The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction: 2 (The Rostovtzeff Lectures) - Hardcover

Wengrow, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691159041 ISBN 13: 9780691159041

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

It has often been claimed that "monsters"--supernatural creatures with bodies composed from multiple species--play a significant part in the thought and imagery of all people from all times. The Origins of Monsters advances an alternative view. Composite figurations are intriguingly rare and isolated in the art of the prehistoric era. Instead it was with the rise of cities, elites, and cosmopolitan trade networks that "monsters" became widespread features of visual production in the ancient world. Showing how these fantastic images originated and how they were transmitted, David Wengrow identifies patterns in the records of human image-making and embarks on a search for connections between mind and culture. Wengrow asks: Can cognitive science explain the potency of such images? Does evolutionary psychology hold a key to understanding the transmission of symbols? How is our making and perception of images influenced by institutions and technologies? Wengrow considers the work of art in the first age of mechanical reproduction, which he locates in the Middle East, where urban life began. Comparing the development and spread of fantastic imagery across a range of prehistoric and ancient societies, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and China, he explores how the visual imagination has been shaped by a complex mixture of historical and universal factors. Examining the reasons behind the dissemination of monstrous imagery in ancient states and empires, The Origins of Monsters sheds light on the relationship between culture and cognition.

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David Wengrow is professor of comparative archaeology at University College London. His books include The Archaeology of Early Egypt and What Makes Civilization?

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"Using the entry point of 'monsters,' this gracefully written, learned, and provocative book draws from archaeology, history, art history, cognitive psychology, and other disciplines, and ranges through the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, classical Greek, central Asian, Iranian, and Chinese regions in order to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the ancient world. The scope of research and the force of analysis are breathtaking. A great read."--Norman Yoffee, University of Nevada, Las Vegas and University of New Mexico

"This book is a real pleasure and succeeds magnificently in its breadth of scholarship, dazzling insight, leaps of scholarly imagination, bold pathways of original ideas, and elegant prose. Covering a huge amount of provocative ground, it will interest readers in archaeology, anthropology, Near Eastern studies and Egyptology, art history, and psychology."--John Robb, University of Cambridge

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"Using the entry point of 'monsters,' this gracefully written, learned, and provocative book draws from archaeology, history, art history, cognitive psychology, and other disciplines, and ranges through the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, classical Greek, central Asian, Iranian, and Chinese regions in order to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the ancient world. The scope of research and the force of analysis are breathtaking. A great read."--Norman Yoffee, University of Nevada, Las Vegas and University of New Mexico

"This book is a real pleasure and succeeds magnificently in its breadth of scholarship, dazzling insight, leaps of scholarly imagination, bold pathways of original ideas, and elegant prose. Covering a huge amount of provocative ground, it will interest readers in archaeology, anthropology, Near Eastern studies and Egyptology, art history, and psychology."--John Robb, University of Cambridge

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THE ORIGINS OF MONSTERS

Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction

By DAVID WENGROW

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15904-1

Contents

List of Illustrations......................................................
xi
Acknowledgments............................................................
xv
Introduction...............................................................
1
1 Image and Economy in the Ancient World: The Bronze Age of Mikhail 
Rostovtzeff................................................................
8
2 Materials for an Epidemiology of Culture.................................
19
3 The Hidden Shaman: Fictive Anatomy in Paleolithic and Neolithic Art......
33
4 Urban Creations: The Cultural Ecology of Composite Animals...............
50
5 Counterintuitive Images and the Mechanical Arts..........................
74
6 Modes of Image Transfer: Transformative, Integrative, Protective.........
88
Conclusion Persistent, but Not Primordial: Emergent Properties of 
Cognition..................................................................
108
Notes......................................................................
113
References.................................................................
133
Index......................................................................
161

CHAPTER 1

IMAGE AND ECONOMY INTHE ANCIENT WORLD

THE BRONZE AGE OF MIKHAIL ROSTOVTZEFF

Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff (1870–1952) is remembered mostoften today for his seminal studies of Greco-Roman antiquity,and for his controversial—some might say untenable—view that thetrue architects of classical civilization were not those tied to the land,whether as peasant laborers or feudal aristocracy, but rather the middlingprofessional classes of merchants, industrialists, and bankerswhose social aspirations were most closely in tune with the civicvalues of an expanding urban society. In reviewing Rostovtzeff'smonumental work on the social and economic history of the RomanEmpire, Glenn Bowersock notes that "he presupposed a capitalistsociety which itself presupposed the primacy of commerce and industry"as guiding influences upon the course of history. Rostovtzefftherefore represents one side of an ongoing debate over the nature ofeconomic life in the ancient world, and the extent to which the formsand functions of ancient economies can be understood through thelens of modern experience.

