Vessel

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This cylindrical vessel has a flat base (though the interior bottom is rounded) and a flaring mouth. Four vertically pierced lugs emerge from the shoulder, with four corresponding holes below them near the base. The vessel is made of gray clay with incised decorations which have been filled in with white powder. The decorations include several horizontal and vertical lines, horizontal rows of circles, and images of birds. The birds are rendered in outline, but based on the shape of their bodies and their short legs, they are probably ducks. This vessel was excavated at Susa in southwestern Iran, the capital of the Elamite kingdom. Similar vessels have been found at Uruk, Telloh, Nippur, Tell Hassan, Tell Asmar and Nuzi in Mesopotamia and at Anshan, Godin Tepe and Chogha Gavahneh in Iran, with near identical decorations. It is thus very likely they were produced in a single workshop and exported, but on current evidence it is impossible to say where. It is also difficult to say what purpose these vessels were intended to serve, since their shapes are quite usual and not paralleled in other ancient ceramic corpora. Possibly they were intended to imitate stone vessels.

Ancient Near Eastern Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art cares for approximately 7,000 works ranging in date from the eighth millennium B.C. through the centuries just beyond the emergence of Islam in the seventh century A.D. Objects in the collection were created by people in the area that today comprises Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean coast, Yemen, and Central Asia. From the art of some of the world's first cities to that of great empires, the department's holdings illustrate the beauty and craftsmanship as well as the profound interconnections, cultural and religious diversity, and lasting legacies that characterize the ancient art of this vast region.

Metropolitan Museum of Art