Vessel in the form of a boar

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This ceramic vessel takes the form of a standing wild boar. The body is hollow, serving as a container, with a small round rim atop the center of the back and a hole pierced through the snout. The vessel could have been filled through the larger hole in the back while the smaller hole in the snout was held closed with a thumb, allowing the liquid to flow out once the snout was uncovered. Made of fine clay with a smoothed surface, the vessel is decorated in dark brown paint on buff-colored ceramic. The sharply angled hatching covering the vessel evokes the boar’s bristly hide, especially along the spine, where it is arranged in a vertical row. The eyes are indicated by circles with a central dot, just below the small, alertly raised ears. The split hooves and fetlocks are modeled in clay. The boar’s hunched posture lends the vessel a sense of potentially explosive movement, and reminds the viewer that wild boars are fierce animals that pose dangers to crops in the field, and to the hunters pursuing them. Similar zoomorphic, or animal-shaped, vessels are especially characteristic of the Proto-Elamite period (3100-2900 B.C.) in southwestern Iran.

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