Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant

Marian H. Feldman is professor of Near Eastern studies and art history at Johns Hopkins University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-10561-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-16442-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164427.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman, Marian H., author.

Communities of style : portable luxury arts, identity, and collective memory in the Iron Age Levant / Marian H. Feldman.

pages   cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-10561-1 (hardcover : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-16442-7 (e-book)

1. Decorative arts, Ancient—Middle East—History.   2. Middle East—Antiquities.   3. Iron age—Middle East.   I. Title.

NK685.M628F45   2014

745.09394—dc23

2014000140

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Communities of Style

Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant

Marian H. Feldman

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

For Lisa and Tara

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Ivories and Metalworks in a Levantine Context

Networks and Communities in the Early Iron Age

1. Workshops, Connoisseurship, and Levantine Style(s)

First-Millennium Levantine Ivories

Connoisseurship and the Study of the Ancient Near East

Attributing Levantine Ivories

The Mobility of Style

Slippery Identities

Conclusions

2. Levantine Stylistic Practices in Collective Memory

The Problem of Artistic Intentionality

Rendering Animals and the Logic of Stylistic Practice

Habitus in Levantine Style

Stylistic Practices in Collective Memory

Late Bronze Age Memories in the Early Iron Age

Continuity, Rediscovery, or Invention?

