The use of color on early Mesopotamian sculpture

Researchers using ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy have discovered ancient Mesopotamian art, like classical art of Greece and Rome, was often brightly colored although studies have shown the number of colors used appears to be limited to shades of red and black.  

"Red pigments consist almost entirely of haematite, black is either bitumen or a carbonized product. White is almost non-existent (white lead, gypsum), apart from rare cases where it is used as color lightener for the skin. We did not find either blue or green. It is difficult to judge whether this lack reflects an ancient reality or not. On statues, as well as in most wall paintings, pigments were hardly ever mixed. This seems to be a conscious choice, as mixing pigments is not technically difficult." - Astrid Nunn, Adjunct Professor for Near Eastern Archaeology (retired) at the University of Würzburg.

However, scholars noted distinct shifts in color intensity over time.  Skin color in the third millennium was depicted as orange, yellowish brown, red brown, and brown but in the second millennium, there was a general change to bright red and red brown.  By the first millennium, skin color became notably darkened.

Reading this, I couldn't help but wonder about any correlation between changes in skin tone depictions and recorded migrations and conquests by different groups.  However, Professor Nunn does not mention any studies of that nature.  However, she does point out that skin color was derived from a combination of realism mixed with artistic conventions and social determinants, which in turn are subject to symbolic meaning.

This is further complicated by the ancients descriptions of color including textures and other characteristics.

"Taking the materiality of colors (and not simply their hue and chroma) as a starting point enables us to understand why ancient terms that are translated as dazzling, shining, lustrous, brilliant and translucent, or, inversely, dark, poorly lit, dim and dull, must be considered a – positive or negative – color category," Nunn observes. "In Akkadian literature, red on the body, especially on the face, was very positive...However, in Sumerian and Akkadian texts, gods (in particular the sun god Utu), heroes and kings sport beards referred to as lapis lazuli. Thus these words also mean bright and shiny. Despite the reference to lapis lazuli (blue) being conceivable, the shininess of the beard was just as important as its hue."

Of course I have seen objects such as the bull-headed lyres recovered from the royal cemetery of Ur, dated to 2550-2450 CE, with beards literally made of lapis lazuli so describing beards in this way could have been quite precise if the statues of the gods were thought to represent the gods themselves.

Surprisingly, researchers found that even sculpture crafted of expensive, imported stone like diorite was often painted over, despite the lustrous beauty of the stone itself.

Read more about it:  https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2021/05/mesopotamian-sculpture 

 

Millenium, Gypsum, that I photographed at University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia

Reconstructed color on the statue of a man with similar garment now in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, courtesy of Astrid Nunn.

Bull-headed lyre recovered from the royal cemetery of Ur, Iraq, 2550-2450 BCE, Gold, with Lapis Lazuli beard that I photographed at University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia

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