The Lost Treasures Persian Art. Vladimir Lukonin

      How rapidly early Scythian articles lose that fabulous imagery which is characteristic of Near-Eastern art! This imagery has already vanished completely from early Scythian objects in burial mounds of the northern Black Sea area dating from the 6th-5th centuries BCE. Here Scythian art comes into contact with the art of Greece. On the other hand, this imagery survives in Persian art of the Achaemenid period. One finds it on Achaemenid seals, on silver and gold vessels (especially on rhytons), in the decoration of Achaemenid swords, and even in monumental art – on the capitals of columns and on reliefs.[9]

      The most natural explanation for this is that the imagery of the Near East was not interpreted by the Scythians in any way.

      On the very earliest Scythian objects it simply constituted a form of exotic decoration. Yet images of actual Scythian “totems”, although originally produced by Near-Eastern metalworkers using Near-Eastern models and styles, were to be developed further in Scythian art.

      In Persian art, on the contrary, Scythian images rapidly degenerate,[10] whilst it is the fabulous imagery of the Near-East which continues to develop. This indicates that their selection, both at the beginning (at Ziwiye) and subsequently (under the Achaemenids), was not accidental and that they were interpreted in some way.

      Thus some of the objects from Ziwiye were produced for Iranian, and in all likelihood Median, rulers. The metalworkers, successors to the Hasanlu and Marlik “school”, produced works of art on the same principle as did the Marlik craftsmen, depicting in a single object images of “evil demons” and “good genii” extracted from the context of various religious pictorial systems. The field of selection for such “quotations” is a great deal more extensive than at Marlik, but the choice itself is more limited. Some dozen or so images are repeated on all the objects. In making the selection, no great importance has been attached to the symbolism these images possessed in their own pictorial systems. The quotations sometimes alternate with a “narration in one’s own words”.

      Lastly, even though the Near-Eastern “text” is ideographic, images that are already indisputably Iranian are introduced into it as “phonetic indices”. If such a system were to be found in written records, we would conclude that the text, despite the fact that all, or nearly all, of it was composed of foreign words, would have to be read in Iranian owing to the presence of phonetic indices. Here is the situation in the written Iranian language: in the Achaemenid period standard correspondences were beginning to be developed between Aramaic words and expressions and their Iranian equivalents (all the business of the chancellery in Achaemenid Iran was conducted in Aramaic, a Semitic language).

      Senior civil servants had the (Aramaic) text read to them in Iranian. Gradually, scribes developed the habit of reading the entire text, even to themselves, in their native (Iranian) language. Aramaic spellings turned into a type of conditional sign system for the Iranian words – ideograms or, more precisely, heterograms.

      The actual use of heterograms was subject to specific rules: thus, for example, one or two of the numerous Aramaic verb forms were arbitrarily selected all the time to serve any purpose… An Iranian verb ending was often joined to the Aramaic form which had been selected once and for all, as a phonetic complement in order to reveal the real Iranian verb form concealed beneath the heterogram. When they arrived on the Iranian plateau, the Iranians did not have their own written language.

      They used the cuneiform script of the Near East in order to set down the official manifestos of the Achaemenid rulers, and Aramaic writing and language in order to conduct their state and business affairs. Neither did these Iranians have their own representational art. Therefore an analogous process can be traced in art – quotations and a limited choice of images can be explained by the fact that the resulting works were also to be understood in Iranian.

      It is only in late Zoroastrian works that we find faint hints of anthropomorphic representation. In fact only a single Iranian goddess – the goddess Anahita – is depicted anthropomorphically. All the other deities of the ancient Iranian religion are represented abstractly, only through their “hypostases” or incarnations (chiefly as certain birds or beasts). The Yasna Haptanhaiti – one of the oldest parts of the Avesta, the ancient Iranian sacred text – mentions the worship of mythical creatures such as, for example, the sacred three-legged ass Khara and a few others, but the deities of the ancient Iranians were not pictorially represented.

      This probably explains why, when the need arose to depict the Iranian gods, artists had to seek a suitable iconography amongst examples of ancient eastern art. These were foreign to them both as regards religious content and, of course, ethnic origin, but they were at the same time widely known and revered and the Iranians interpreted them in their own manner. It was entirely natural for the Median kings to use the very rich figurative art of Assyria, Urartu and Elam as their basis, and especially the art of that region in which their state developed historically and culturally; nevertheless, the selection had to be purposeful and relatively strict. At Marlik and Ziwiye a native Iranian representational language was created on the basis of foreign representational languages; this was, in effect, a native Persian art which, by the Ziwiye stage, one can justifiably term Median.

      An inscription by the Achaemenid ruler Darius I, concerning the construction of his palace at Susa more than a century after the creation of the Ziwiye complex, states (lines 49–50): “The Medes and the Egyptians were skilled in the use of gold, they crafted works of gold”. As we find out in the following lines when he comes to list other craftsmen – stonemasons, specialists in glazed tiles, sculptors and builders (Ionians, Lydians, Babylonians and Egyptians) – Darius’s information is accurate. In all probability he was equally correct in speaking of the Medians as noted metalworkers.

      We have already pointed out the characteristics that link the pieces described and the art of Lorestan – one of the most distinctive regions of Iran. Interest in the culture of Lorestan began in the late 1920s. The story has it that in 1928, in the small town of Harsin, a Lur nomad offered a local merchant a strange bronze object – an idol with a human body ringed with fabulous beasts – in exchange for a few cakes. The Lur had found the idol in an ancient grave. The story may be without foundation but it is well known that when similar objects appeared in the antique shops of Tehran and subsequently those of London, New York and Paris, the interest in them was so great that thousands of Lorestan bronzes were soon scattered amongst private collections and museums and virtually nothing remained for the expert archaeologist arriving in Lorestan, except for ancient graves pitted with holes and entirely robbed of their treasures. It required no little time and effort for systematic excavations finally to reveal the ancient civilisation of Lorestan.

      Nowadays the so-called “typical Lorestan bronzes”, characterised by their original form and iconography, have been singled out from the wide range of objects from this ancient centre. These bronzes consist of ritual bronze axes, often decorated with cast figures of men or beasts (some of them bearing inscriptions with the names of Elamite kings of the 12th and 11th centuries BCE), bronze daggers (also frequently