Cup decorated with horned animals

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This beaker has a narrow, flat base, straight sides, and an everted rim. It is made of buff clay, with painted brown decorations. These decorations feature a horned animal with a stylized body, a long neck, a curled tail, and undulating horns that extend to the rim. Wheel lines on the interior indicate that it was made on a potter’s wheel. The shape and decoration of this beaker closely resemble that of vessels excavated at Tepe Sialk, near Kashan in central Iran. The site of Sialk is spread over two mounds. The northern mound was inhabited from ca. 6000 to 4000 B.C., and the southern mound, where similar pottery to this was found, from ca. 4000 B.C. until 2500 B.C., when the site abandoned for nearly a millennium. The animal on this beaker, though seemingly some sort of caprid, cannot be identified with any specific species. No doubt this is intentional. Rather than illustrating the natural world as it appeared, the maker of this beaker depicts this creature in an abstract manner, perhaps to emphasize some aspect of its role in local beliefs – beliefs which are lost to us in the present day.

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