Remembering a Golden Age

Conclusions

3. Creating Assyria in Its Own Image

An Assyrian Court Style

Assyrian Representations of Foreign Items

The Dangerous Other: Booty, Tribute, Gods, and Deportees

Foreign Goods in Assyria

Stylistic Assyrianization

Ashurbanipal’s Garden Scene

Assyria and Babylonia

Conclusions

4. Speaking Bowls and the Inscription of Identity and Memory

Levantine (Phoenician) Metal Bowls

The Inscription of Identity and Memory

Drinking and Death

Temporality and Presence

The Enchantment of Imagery

Conclusions

5. The Reuse, Recycling, and Displacement of Levantine Luxury Arts

After the Fall: Mobility post Assyrian Empire

Ivory in and around the Assyrian Empire

Secondhand Elites

The Booty of Haza’el of Damascus

Conclusions: Displacements, Values, and Meanings

Conclusion

Theoretical Considerations

Glancing Back, Casting Ahead

Notes

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps

1. Near East and eastern Mediterranean, showing sites mentioned in text

2. Greater Levantine region, showing sites mentioned in text

3. Findspots of Flame and Frond artifacts

Color plates

1. Ivory plaque from Arslan Tash

2. Ivory from Well NN, Northwest Palace, Nimrud

3. Engraved tridacna shell from Rhodes, Greece

4. Stone cosmetic palette from the Amman Citadel, Jordan, seventh–sixth centuries BCE

5. Ivory plaque of lioness mauling an African, Well NN, Northwest Palace, Nimrud

6. Ivory griffin, SW 37, Fort Shalmaneser, Nimrud

7. Detail of Ashurbanipal (668–627 BCE) reclining on a couch in a garden, Room S′, North Palace, Nineveh

8. Bronze bowl naming Abipaṭ, Northwest Palace, Nimrud

9. Gold bowl inscribed for Yaba, Queens’ Tomb II, Nimrud

10. Silver bowl naming Epiorwos, son of Dies, from the Treasure of Kourion

11. Gilt silver bowl naming Akestor and Timokretes, from the Treasure of Kourion

12 Silver bowl from the Treasure of Kourion

13. Silver bowl naming Eshmun-ya’ad, son of Ashto, Bernardini Tomb, Praeneste, Italy

14. Silver bowl from Pontecagnano, Italy

15. Gold vessel inscribed for Yaba, Queens’ Tomb II, Nimrud

16. Reconstruction of ivory-inlaid chair gamma, Tomb 79, Salamis, Cyprus

17a, b. Ivory à jour plaques, Tomb 79, Salamis, Cyprus

18. Reconstruction of ivory-inlaid bed, Tomb 79, Salamis, Cyprus

19. Detail of corner pieces of headboard of bed, Tomb 79, Salamis, Cyprus

20. Bronze cauldron with griffin and siren attachments, Tomb 79, Salamis, Cyprus

Black and white figures

1.1. Group 1 horse-bridle frontlet from Well AJ, Northwest Palace, Nimrud

1.2. Ivory plaque from SW 7, Fort Shalmaneser, Nimrud

1.3. Stele from Zincirli, ca. 735–720 BCE

1.4. Detail of ivory from SW 7, Fort Shalmaneser, Nimrud

1.5. Three relief orthostats from Sakçe Gözü, mid-eighth century BCE

1.6. Ivory from Well AJ, Northwest Palace, Nimrud

1.7. Ivory from Well AJ, Northwest Palace, Nimrud

1.8. Ivory from the Burnt Palace (South-East Palace), Nimrud

1.9. Basalt relief orthostat from later context at Karak, Jordan

2.1a, b. Two views of an ivory pyxis, Burnt Palace (South-East Palace), Nimrud

2.2. Ivory game box, Enkomi, Cyprus, ca. 1200 BCE

2.3. Diagram of how parts of an elephant tusk were carved for ancient uses

2.4. Drawing of Flame and Frond ivories from Nimrud

2.5. Carved basalt orthostat relief from Tell Halaf, Syria

2.6. Ivory sphinx, SW 37, Fort Shalmaneser, Nimrud

2.7. Detail of ivory flask, Well AJ, Northwest Palace, Nimrud

2.8. Ivory from Northwest Palace, Nimrud

2.9. Ivories from Nimrud, Fort Shalmaneser

3.1. Relief of King Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE), Northwest Palace (Room B, Panel 19), Nimrud

3.2. Linear-style Assyrian seal impression of steatite seal, unknown provenance, ninth century BCE

3.3. Assyrian-style ivory plaque, Central Palace, Nimrud

3.4. Relief from palace of Sargon II (721–705 BCE), Khorsabad

3.5a–c. Drawing of reliefs showing the Siege of Lachish, reign of Sennacherib (704–681 BCE), Southwest Palace, Nineveh 90,

