Vase returned!

[Guest guest]

I am heartened at the news about the artefacts from Iraq, some are

being found not having been looted at all, others are being returned.

This vase is one of the treasures of the period of the worship of the

great Goddess Innana or Innin.

 

 

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11155

 

The Warka Vase, the greatest loss from the National Museum in

Baghdad, has been recovered. Three men unexpectedly turned up at the

museum on 12 June, with the sacred vessel of 3200 BC on the back seat

of their car. Although the press have not commented on its condition,

our information is that ancient breaks in the fragile limestone were

broken again.

 

 

 

 

Also this story: http://www.suntimes.com/output/iraq/cst-nws-

iside13.html

 

"The vase, still pictured on the Interpol Web site of missing

artworks, is a major Mesopotamian artifact widely studied in art

history and archeology. It depicts Sumerians offering gifts to the

goddess Innin, as well as scenes of daily life in the ancient city of

Uruk. It was carved about the time the city's Sumerians were

inventing writing"

 

 

Here's my favorite current description of the Warka or Uruk Vase:

 

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030602&s=perl060203

"If Greek art defines, forever, an idea of Heroic Man, early

Mesopotamian art defines, forever, an idea of Modest Man. And if that

vision finds its perfection in the Gudeas, its origins are some

thousand years earlier, in the procession of figures on the Uruk

Vase, a tall alabaster carving. Arranged in ascending order on the

Uruk Vase are the realms of plants, animals, men, and the goddess

Inanna, who stands with her consort Dumuzi before her storerooms,

which are loaded with the riches that agriculture had drawn from the

Mesopotamian earth. There is a sense of crazy delight in the

processionals of the vase, in the regular rhythm of the animals

moving to the right and, above them, moving in the opposite

direction, the succession of naked men.

 

"Looking at the Uruk Vase, you may feel that you are witnessing a

time when artists had not yet rejected the sweaty immediacy of

religious experience in favor of the aloof stylizations of

ritualistic performance. Each of the men, carrying his offering of

food or drink for Inanna, is an individual, with his own compact

muscular body, his own touching ordinariness. There is something

oddly, subtly comic about this world in which the meetings of men and

gods can be so insistently anti-heroic. With its eager embrace of

life, the Uruk Vase stands at the very beginning of all the notions

about individuality within community that are sounded in the linked

figures of the Parthenon frieze, of Jean Fouquet's illuminations of

processions winding through the cities of France, of Courbet's Burial

at Ornans, of Seurat's Circus Sideshow."

 

 

 

I love the idea of this very human ceremony, the presentation of

gifts and offerings to the Goddess, and that it was captured in all

of it's humanity in alabaster.

 

Blessed be,

 

prainbow

[Guest guest]

Dear Prainbow!

 

Thanks for sharing this good piece of news, my sister archealogy

buff! I especially appreciated the lyrical description of the the

Uruk Vase, and what it seems to represent. Like many other art

lovers, I was both astonished and relieved to learn that virtually

the entire contents of the museum had been safely stowed away by

museum employees, weeks before the U.S. invasion:

 

Iraq museum artifacts found in Central Bank

By Hamza Hendawi, The Associated Press

 

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 8, 2003 -- The world-famous treasures of Nimrud,

unaccounted for since Baghdad fell two months ago, have been located

in good condition in the country's Central Bank -- in a secret vault-

inside-a-vault submerged in sewage water, U.S. occupation authorities

said Saturday.

 

They also said fewer than 50 items from the collection of the Iraqi

National Museum's main exhibition are still missing after the looting

and destruction that followed the U.S. capture of Baghdad.

 

The artifacts -- gold earrings, finger and toe rings, necklaces,

plates, bowls and flasks, many of them elaborately engraved and set

with semiprecious stones or enamel -- were found several days ago

when the vault was opened, according to an official of the Coalition

Provisional Authority, the official name of the U.S.-led occupation

force.

 

He said they were "largely unscathed," though it was unclear if the

sewage water caused any damage at all.

 

The Nimrud treasures date back to about 900 B.C. They were discovered

by Iraqi archaeologists in the late 1980s in four royal tombs at the

site of the ancient city of Nimrud near Mosul in northern Iraq.

 

The treasures, one of the 20th century's most significant

archaeological finds, have not been seen in public since the early

1990s. Their discovery will help assuage the worries of

archaeologists worried about the country's ancient treasures.

 

Nimrud, destroyed in 612 B.C., was the second capital of Assyria, an

ancient kingdom that sat partly in what is today Iraq. The discovery

of the treasures in the royal tombs surprised archaeologists at the

time, because members of the royal family were thought to be buried

only in the holy city of Assur.

 

"Early inspection of the pieces suggest that they are in good

condition," said a statement issued by the provisional authority. It

said a team from the British Museum will join Iraqi experts to find

the best way to protect them.

 

The coalition official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said at a

news briefing that the number of artifacts looted or lost from the

Iraqi National Museum after the fall of Baghdad was significantly

exaggerated.

 

http://www.insidevc.com/vcs/showdown_with_iraq/article/0,1375,VCS_9220

_2021458,00.html