fashion” began. The activities of antique dealers led to the dispersal of objects from the hoard into private collections, though some ended up in museums in the USA, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Until the 1980s a large part of the treasure was kept in the Tehran Archaeological Museum. One of its first researchers, Roman Ghirshman, drew up a list of finds, attributing 341 objects to the hoard, including 43 of gold, 71 of silver and 103 of ivory.
Such variety in the contents of the hoard aroused incredulity. Godard had already pointed out that items ascribed to the hoard had been discovered by chance in neighbouring regions or even in Southern Azerbaijan. In recent years, the disputes have grown even more bitter. Some specialists have flatly refused to consider that the majority of the objects on the “Ghirshman list” were really found at Ziwiye, declaring some of them to be modern imitations. It must be said that these suspicions have some basis, for archaeological investigation of the hill at Ziwiye has, in essence, yielded nothing (archaeologists only gained access more than ten years after the discovery of the hoard). 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. But the hoard might well be unconnected with the fort. 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.”[5] This ironic remark is, in fact, extremely significant, for the answer to the question of what this collection of objects was hinges upon whether there was a real, not a metaphorical, horse at Ziwiye. Was it a hoard or the remains of the rich burial of an Iranian – or perhaps a Scythian – chief with his steed, weapons and personal belongings, like the Scythian barrow at Kelermes? Ghirshman considers that the hill of Ziwiye is quite definitely the grave of the Scythian ruler Madias, son of Partatua, who was king of the Scythians and a powerful ally of Assyria (died in c. 624 BCE). But what then of the remains of walls discovered by archaeologists? As has already been stated, together with the other objects from Ziwiye housed in the Tehran Archaeological Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York there are fragments of the sides and edge of a large bronze “bath”. Similar artefacts, undoubtedly Assyrian and dating from about the second half of the 8th century BCE, have
There may be material from several burial sites of various periods at Marlik, the dates of these sites differing from each other by up to 1,500 years. See Negahban 1964; Negahban 1972, pp. 142–152; Negahban 1977; Hakemi 1973; Moghaddam 1972, pp. 133–136, figs. 1–3.
The vessel is a tall stemless vase or goblet (of the same form as almost all the gold vessels from Marlik, Hasanlu and finds from other sites). The technique of all these vessels is also standard – embossing with subsequent engraving.
Wilkinson 1975, p. 7.