Crafts and Images in Contact: Studies on Eastern Mediterranean art of the First Millennium BCE.

• Author: Thomason, Allison Karmel

Crafts and Images in Contact: Studies on Eastern Mediterranean Art of the First Millennium BCE. Edited by CLAUDIA SUTER and CHRISTOPH UEHLINGER. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, vol. 210. Fribourg: ACADEMIC PRESS, 2005. Pp. xxxi + 395, plates. [euro]85.

This volume of collected papers arose from a workshop convened at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, in 2001. The 2001 workshop was a continuation of earlier conversations and studies that followed from the inaugural symposium organized by the same authors and held in 1997. Hence, this volume succeeds an earlier one edited by Uehlinger, also published in the OBO series: Images as Media: Sources for the Cultural History of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean (1st Millennium BCE), OBO 175, 2000. It is a testament to the diligence and commitment of the editors that both volumes have been published in timely fashion, despite difficulties in funding and administrative support mentioned in the Preface (p. viii).

The principal topic of both the 1997 and 2001 workshops and their related publications, to which scholars of the art of the ancient Near East and Classical worlds were invited, was the minor arts produced in those areas during the first millennium B.C.E. Both of the workshops were inspired by the work of Othmar Keel and the "Fribourg School" of biblical scholarship, which calls for the "integrated study of archaeology, iconography and religious history" (p. vii). Of paramount concern to the authors in this volume and to the Fribourg workshops in general is the classificatory methodology used to study and analyze ivory carvings from Near Eastern and Mediterranean contexts of the second and first millennia B.C. A range of ways to study this complex topic emerges from the contributions, with special emphasis placed by many authors on style and iconography.

Departing from the first symposium and its resulting volume, the emphasis on "cultural contact" forced the contributors to explore how artisans, styles, motifs, techniques, ideas, and objects diffused throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. Thus the authors were asked to "take seriously the very materiality of their sources, the objects' functionality as well as the craftsmen's genuine competence" (p. vii). In their introduction, Uehlinger and Suter address what is meant by "cultural contact," calling on historians to "first delineate the contours of local and regional symbol systems, before studying how and to...