3.6. Relief of Tiglath-Pileser III (744–727 BCE), showing the capture of foreign gods in lower register, Nimrud

3.7. Drawing of detail from relief of Tiglath-Pileser III (744–727 BCE), Nimrud

3.8. Stele of Weather God, Til Barsip (Tell Ahmar, Syria), ninth–eighth centuries BCE

3.9. Relief of Ashurbanipal (668–627 BCE) reclining in a garden, Room S′, North Palace, Nineveh

3.10. Reconstructed series of reliefs from Room S′, North Palace, Nineveh

3.11. Stele of Ashurbanipal (668–627 BCE) from Babylon

4.1. Bronze bowl naming Muwazi from burial at Tragana, Greece

4.2. Katumuwa stele, Zincirli

5.1. Bronze relief band from Olympia, Greece

5.2. Reconstruction of the three sphyrelaton korai by Borell and Rittig 1998

5.3. Ivory carved with bull from Town Wall House 6, Room 43, Nimrud

5.4. Ivory carved with bulls from Well AJ, Northwest Palace, Nimrud

5.5. Bronze horse-bridle frontlet from the Heraion on Samos, Greece, ninth century BCE

5.6. Drawing of inscribed bronze horse-bridle blinker from Eretria, Greece, ninth century BCE

5.7. Uninscribed bronze horse-bridle blinker from Eretria, Greece, ninth century BCE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Many of the places mentioned in this book have a variety of ancient and modern names, which are transliterated from the ancient and modern languages in different ways. For ease of recognition, I have chosen to use the names by which places are most commonly known in English-language scholarship, despite the inconsistencies that sometimes result. For example, at least three ancient names are recorded for the modern site of Tell Ahmar in Syria: the Luwian Masuwari, the Aramaean Til Barsip (also transliterated Til Barsib), and the Akkadian Kar-Shalmaneser (which can also be more faithfully transliterated as Kar-Šulmānu-ašarēdu). I use the most common of these: Til Barsip.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Numerous people and institutions have contributed to the formation of this project, which had a considerable gestation period well before I ever put pen to paper. The final product is rather different from what I initially set out to do, or at least what I thought I was setting out to do, and that is largely the result of the many stimulating responses and conversations I have had along the way, for which I am most grateful. An ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, held in 2008–9 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, not only provided me with space and time to work through early conceptual challenges; it also introduced me to a group of scholars, mostly working in the social sciences, whose research and approaches pushed me in new directions. Most important in this respect was the Agency and Objects Group that met every other week to share research-in-progress and discuss relevant theoretical literature: Glenn Adams, Linda Jack, Karin Knorr Cetina, Seth Landefeld, Keh-Ming Lin, Chandra Mukerji, and Ann Taves. Out of this grew yet another forum in which I was able to test my ideas and gain new insights—the Material World in Social Life Working Group, funded by the University of California Humanities Research Institute for 2010–11: Barry Brown, Kelly Gates, Karin Knorr Cetina, Chandra Mukerji, Gina Neff, Mark Peterson, Benjamin Porter, Fred Turner, and Heghnar Watenpaugh. Likewise, I am indebted to the close readings and thoughtful feedback from my UC Berkeley colleagues who participated in the Townsend Center Associate Professor Fellowship Group in spring 2011: Charles Altieri, Kevis Goodman, Jocelyn Guibault, Charles Hirschkind, and Tom Laqueur. The manuscript was completed and sent to press during the summer term of 2013 under the aegis of a fellowship at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata at the Universität zu Köln, directed by professors Günter Blamberger and Dietrich Boschung.

An early exploration of the ideas presented in chapters 1 and 2 appears as The Practical Logic of Style and Memory in Early First Millennium Levantine Ivories, in Materiality and Social Practice: Transformative Capacities of Inter cultural Encounters, edited by Joseph Maran and Philipp W. Stockhammer, 198–212 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012), which was first presented as a talk at the stimulating symposium Materiality and Practice: Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters, held at the University of Heidelberg in March 2010. These two chapters further benefited from a fall 2011 graduate seminar at Berkeley on making things in the Iron Age Levant, cotaught with Ben Porter.

Part of chapter 3 appeared as Assyrian Representations of Booty and Tribute as a Self-Portrayal of Empire, in Interpreting Exile: Displacement and Deportation in Biblical and Modern Contexts, edited by Brad E. Kelle, Frank Ritchel Ames, and Jacob L. Wright, 135–50 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), which in turn grew out of a session on warfare and the ancient Near East held at the annual conference for the Society of Biblical Literature in 2009. A conference in April 2011, Imagined Beginnings: The Poetics and Politics of Cosmogony, Theogony and Anthropogony in the Ancient World, organized by the Center for the Study of Ancient Religions at the University of Chicago and the Midwest Consortium on Ancient Religions, gave me the opportunity to further flesh out the ideas in chapter 3.

Many ideas that appear in chapter 5 had their initial testing ground in a fall 2010 graduate seminar at Berkeley on Greece and the Near East in the Iron Age that I cotaught with Andy Stewart, and I am especially indebted to the views and research done by several of the participants in that class, particularly Chris Bravo, Laure Marest-Caffey, Erin Pitt, and Jessica Stair.

Profound thanks and gratitude are also due to students, colleagues, and friends who have shared their own research, read drafts of the book, or fielded random questions along the way. Among them: Aaron Brody, Brian Brown, My Chau, Whitney Davis, Lynn Swartz Dodd, Eduardo Escobar, Ron Hendel, Gary Holland, Chris Gosden, Crawford Greenewalt, Tim Harrison, Samantha Henneberry, Candy Keller, Stephanie Langin-Hooper, Jake Lauinger, Greg Levine, Ted Lewis, Joseph Maran, Kiersten Neumann, James Osborne, Loren Partridge, Lisa Pieraccini, Carol Redmount, Yael Rice, Chessie Rochberg, Caroline Sauvage, Glenn Schwartz, Philipp Stockhammer, Claudia Suter, Allison Thomason, Niek Veldhuis, Martin Weber, Jackie Williamson, and Irene Winter. Susan Bielstein at the University of Chicago Press has proved to be an unfailing advocate, and I am grateful for her initial and ongoing faith in my work.

