AT     A      GLANCE

The Beginnings of Art(Part 2.)

From the beginning, however, the Iranian potter produced some decorated wares. Soon a whole range of fine pottery developed with local styles of decoration based on the ingenuity of the potter, who was inspired by materials and themes already established in his culture and by the stimulus provided by the natural forms of the surrounding countryside. The new medium, pottery, provided the wide range of creative opportunity. Not only could the plastic material be formed into a variety of shapes but its colour could be changed by changing the method of firing and its surface could be decorated by impressing or painting patterns on it. It is scarcely surprising that for over two thousand years, from about 5500 to about 3000 B.C., the shaping and painting of pottery was one of the principal artistic activities of the villagers of Iran. Even after 3000 B.C., the approximate date by which the first truly urban civilization had arisen at Susa in south-western Iran, the production of painted pottery continued in the villages of some areas for centuries.

A study of the art of Iran requires that only pottery representing high points in the artistic production of the country be mentioned here. It is to be understood of course, that such selected pottery by no means reflects the entire state of the ceramic industry in any given village culture.

The relevance of early pottery to the general development of art has been pointed out by Sir Herbert Read, who said: 'Pottery is at once the simplest and the most difficult of all arts. It is the simplest because it is the most elementary; it is the most difficult because it is the most abstract.' And continues: 'Judge the art of a country, judge the fineness of its sensibility by its pottery; it is a sure touchstone. Pottery is pure art; it is art freed from imitative intention. Sculpture, to which it is most nearly related, had from the first an imitative intention and it is perhaps to that extent less free from the expression of the will to form than pottery; pottery is plastic art in its most abstract essence.' [2]

The case for pottery is thus presented in a somewhat exaggerated form and without due consideration of the limitations imposed on the potter by his craft and by the purpose of the objects which he fashioned. Nevertheless, Read furnishes [p. 22] arguments for a consideration of pottery beyond that of archaeological chronology and the study of the diffusion of ceramic traits from one region to another. The latter two studies, however, provide our only guide to the arrangement of early Iranian cultures in space and time, since written sources are lacking for most regions until the middle of the first millennium B.C. --except at Susa, where Mesopotamian influence caused an output of cuneiform texts from the third millennium onward.

The limited extent of systematic archaeological investigation of Iran, and in several instances its poor quality, makes an outline of ceramic and consequently stylistic development highly tentative. Nevertheless, the broad outline for the piedmontal area of the central plateau and the lowland around Susa is discernible, as well as more recently that of early settlements in Azerbaijan.

In the mountain arc surrounding the central desert, reaching approximately from Persepolis and Kerman around to Teheran and Meshed, several early sites have been investigated which show a similar type of coarse buff-brown hand-made pottery. The clay contains a great deal of chopped straw used as a tempering agent to prevent cracking while drying and firing. Surfaces were commonly given a lustrous finish by over-all burnishing. In several excavated sites, such as Tall-i Bakun near Persepolis, and the Belt and Hotu caves, near Beshar on the Caspian shore, this ware, sometimes called soft ware because it crumbles easily, has been found to precede more decorated wares painted black on a red or buff ground. At two other early sites of importance, Tepe Sialk near Kashan and Cheshm-i Ali near Teheran, similar soft ware occurs without decoration along with the later painted pottery. Closely related plain wares associated with painted pottery also occur in the earl sites of Tepe Sarab near Kermanshah, in basal Tepe Giyan near Nihavend, and at Hajji Firuz Tepe in southern Azerbaijan. This extended enumeration of sites bearing a closely related type of pottery becomes interesting when it is realized that similarity in pottery implies contact between villages. In some way the knowledge of how to make pottery from clay mixed with chaff temper spread--whether by trade or by some other means is unknown. Nor is the centre of the earliest pottery manufacture in the Near East known, for the Iranian samples are as yet insufficient to suggest that they represent the sites where pottery was invented.

More distinctive of early Iranian art than the more primitive pottery are the Chalcolithic painted wares which developed on the plateau and also in the western mountains. Their distribution coincides on the one hand with the agricultural zone around the northern end of the central piedmont and on the other with major agricultural valleys in the Zagros. In the central area they have been found at sites near Kashan, Qum, Saveh, Rayy, Tepe Hissar Damghan and Nishapur, as well as on the Caspian coast at Hotu cave. In the Zagros they occur in the north at Hajji Firuz Tepe and Dalma Tepe in the Solduz valley of Azerbaijan; near Kermanshah they are found at Tepe Siahbid, and in the plains at Pasargadae and Persepolis we may mention Tall-i Bakun and Tall-i Nokhodi, [3] a new site. The history of one of these regional developments in painted pottery is best recorded at Tepe Sialk, where the earliest phase is one of purely abstract decoration. Typical of this stage are simple geometric patterns like the lozenges painted in black on a red ground inside the deep fragmentary bowl seen in Figure 2. Hatched and cross-hatched lozenges, zigzags and undulating lines were often used in groups of four, first on the inside and later on the outside of bowls. A second ware used a buff slip as the ground for a delicate type of panel [p. 23] pattern which may have been derived from basketry. All of the geometric designs are characterized by the extent to which they appear as net patterns imposed upon the background, which thus forms an integral part of every design. Only a few patterns composed of solid black triangles occur. The finer pottery with a narrow flat base from which the walls flare out and then change to a more vertical direction. The same basic form, but with the shoulder placed higher in the bowl, was still used in the third period of Sialk about a thousand years later. Another early Sialk form which has been associated with later shapes by the excavator, R. Ghirshman, is the open bowl on a large foot. The walls are much thicker than those previously described. Vessels of both types were covered with a buff slip and decorated with a panelled pattern. Radio-carbon tests indirectly suggest a date of around 5000 B.C. for this early phase on the plateau.

We speak here of one phase because there is consistency in the pottery found in the excavated layers or levels, of which there were five in Period I at Sialk. The first yielded no walls, but the other four present four subsequent levels of construction of pis� walls, which correspond to four levels of occupation. When the pottery changes, when new forms of decoration, new colours, new shapes appear, it is assumed that a new period or phase has begun. Such changes may have been brought about by the addition of a new element in the population, or they may have been independently evolved. The latter seems unlikely when a change in pottery is accompanied by changes in the other remains such as building materials and methods. Such changes occurred between Periods I and I at Sialk when the pis� walls of Period I were replaced by the mud brick of Period II and [p. 24] the pottery of Period II appeared, which is more evolved than that of Period I. It is thin-walled, generally fired a brick red, and contains less straw than the foregoing wares. Patterns now expand. The interiors of deep bowls are divided into segments of different design or are covered by over-all designs. Often the pattern consists of geometric forms and lines so combined as to suggest organic forms. Most distinctive of this new departure are ibexes obtained by adding two short curved lines as horns to a form composed of two semicircles with the space between filled by vertical hatching. A bowl in the Metropolitan Museum, with linked ibex horns in a delicate pattern inside, is a fine example of the style of Period II which has been found at numerous sites other than Sialk--for example, at Kara Tepe in Shahriyar province west of Teheran, where an almost identical bowl was discovered. [4]

The third period at Sialk witnessed the emergence of more naturalistic animal forms than before and the combination of motifs into more complex compositions. By the middle of the period vertically and horizontally directed motifs had appeared. The vertical ones consisted of four elements: superimposed volutes, horizontal 'bird' chevrons, horned lozenges and vertical placed snakes. Horizontal motifs consisted of geometric forms like chequer-boards, but the more interesting vessels have rows of animals, felines, birds or a snake. At the end of the period horned animals are seen, first in panels, then in cursorily executed rows. Man appears fairly frequently with triangular thorax and summarily rendered head. To the same period belongs a vase in the shape of an animal; such vases are called theriomorphic.

The change in decoration corresponds to the change in the consistency of the clay and in the manner of manufacture. At the beginning of the period the clay still [p. 26] contains some straw, but by the middle the clay is very compact with virtually no straw and the surface is smooth, with a soapy feeling. Increased firing temperatures due to improved kilns changed the red colouring to buff or cream [the entire range often occurring on a single vessel] to which a slight lustre is added by light burnishing. Later the surface and paint are again left mat and the colour of the clay has a greenish cast reminiscent of the clays of south-western Iran and Mesopotamia. A most important technological revolution, which occurred during Period III, was the introduction of the potter's wheel, which permitted mass production of new and more regular shapes. The appearance of the actual 'fast' wheel may have been preceded by use of a turn-table, or tournette, as it is called in French. This was a device by which the potter could easily bring every side of the vessel within his reach by turning it on a movable base--a mat or perhaps a clay or stone disk--which in some instances may have been pivoted. The actual potter's wheel can be made to spin fast enough to impart centrifugal force to a centered lump of clay. The result is a more regular form with more sharply defined profiles. A footed beaker was one of the characteristic forms of this new technique, but older forms carried on as well. [p. 27]

In the middle of Period III at Sialk connections can be observed with the potter of other sites, for example, with that of Tepe Hissar at Damghan several hundred miles to the north-east. The main body of Hissar painted pottery [Period IB and IC] is very similar to its Sialk counterpart. Footed beakers with rows of animals and animals in panels, for example, are also found at both sites. One would like to theorize on the nature of this relationship. Why was one pottery essentially duplicated in another place? How did it become known: through trade, through migrant workers or through migration of a people? At any rate the fact that there were connections not only with Hissar but also with the pottery of Tepe Giyan--far to the west, over steep mountain passes--and with other sites indicates that the art of pottery-making was widespread and subject to influences from afar. The technique of mass production which had been created with the potter's wheel and the form of decoration, a combination of geometric and animal forms tastefully adjusted to the form of the vessel, laid the foundation for much of the stylistic tradition which subsequently characterized the pottery of Iran and which eventually found its way even to central India.

The sequence of south-western Iranian pottery cultures is known from two areas, Susiana and the Persepolis plain. Susiana, the region surrounding Susa, has prior claim to our interest because of the fact that prehistoric Iranian pottery was first discovered there and because, owing to its inherent aesthetic appeal, this pottery was the subject of a major essay in stylistic analysis made by the classical archaeologist E. Pottier. [5] Prehistoric Iran was thereby brought for the first time into the field of vision of general art history. When the painted pottery of Susa with its marvelously balanced panelled animal designs was first discovered, it was considered the earliest in the area. Recent excavations however, have shown that it came very late indeed in a development which began before 6500 BC., at a time when pottery was not yet used in the region. [6] Once painted pottery had been developed, several stages followed each other in the Susiana before the exceptional quality of the Susa I pottery had been attained [see Appendix, Chart I: Painted Pottery of Iran].
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