Rostovtzeff's life and work has been the subject of several notablestudies, written mostly by experts on the classical world. This mayexplain a relative lack of attention to those features of his scholarshipthat an archaeologist, working on earlier periods, might findmost intriguing. They relate less to his championing of the bourgeoisiethan to the sheer scale—both spatial and chronological—onwhich he tried to pursue a complex argument about the relationshipbetween economic forces and cultural change, and also to the varietyof historical sources that he brought into account. For Rostovtzeff,the civilizing role of commerce and capital (as opposed to agrarianvalues and dynastic authority) was not to be reconstructed just onthe basis of fiscal records and other textual sources. It could also bedetected in the material culture of tribal, nonliterate societies, andmost notably in the elaborate styles of imagery that they produced,circulated, and wove together with a consummate skill that still commandsour admiration (figure 1.1).

Following on the heels of his (1922) Iranians and Greeks in SouthRussia, we find a series of lectures on The Animal Style in South Russiaand China, delivered at Princeton and published in 1929. I will returnto those lectures, and to the subject of China, in chapter 5. The formerstudy laid foundations for an internal account of seminomadiccivilization on the Russian steppe, relying mainly on archaeologicaldiscoveries, instead of the written accounts of Scythian and Sarmatianculture provided by Greek commentators. Rostovtzeff highlightedthe prominence of cosmopolitan display items, procuredfrom urban trading partners, in the tombs of the steppe kings. Hetook this as evidence that their wealth and power was grounded inaccess to commercial routes flanking the great patchwork of grasslandsbetween the Danube and the Yellow River. The steppe acted asa kind of cultural cauldron in which otherwise unrelated elements ofurban civilization were drawn together in novel combinations, anddisseminated farther afield. This was most apparent in the intensefusion of visual styles and techniques to be found in nomadic art,echoes of which could be detected from the northern frontiers ofChina to Celtic Europe.

Still more striking are Rostovtzeff's attempts to find traces of thiscommercial and cosmopolitan impulse amid the evidence of pre-andprotohistoric societies. This interest in the deep origins of OldWorld civilizations becomes more understandable in the contextof Rostovtzeff's exile from his native Russia, at age forty-eight. Itprovided a way of suggesting that Bolshevik communism, far frombeing the culmination of a long evolutionary process, was an anomalousdeparture from the values that had shaped Europe's developmentover the millennia. Alongside studies of Greco-Roman economyand society, we find Rostovtzeff embroiled in debates over thechronological position and cultural affiliations of Bronze Age metalhoards, unearthed along the shores of the Caspian and Black Seas.With remarkable perspicacity, he discerned relationships among theelite iconography of protodynastic Egypt, Mesopotamia, Elam, andthe Caucasus, some of which I will be considering in the chaptersthat follow. And in Iranians and Greeks, we discover a cultural genealogyfor the fantastic beasts of Scythian art, reaching back to the firstBronze Age states on the Tigris and Euphrates. The wider implicationswere fairly clear: feudalism had not emerged from the closed,command economies of Marx's "Asiatic mode of production," butfrom an interconnected world of remote antiquity, bound togetherby shared commercial interests.

It is, perhaps, worth trying to relate these prehistoric interests alittle more closely to Rostovtzeff's better-known work on later periodsof antiquity. Caravan Cities, published in 1932, was a more personalaccount of the classical remains at Petra, Jerash, Palmyra, andalso Dura-Europos, on the Syrian Euphrates, where Rostovtzeff hadexcavated. Its opening chapter, tracing the Bronze Age origins ofthe caravan trade in the Near East, demonstrates an acute awarenessof archaeological evidence as a window onto far-flung connections,linking the development of ancient societies. The first greatalluvial civilizations of Sumer and Egypt, he noted, were dependenton remote highland sources for supplies of metal, ivory, rarewoods, precious stones, spices, cosmetics, pearls, and "incense forthe delectation of gods and men." The archaeological distribution ofluxury consumables, commercial instruments, and political symbolsconfirmed that "the oldest city-states of Sumer in Mesopotamia werelinked to far distant lands by caravans: to Egypt in the west, to AsiaMinor in the north, to Turkestan, Seistan, and India in the east andsoutheast."

