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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > September/October 2004

Birth of Narrative Art

How Writing Led to Picture Painting

By Denise Schmandt-Besserat

Pottery painting was a major art form in the ancient Near East as early as the seventh millennium B.C. For thousands of years, the designs painted on ceramic pots were largely limited to geometric or animal patterns, though these decorations were often very elaborate and striking. Then, in the third millennium B.C., Mesopotamians and Elamites began producing a new form of pottery painting: narrative scenes, or painted tableaux that tell stories in images. How did this happen, seemingly all of a sudden? Is it possible to say why the adoption of narrative scenes—so familiar to us today in art, […]

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Footnotes

1.

See the following Origins columns in Archaeology Odyssey by Denise Schmandt-Besserat: “Signs of Life” (describing how writing evolved from counting), January/February 2002; and “One, Two … Three” (describing the development of counting), September/October 2002.

Endnotes

1.

Pierre Amiet, Elam (Auvers-sur-Oise: Archée Editeurs, 1966), p. 44, fig. 16.

2.

Namio Egami, Telul eth Thalathat: The Excavations of Tell II 1956–1957, The Tokyo University Iraq-Iran Expedition, Report 1 (Tokyo: The Yamakawa Publishing Co., 1959), pl. 6.

3.

Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia (Oxford: Equinox, 1990), p. 38.

4.

Annie Caubet and Patrick Pouyssegur, The Origin of Civilization, The Ancient Near East (Paris: Editions Pierre Terrail, 1997), pp. 40–41.

5.

Dominique Collon, Ancient Near Eastern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 45.

6.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (Austin: The University of Texas, 1996); and Before Writing (Austin: The University of Texas, 1992).

7.

Henri Frankfort, Progress of the Work of the Oriental Institute in Iraq, 1934–35. Fifth Preliminary Report of the Iraq Expedition, The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Oriental Institute Communications, no. 20 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1936), pp. 62 and 65, pls. 50–51; Pinhas Delougaz, Pottery from the Diyala Region, The Oriental Institute Publications, vol. 63 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1952), pp. 70–72, pl. 138.

8.

R. de Mecquenem, Mémoires de la mission archéologique en Iran, vol. 29 (1943), pp. 103–104, figs. 72 and 79; Amiet, Elam, pp. 135–136, fig. 106.