A Researcher Chisels New Perspectives on Ancient Art

This spring marks the seventh expedition that Zainab Bahrani, chair of Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology, has conducted in northern Iraq and southwestern Turkey since establishing the Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments project in 2012. Spurred by the damage and destruction war had wreaked on sites in the region, Bahrani set out to create a database that could serve current and future generations of conservators and scholars.

Using photography to preserve information is not new—archeologists have been doing this since the invention of the camera in the mid-1800s. How Bahrani photographs these sites, however, reflects a shift in thinking about artwork made from 4000 BCE to 200 CE in an area that spans present-day Iraq, eastern Syria and northwest Iran.

Scholars now believe that Mesopotamians did not simply regard art as portraying the world around them. To them, some art forms like statues and reliefs also actively participated in the world. In reviewing a compendium of new scholarship published in Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, professor Sarah J. Scott Wagner College in New York, highlights this perspective as “driven in part by the work of Zainab Bahrani.”

Bahrani describes herself as part of an ongoing process in academia that is “decentering Europe from histories of art and histories of archeology, where we were taught to look from only one perspective.”

For Frederick N. Bohrer, author of Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Photography and Archaeology, one of Bahrani’s important contributions lies in looking beyond her field of study. In documenting a site or object, for example, she records those features it acquired at different periods rather than, as is a common practice, focusing solely on its aspect at a particular time “as though it never had any other life.” She adopts a similarly unusual wide-angle approach in her analyses, he says, bringing in “aspects of cultural theory and developments in the humanities of the last few decades.”

Bohrer, who studies the way scholars in the West have historically described and interpreted the ancient Near East, regards Bahrani as a “remarkable, innovative scholar” who has changed the discourse about ancient art by raising new questions.

Bahrani, a native of Iraq, earned her master’s and doctorate in a joint program of ancient Near East and Greek art history and archaeology and, as a graduate student in the 1980s, some things she was learning didn’t sit right. A typical assignment was to discuss the ways Greco-Roman art was better or more advanced than the earlier Mesopotamian. “This assumption that there was a development where you go from more primitive to more sophisticated,” she says, “was something that I always questioned.”

The massive archive of cuneiform writings made it clear to her that ancient Mesopotamians had a highly sophisticated and complex “conception of reality and the relationship of representation to reality.” It was different from that of the later Greeks, whose civilization is regarded as the foundation of Western art and philosophy. As 19th-century Westerners studied Mesopotamia, they posited a historical progression with classical Greece at the pinnacle.

But to Bahrani, Greek and Mesopotamian thought were neither inferior nor superior to one another. They were alternative views, “which to me was so fascinating because it also became a reminder that what we sometimes consider to be natural and universal is just our own way of looking at the world,” she says.

This insight would come to bear while studying rock reliefs carved in the Zagros starting around 2090 BCE during the last Sumerian dynasty through the Assyrian and Babylonian eras to 300 BCE.

She first encountered them in textbooks where photographs of the Darband-i-Gawr relief, for example, show a man armed with an ax and a bow towering over two small figures sprawled at his feet. Here and in similar reliefs, the photographs are framed in such a way that they appear “almost as if they were paintings,” Bahrani says. This tallied with the traditional argument that they served as propaganda, an early version of billboards advertising a local hero. Seeing them in person, however, “it becomes clear that they’re not panel reliefs, they’re not architectural sculpture” that stands out against the mountainous backdrop. 

Quite the opposite, they’re absorbed into the landscape, “very intentionally embedded into the structure of the rock formation, of the geological layers that you can see in the rock.”

Far from fully facing forward, the composition of Darband-i-Gawr follows the tilt of the rock, and the step the warrior is climbing is not carved; it is a layer of sediment that the artist has made part of the scene. In shots of the surroundings, we see this stratum running along the rest of the mountain. Significantly, other images—taken at various times of day, from different distances and angles, solo and as part of a high-resolution 360-degree panorama—underscore the relief’s remoteness and its minuteness in the landscape. As Bohrer points out, “Photographs don’t just capture what is in front of the lens. Every photograph captures a sensibility behind the lens.” Close-ups of the relief speak to Bahrani’s art-historian interest in stylistic analysis and iconographic details, while the ever-wider views reveal the weight she assigns to how the relief relates to its surroundings.

For comparison, Bahrani cites a famous Achaemenid relief on Mount Behistun in Iran. Sculpted in 521 BCE, it also portrays a 3-meter-tall King Darius facing a line of smaller figures of prisoners, hands tied behind their backs. Unlike Darband-i-Gawr, this scene is part of a 25-by-15-meter (82-by-49.2-foot) carving with 450 lines of inscription sitting some 200 meters (656 feet) up a rock overlooking a broad valley. “From below you can see that there’s something very high up,” she says. “Now, that is clearly on a major thoroughfare. But the ones that we’ve been recording are not like that. They’re in crevices and ravines and places that only maybe a shepherd or a goatherd might go.”

Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments images show that sculptors carved Darband-i-Gawr high above a narrow, rocky gorge known as Pagan’s Pass. The surrounding rock is uneven, marked by deep fissures, dark streaks and patches of hardy vegetation. Add to that the shifting play of shadows cast by myriad outcrops, and it is easy to see why Bahrani doubts they were intended as propaganda given how remote and difficult to spot they are. “Who is going to see them?”

This emphasis on context extends to documenting the ways ancient works have been subsequently incorporated into later structures. One such site is the Mosul Gate at Amedi (al-Amadiya), a 13th-century gate with Arabic inscriptions seamlessly integrated with a first-century BCE to second-century CE stone staircase and its three rock reliefs of life-size figures. Since 2019, Bahrani has used this documentation to direct a preservation project that pays equal attention to the site’s pre-Islamic and Islamic elements.

Over her career, she has disputed a number of preconceptions about Mesopotamia. In Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia, she pushed back against the perception of ancient women as subservient and lacking power. The 2022 exhibition She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 B.C. at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, built on those ideas. Among them was her observation that scholars had consistently downplayed the power of Enheduanna—the high priestess of Ur, a Sumerian city-state, around 2300 BCE—solely because of her gender. This included giving little credence to accounts that named her as the author of acclaimed poetic odes. Mining what Bahrani calls “a small idea more than 20 years ago,” some of her graduate students presented new research that bolstered her case (for a related article, see AramcoWorld March/April 2022).

She has also introduced new ways of looking at ancient warfare and violence (Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia); challenged the treatment of text and image as wholly separate in Mesopotamia as they were historically in Europe; and questioned the term “visual arts” while studying Zagros Mountains reliefs. “It’s immediately tied to vision and viewing. But not all historical conceptions of the work of art are about viewing.”

Take foundation figurines. About 35 centimeters (13.8 inches) tall, they range from metal pegs topped with the sculpted head and torso of a god or royal to full-bodied statuettes. Created to be buried inside the foundation of buildings, they conferred protection and a powerful connection to the past and a collective memory. Just as these figures were not made to be seen, Bahrani argues, many of the Zagros Mountains rock reliefs were not made with viewers in mind.

Then why commission them? Bahrani believes it is crucial to consider the perspective of ancient Mesopotamians. “We tend to think that it’s common sense and patently obvious that an image is not the same thing as a person or a thing, that these are two totally different categories. But for them,” she says, “those categories blurred.” One’s image was seen as a detached part of one’s body, like hair or nails. This intimate relationship extended to one’s name, shadow and clothes. Carving images of local rulers into limestone, therefore, embedded them into the land where their presence conferred protection and reverence, Bahrani speculates, to nearby springs—a manifestation of Mesopotamians’ belief in the “agentive power” of art.

Her intellectual journey has depended greatly on reading scholars like Linda Nochlin and Partha Mitter, who questioned the veracity of what they had learned in their fields of art history. She vividly recalls diving into Mitter’s Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art and feeling thankful: “Reading those books gave me courage to pursue the directions that I wanted to pursue.”

Hoping to do the same for others, she included some of the history of archaeology and Western scholars’ attitudes in Art of Mesopotamia, a textbook she wrote in 2017. Professors of Mesopotamian art welcomed her book as a long-overdue update, an introductory overview that, one critic wrote, “skillfully fills this enormous void in the field.” Bohrer points out that, while it is unusual for scholars, particularly top scholars, to take time away from research to write a textbook, there is a lot of power in doing so “because it’s what brings people into a field in the first place,” he says. Through both text and illustrations, it shapes the way readers think about this ancient art. “That’s not just creating knowledge. That’s creating a field.”

Bahrani has been very outspoken on the need to ensure that this field includes people who call the lands of ancient Mesopotamia home. “One of the things that I find really unfortunate is the lack of translation of good textbooks into Arabic.” Having seen that students in Iraq rely on a 50-year-old text “full of racial theory,” she is carving out time to translate her textbook.

As for the Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments project, she continues to ensure that new material is simultaneously posted online in Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish as well as English. Bahrani hopes that younger generations will raise new questions—just as she has when standing below rock reliefs in the Zagros Mountains. Why such an inaccessible location? Why chiseled this way? Is there a pattern to the sites? Everything she knows about Mesopotamian thinking tells her that “nothing about this was random,” she says. “But because all the focus was on the power of the king, these questions were not being asked about ancient Mesopotamian art. So, I wanted to push to ask them.”