Archaeologists, such as V. Gordon Childe and Henri Frankfort,would later add substance to this historical sketch of a connectedBronze Age world, reaching from the Indus to the Mediterranean,bound together through commerce in rare and precious commodities.The chapters that follow will explore that world in greater detail.First, however, there is more to say about Rostovtzeff's approachto images, and how it defines my own task.

CELEBRATING MONSTERS

By the early decades of the twentieth century, the study of prehistoricand ancient art in continental Europe had become stronglyassociated with questions of racial identity and national spirit. Theinfluence of Alois Riegl (1858–1905), and his concept of Kunstwollen,was especially strong in Austria and Germany. As Jas Elsner pointsout, the period in which Riegl's followers developed his new scienceof the visual arts was also that in which Mendelian genetics were firstapplied to questions of inheritance and variability among naturalspecies. The common analytical factor, which Elsner also detects inGestalt psychology, was faith in the idea that minute and criticalstudy of form would eventually lay bare the workings of a grandtotality.

Applied to culture, this paradigm could only incorporate the mixingof local and foreign elements in somewhat ambivalent terms.Hence Riegl, writing of the famous Bronze Age cups from Vapheionear Sparta, could acknowledge a technological debt to Orientalcraftsmanship, while insisting that the borrowings had been ofa purely technical nature, serving only to augment a preexistingcultural milieu that remained steadfastly Greek, and hence European.Half a century before the decipherment of the Linear B script,which demonstrated the Bronze Age roots of Classical Greek language,he already felt able to write, on the basis of the golden cupsand their relief decoration, that "the Mycenaean period heralds thepeople who would later invent philosophy and the natural sciencesand who would create the notion that man is the measure of allthings."

Riegl did not live to see the publication of Fredrik Poulsen's (1912)study of orientalizing influences upon archaic Greek art. Poulsen'sachievement was to lay out, with unprecedented clarity, a rangeof evidence for the movement of artistic techniques and motifs—includinga variety of composite creatures—from the western fringesof the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the Aegean and central Mediterranean,in the centuries preceding the formation of the classical Greekcanon (figure 1.2). Perhaps it is wrong to speculate as to whetherRiegl would have agreed with the view of some later historians, whointerpreted orientalizing art as a kind of unpleasant inoculation,which Greek culture had to endure in order to realize its native genius.But at a time when social fears about a contemporary "EasternProblem" ran high in Europe, there seemed an obvious significanceto the infiltration of Greek art by "monstrous" forces at its point ofgestation, and their subsequent "taming" within a native scheme ofrepresentation.

It is against this background that we can begin to appreciate thedistinctiveness of Rostovtzeff's approach to the interpretation of imagery,and his particular attraction to the imaginary creatures of nomadicart. He seems to have delighted in the unbounded character ofthese particular designs, following their transmission far and wide,across the boundaries of urban and pastoral, literate and nonliterate,societies. In addition to their innately hybrid character—as depictionsof fantastic, composite species—the images whose distributionhe so carefully traced are also the outcome of cultural admixturesand borrowings, fusing technical knowledge of diverse media andmodes of representation from multiple societies. And yet, as he intimated,we typically find these depictions on the surfaces of artifactsthat possessed strong local significance as ritual or magical objects,through the use of which each individual society forged its own specialrelationship to the gods.

It might be argued that these movements of monsters, seeminglypromiscuous and endlessly adaptive, offered a kind of visual counterpartto Rostovtzeff's story of an ever-expanding Bronze Age civilization,evolving by virtue of its receptiveness to outside influence,and its ingenuity in weaving together the local and the foreign. Asa template for the interpretation of social history, however, this attemptto project Homo economicus onto the world of images—if suchit was—was scarcely less idealized than the myths of cultural autochthonythat it sought to displace. Image and economy are connectedin Rostovtzeff's work through their distributions in time and space,rather than by any causal or functional relationship. We search invain for any attempt to account for the fact that, over a period ofmillennia, the nomadic elite of the Russian steppe not only commissionedand accumulated exotic wealth from an urban hinterland butalso sacrificed it to the ground in spectacular burial rites, creatinga monumental landscape of kurgan mounds that extended from theAltai to the Black Sea (ensuring, in the process, the physical preservationof objects and images that have largely disappeared fromtheir areas of manufacture).

