"Statuary and Reliefs.” In A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Art, edited by Ann C. Gunter. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Blackwell: 2019: 385-410 By Claudia E. Suter

https://www.academia.edu/38902429/_Statuary_and_Reliefs_In_A_Companion_to_Ancient_Near_Eastern_Art_edited_by_Ann_C_Gunter_Hoboken_NJ_Wiley_and_Blackwell_2019_385_410 Statuary and reliefs, along with the term sculpture, under which they could be subsumed, are modern categories. They designate art historical genres defined in terms of form, with the aim of being objective. There are no equivalents for such categories in ancient Mesopotamia, the region of the ancient Near East on which this chapter focuses. The terms alan, an-dul 3 , and ṣ almu, which in accompanying inscriptions and other texts refer to anthropomorphic statues, designated more generally an "image" or a "manifestation." They were also used as early as the Early Dynastic period to refer to anthropomorphic figures carved in relief (Waetzoldt 2000; Evans 2012: 112-15), and to aniconic Middle and Neo-Assyrian stelae (Feldman 2009: 46). The Stele of Hammurabi (Figure 16.1) refers to the image of the king and to the entire monument with the terms ṣ almu and narû, respectively: "Let a wronged man who has a legal case come before my image (depicting me as) king of justice, and let him have my inscribed stone monument read out loud; let him hear my precious pronouncements, let my stone monument reveal the case to him" (xlviii 3-17). 1 Mesopotamian stelae were largely royal monuments and ideal vehicles for self-representation, since they provided space for both extended visual narratives and long texts. The Akkadian term (narû) designating this image-and text-carrier is a loan from Sumerian na(4)-ru 2-a, which literally means "erected stone." In late second-and early first-millennium Babylonia, it was appropriated for stone boulders that record ...