Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque. Isfahan, Iran.
These are all prestigious items. Richly decorated weapons, insignias of a king’s or courtier’s power, such as a pectoral, a diadem, a gold belt and so on. On nearly all these objects the composition is based on heraldic principles, symmetrical scenes depicting mythical creatures are displayed on either side of the Tree of Life. There are no less than ten versions of the Tree of Life from Ziwiye, consisting of standard S-shaped curves woven into a complex pattern. The representations of the Tree of Life on Urartian bronze belts of the 13th-7th centuries BCE form the closest parallel. The fabulous creatures depicted at the sides of the Tree of Life on objects from Ziwiye are not very numerous – a dozen in all.
There are also purely Assyrian compositions on gold, as on ivory, objects. These include a king with a sword defeating a rampant lion. Apart from this, zoomorphic figures are represented on gold objects and even on fragments of pottery. There is a stag with legs drawn in and branching antlers executed in a typically Scythian style, very close to those on famous objects from Scythian barrows, such as the Kelermes or Melgunov swords or the Kelermes pole-axe; a panther with its paws entwined into a ring, almost the same as the famous Kelermes panther or the panther on the gold facing of the Kelermes mirror; the head of a griffin, identical to that on the Kelermes sword; a mountain ram with legs drawn under it, its pose and the treatment of its body identical to those of the Kelermes stag; and, finally, a hare.
Amongst the objects from Ziwiye are some which show only mythical beasts (the gold breast-plate, the gold quiver-facing, and others) or only real animals (the gold belt with stags and rams, parts of the gold diadem with panthers and griffins’ heads, and others); only one object a gold pectoral, the symbol of power of a king or a courtier shows both types of animal.
At this point, an important detail must be emphasised. Without exception, all the images on both gold and silver items as well as some articles of carved ivory are fashioned using the same stylistic devices (for example, idiosyncratic “underwings” appear on the bodies of the fabulous creatures and the panther).
Thus the craftsmen of Ziwiye created prestigious objects such as symbols of power (ceremonial weapons, a pectoral, a diadem, a belt, etc.), employing the pictorial language of Urartu, Assyria, Elam, Syria, Phoenicia and, lastly, the “animal style” of the Scythians, so that their own pictorial language was again created from elements extracted from various alien contexts to produce a new text. They also employed many older metalwork techniques (as seen, for example, in the Marlik objects).
Three facts are of importance here. Many of the objects at Ziwiye were produced for rulers or for the aristocracy, they clearly display the Scythian animal style which was new to this area, and the majority of similar designs (such as the Tree of Life and the monsters) link these objects to the art of Urartu.
All these parallels inevitably pose fresh questions. Above all, for whom were the Ziwiye objects produced? And then, how are these works to be dated? If they were made earlier than the Scythian items at Kelermes, or were even contemporaneous with them, what then is their significance in the formation of the Scythian animal style and of those other aspects of Near-Eastern art to which we have already referred? How are these objects to be interpreted? Lastly, how did these images subsequently develop?
Vase, 9th century. The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
First of all, one has to answer, however cursorily, the question of how the animal style developed. The origin of the nomadic tribes known to the Ancients by the generic name of Scythians or Saka – their first homeland, their migration routes and their ethnic origin – is as controversial as the question of the Iranians’ original homeland and of their migration. However, the important thing for the history of Iranian culture is that detachments of nomadic warriors are first mentioned in writings in the Near East during the 8th century BCE (the oldest known references are the reports of Assyrian spies from Urartu in the 720s BCE). They are known by various names: umman-manda (the Manda tribe), gimirrai (Cimmerians?), ashkuzai, ishkuzai (Scythians), saka (Saka). In the 670s BCE, these tribes were already playing an active part in the foreign policy of the Near-East and subsequently they even set up a short-lived “Scythian kingdom” in Southern Azerbaijan, somewhere in the vicinity of Manna. No less controversial is the origin of the Scythian animal style itself. Images of beasts stylised in a Scythian manner connect a number of archaeological cultures covering a vast territory from the Mongolian steppes to the Crimea. In recent years, the term “Scythian-Siberian animal style” has become current in Russian archaeological literature. It has been suggested that this style emerged in the eastern steppes, perhaps as early as the late 9th century BCE, and then migrated westwards along with its bearers. Two features of “Scythian stylisation” are also characteristic of Ziwiye imagery. One is the generally closed construction of the animal figures (for example, beasts twisted into a circle), resulting in a distortion and simplification of form, and the other is the consequent construction of designs consisting of several entirely distinct planes of geometrical regularity.
Thus the question of dating is highly important, but at present it remains unresolved. It is not impossible, of course, that it was the Scythians themselves who brought with them to the Near-East the motif of the stag with legs drawn in and branching antlers, the motif of the panther and the stylised image of the griffin’s head.[6] One cannot, however, point to a single similar object of incontrovertible Scythian provenance which is reliably dated and known to be older than the pieces from Ziwiye.[7] At the same time – and leaving aside the stag’s or ram’s pose, which was already extremely widespread in the art of the Near-East by the end of the second millennium BCE – objects have been found on Iranian territory depicting these same beasts but stylised in a different manner.
A griffin’s head adorns the butt of a number of Lorestan axes as early as the 10th-9th centuries BCE, the stag with legs drawn in is found on Lorestan psalia of the late 8th century BCE, and there is a panther on a bronze pin from Baba Jan Tepe, also from the 8th century BCE.
Let us assume that Ziwiye and the Kelermes burial mounds date from the same period.[8] Despite an abundance of Urartian and Assyrian motifs, the buyer for whom these articles were intended could have been neither an Assyrian nor an Urartian ruler because the pictorial categories of fabulous beasts are grossly confused, which would have been unacceptable in the unified systems of religious imagery of Assyria and Urartu. Thus we must seek another candidate, and he must be an Iranian. Only in this case would the “Scythian animals” have to feature on his belongings, insofar as they were a totem or emblem of his tribe (in Vladimir Abayev’s opinion, for example, the term saka –