It is not difficult, with hindsight, to see why Rostovtzeff avoidedsuch matters. In the 1920s and 1930s, they would have broughthim into the uneasy company of the Frankfurt- and Vienna-basedKulturkreislehre, or still worse perhaps, the hyper-diffusionist schoolof prehistory, which was busily tracing the movement of Egyptiancults and esoteric signs across the Atlantic, borne aloft on the slimmestof evidence. Yet an unwillingness to consider functional, asopposed to merely distributional, relationships between the spreadof representations and the expansion of commerce is equally evidentin Rostovtzeff's reconstructions of later antiquity. Following his gazearound the ruins of Jerash, Petra, or Palymra, it is the ritual landscapeof sacred springs and pathways, ornate rock-cut tombs, andstone temples adorned with cult statues that command our attention,but their links to the mundane world of the market, theater,public bath, and household remain unclear.

What, then, has Rostovtzeff bequeathed to the study of preclassicalantiquity that might be of lasting value? Different people willhave different answers, but the legacy that interests me, and that Ipropose to develop, concerns the links he explored between large-scaledistributions of images and the growth of commercial and politicalnetworks. It is understandable, given the fragmentary natureof his evidence, that Rostovtzeff should have contented himself withtracing the outlines of these relationships, leaving aside questionsof causation. He did, however, propose one specific avenue of inquiry,which remains relatively unexplored, and which I will adoptas my own point of departure. It concerns the sporadic transmission,across cultural boundaries, of certain distinctive kinds of image.

FANTASTIC IMAGES AND THE GROWTHOF NETWORKS

In Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, Rostovtzeff drew attention towhat he perceived as an important innovation in visual culture, tracingits source to the third millennium BC, and to ancient Sumer:the world's first literate and urban civilization, located on the southernplains of Mesopotamia. Today we would extend this search fororigins back at least to the fourth, or perhaps the late fifth, millennium.The innovation was, as he put it, "the introduction into decorativeand symbolic art of special symbolic and fantastic creationsformed by the amalgamation of favourite animals of the period witheach other and sometimes with human beings."

Rostovtzeff never made fully clear what he viewed as the significanceof this development. The following passage of his text leavesno doubt that, for him, the point was not going to be one about thesymbolic workings of a collective unconscious. This he left to theanalytical psychologists, and to their intellectual counterparts in arthistory. Instead it resided in the empirical distribution of particularimages (and particular ways of crafting images) along certain pathwaysof cultural transmission, and the historical connections and responsesgenerated by such spreads: "It was thus," he went on, "thatthe popular types of fantastic animals with a religious significancearose: the two types of griffin—with a horned lion's head, and withan eared eagle's head, both crested; the two types of dragon—with asnake's or a crocodile's head, horned or not; the well-known type ofthe sphinx. All these types spread far and wide, eastward, westward,and northward."

In the last statement, Rostovtzeff has already departed from the arthistorical orthodoxy of his day, abandoning a strictly "orientalizing"framework of interpretation—focused upon the Greek world—forone that places equal emphasis on north-and eastward movementsof culture. At this critical point, however, his argument becomesenigmatic, increasing markedly in scope, but little in clarity:

I cannot dwell upon this subject either. I must point out, however,that the Sumerian innovations exercised a powerful influenceupon the entire ancient world. The influence can be observedeverywhere, in Egypt, in Hittite Asia Minor, in Babyloniaand Assyria, in the Aegean and Mycenaean world, in Cyprusand in Phoenicia, in Phrygia, Lydia, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia,Lycia, in Etruria and in Sardinia, and finally in continental, islandand colonial Greece.

But Greece did not, in fact, mark the end of the monsters' trail.Rostovtzeff goes on to note that in Mesopotamia, the heartland ofmonsters, further mutations took place throughout the first millenniumBC, producing new generations of fantastic beasts. As thoughspurred on by a sudden realization, he documents the transfer ofthis new bestiary into Iranian art, whence it flowed into the Scythiananimal style, departing both northward "to the forests and swamps"of temperate Europe, and eastward, to the frontiers of China. So,he thought, these fabulous creatures had found their way, throughdiverse routes of contact and transmission, onto the surfaces of funeraryofferings presented to the gods of the Danube and the YellowRiver, to be received with equal grace by both.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691159041
• ISBN 13: 9780691159041
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 184
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar