Der Affe in der altorientalischen Kunst.

• Author: Collon, Dominique
• Position: Review

By AZAD HAMOTO. Forschungen zur Anthropologie und Religionsgeschichte, vol. 28. Munster: UGARIT VERLA, 1995. Pp. xii + 176 (paper).

This well-presented and organized little book has been set in a clear typeface with 155 well-reproduced illustrations. It deals with the depiction of monkeys in ancient Near Eastern art (part III) with 202 examples catalogued and many more referred to in footnotes. There is also a brief description of the different types of monkey (part I) and a total of thirteen lines (part II, on p. 7) listing one Sumerian and three Akkadian terms for monkey. The features which allow identification are summarized on pp. 9-11 with useful sketches.

The survey of monkeys in art is arranged chronologically with emphasis on provenanced examples, starting with the Paleolithic. However, the first examples are two Neolithic amulets from Byblos for which Egyptian influence is plausibly suggested, indicating that "even in this period there were contacts [trade] between the Levant and Egypt" (p. 12); the date of c. 5000 B.C. is given in the catalogue on p. 77. There is a Chalcolithic example from Safadi near Beersheba (3500 B.C.) but it is only at the end of the fourth millennium that examples become more numerous, with one each from Ur and Tello, three from Uruk, nine from Susa, two from Safarabad and, surprisingly, four from far-away Tell Brak. There is then a gap of about a millennium, only relieved by a cluster in ED III (five from Ur, two from Khafajah, and one from Susa), and by one Ur III example from Tello. Hamoto has also cited and illustrated examples from Failaka (not in the catalogue), which he dates very early, to the late ED and Akkadian periods.

Hamoto stresses the huge popularity of the monkey during the Old Babylonian period and is surely right in attributing this to the Amorites. However, his proposed association with the cult of Ishtar is more debatable. I have suggested in a discussion on monkeys to which Hamoto does not refer (Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum, Cylinder Seals, III: Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian Periods [London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1986], 45-47) that the gift of a monkey to Ibbi-Sin, the last king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, which gave rise to a "genre literature" (such as the "Letter of a monkey to its mother"), inaugurated a fashion in monkeys as a status symbol among the Amorite rulers who were establishing their kingdoms at the beginning of the second...