The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria.

• Author: Feldman, Marian
• Position: Book Review

The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria. By ZAINAB BAHRANI. Archaeology, Culture, and Society. Philadelphia: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS, 2003. Pp. x + 242, illus. $49.95.

In The Graven Image, Bahrani tackles the ambitious question of the essence, or what she calls the "ontology," of representational arts in Babylonia and Assyria. It is a book laden with ideas and insights, and a short review of this kind can only touch briefly upon some of these.

Arguing for "self-reflexivity"--a critical awareness of one's methodology and disciplinary history--Bahrani begins with three chapters that examine the concept of Mesopotamia and the placement of "Mesopotamian art history" within the trajectory of Western art history. She rightly brings attention to the development (and lingering effects) of Mesopotamian studies as a "hostile other" to the Classical and biblical traditions. In addition, she critiques the practice of art history for its purported reliance on ethnographic approaches and use of mimesis as a point of reference, which according to Bahrani, contribute to a colonialist discourse. One might wish for a more nuanced reading of these (and other disciplinary) classifications in the discussion, allowing more for the heterogeneity and spatio-temporal diversities within each, as Bohrer (2003) has recently done for the diverse nineteenth-century European reception of Mesopotamia along class and national lines.

Throughout the book, Bahrani argues for rejecting mimesis, which she defines as "close copy," as a basis for Assyro-Babylonian representation. Mimesis, a Greek word that Bahrani anchors to an art-historical tradition privileging Classical Greek art, is a slippery concept to define (e.g., see Stewart 1990: 73-85), and it threatens at several points itself to become a "hostile other" within the line of argumentation. Nonetheless, the awareness that a comprehensive, illusionistic imitation of perception was not the driving aspiration of Assyrian and Babylonian artistic production is an important contribution of the present study. However, moving beyond this begs fundamental questions regarding why the arts were created to look the way they do and why shifts in representational strategies occurred when and where they do.

Denying all mimetic function to representation, Bahrani precludes analysis of the motivations behind such shifts: for example, the introduction of "true profile" to depict the divine horned headdress during the period of Hammurabi, the use in Assurbanipal's reliefs of both multiple registers and the entire surface space (creating the so-called "worm's eye" and "bird's eye" perspectives), or the change from five- to...