Of course, such an undertaking as this book could never have been accomplished without the support of my family, and my deepest debt goes first and foremost to James, who bore countless hardships and neglect with humor and goodwill as I pursued its completion. The arrival of my twin daughters, Lisa and Tara, at the very beginning of the book’s inception seemed at first to mean doom for the entire venture, but their presence has in fact turned out to be a keystone for its successful completion. As they keep me focused on my priorities and centered in my outlook, it is to them that I dedicate this volume.

INTRODUCTION

This book presents a story about community formation mediated by art. Or, more accurately, it contains many stories about multiple communities coming together, overlapping, interacting, and re-forming, through differing relationships between human beings and objects. It explores these processes for the early Iron Age Levant (including present-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan from circa 1200–600 BCE) and surrounding areas, and focuses on portable luxury arts, in particular ivories and metalworks. This is an especially ripe period for such explorations, as the different cultural regions of the Near East and Mediterranean reimagined themselves in the wake of the collapse of the Bronze Age around 1200/1100 BCE. This study posits these communities as being in flux both horizontally across space and vertically through time, and argues that their members came together around the material effects of art and style as these were inflected by their special role in collective memory.

The artworks at the center of the study include carved ivory plaques and figures that served as furniture attachments; ivory containers; bronze, gold, and silver decorated bowls; and bronze relief bands and horse bridle ornaments. Generally considered to have been produced in the Levant, they are found widely distributed across the Near East and Mediterranean, but infrequently in the Levant itself. For this reason, they have been studied chiefly in terms of stylistic classification for the purpose of attribution to specific geographic locations of production. Here, I first argue that the stylistic evidence destabilizes the one-to-one equation of style-group to workshop to specific Levantine city-state. Alternative avenues of inquiry offer the opportunity to explore the link between art, style, memory, and community identities during the Iron Age. This study thus brings together the material effects of art objects, particularly that of style, with the human beings who made and used them, proposing the power of their entanglement in creating and structuring communities of inclusion and exclusion.

I use the term community, and more often its plural, communities, to capture the sense of a degree and kind of social relations that are not necessarily rigidly organized or bounded, yet can stretch across wide networks of people.¹ Such communities are understood to be potentially flexible, able to accommodate fluctuations in their membership. As such, they are not taken to be preexisting, static entities awaiting our discovery of them in the remains of ancient artifacts. Rather, by means of a reconsideration of the artworks’ formal and stylistic properties from the perspective of their affectiveness in contextualized social relations, this book explores the ways in which artistic production, consumption, and appreciation generate community networks, and it argues that artworks accomplish this through their unique ability to catalyze collective memories.

Recent scholarship in ancient history and archaeology has highlighted the central role of memory (and memories)—shared among individuals/people—in cementing social relations and shaping group identity.² Variously referred to as collective, social, or cultural memory, it forms bonds between those who claim membership, and conversely erects boundaries excluding those who either do not or cannot claim such membership. Despite a recent call in archaeological discussions of memory theory to abandon the Durkheimian (through Halbwachs) use of collective and replace it with social, I have chosen to retain Halbwachs’s original terminology. The recent critique of the term collective derives from what is perceived to be a prior, exclusive interest in social structures at the expense of agency (particularly individual agency).³ This sentiment, however, represents a reaction to the filtering of Halbwachs and Durkheim through the French structuralists, in particular Levi-Strauss. While Durkheim is not fully logical in his distinction of categories such as the individual and the collective,⁴ his successor Halbwachs resolved several of these intellectual ambiguities.⁵ For Halbwachs, the collective is neither simply the sum of individual parts, nor a superstructural phenomenon floating above the level of the individual.⁶ Indeed, it is the combination of individuals, sharing memories through shared experiences, that forms collectives of communal identity. It is this concrete notion of people coming together through shared experiences—in my case, through the experience of artistic products—to generate a sense of community identity that I seek to capture in my use of the term collective memory.

Ivories and Metalworks in a Levantine Context

Of central importance to the development of scholarship on Levantine ivories and metalworks is the fact that very few actual pieces have been excavated from archaeological sites located within the Levantine region itself. Indeed, the vast number of examples has been found at non-Levantine sites, in particular Nimrud in northern Iraq but also locations in Iran, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy. Two questions are therefore paramount before embarking on this inquiry: how can we associate these pieces with a Levantine realm of production and consumption, and if we can do so, can we consider them to have served meaningful roles within Levantine society?

In answer to the first question, the overall density of coextensive material remains—monumental and small-scale arts of several different media—provides support for a generally Levantine regional context for the ivories and metalworks of the study. This general sense of belonging together that characterizes so many of these different genres of artworks has served to localize the ivories and metalworks in the Levant from at least the beginning of the twentieth century. Two caveats must be noted, however. First, this proposal does not necessarily mean that all ivories and metalworks with similar visual elements had to be produced and/or consumed within the greater Levantine area. One might readily imagine scenarios where this was not the case, especially once the autochthonous nature of style is challenged. Thus, while on a generalizing level the corpus here studied may be said to be Levantine (and thereby might have been made somewhere in the Levant), it cannot be assumed that any one particular item was in actuality made in the Levant. Nonetheless, it can be accepted that these artworks bore the potential to affect human actors in a similar fashion as if they had been physically present in a Levantine social context. Second, placing these items within a Levantine regional context does not necessarily require or enable us to locate production/consumption on a more specific level, such as that of the city-state—a primary argument of chapter 1.

One result of my reconsideration of stylistic attribution in chapter 1 is the necessity of accepting a concept of the greater Levant as a coherent geocultural entity within which we can contextualize the primary production and consumption spheres for the material under study in this book. Without imposing hard boundaries around this entity, I see the greater Levant as stretching from the south (generally referred to as the southern Levant) in the modern states of Israel and Jordan, running along the Mediterranean littoral and west of the Syrian Desert (including the modern state of Lebanon and western Syria) up to the northern plain of Antioch (in present-day Turkey), and extending northwestward into Cilicia and eastward across the Jabul Plain to the middle and upper Euphrates. The site of Tell Halaf, usually included in definitions of North Syria⁷ because of its architectural carved reliefs and the presence of several small-scale luxury goods, exists as a geographic outlier—problematic in its own cultural definition, but also serving to problematize our own geocultural notions. It, along with several other sites on the edges of this conceived greater Levant, speaks strongly to the lack of sharp or consistent boundaries. Indeed, because I propose to understand the artistic products of this greater Levant as part of a networked set of communities of practice, these exceptions take on greater weight. As such, we might see Tell Halaf participating in one community bound by practices involved in the production and consumption of carved stone reliefs and ivories similar to those farther to the west, while at other times we might see the site participating in communities connected more to social practices linked to areas to the east, or in more locally inward-looking communities of practice. In the end, part of what this book hopes to accomplish is to question our culture-history classification of this part of the world, in which geopolitical entities are conceived as abutting containers, each replete with distinct cultural markers.⁸

Locating the artworks within a Levantine production/consumption context then raises the second question: that of their meaning within such a sphere. Little has been written about the significance of these works in the social context of the place of their presumed manufacture. This book seeks to remedy this situation in part, proposing that those artworks identified generally as Levantine not only can but must be examined first through a Levantine social lens. With that as a basis, inquiries regarding the reception and affect of these artworks outside the Levant can be pursued on a more nuanced level. It is therefore essential to determine that these objects held meaning within the Levant.⁹

Although most of the material under study in this book derives from non-Levantine contexts, there are a few finds that allow us to make a good case for their use and meaningfulness within a Levantine social sphere. In considering the Levantine findspots, I have concentrated on those finds that derive from contexts associated with pre- or weak Assyrian control.¹⁰ Pieces from Zincirli (ancient Sam’al) located in the modern state of Turkey, Hama (ancient Hamath) and Tell Halaf (ancient Guzana) in the south and east of Syria, Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley, and Kefar Veradim in the Upper Galilee derive from contexts that predate full incorporation into the Assyrian state and provide a general indication of the place of these objects (both literally and in regard to significance) within the early Iron Age greater Levant.¹¹ These sites at a minimum establish an elite usage for these types of artworks and demonstrate that they held high value meaning within Levantine community activities.

Both the Zincirli and the Hama contexts suggest that luxurious ivories and metal objects manufactured in styles we associate with the greater Levantine region were used in settings belonging to the highest elite Levantine groups. The objects appear in structures functionally understood to relate to reception halls, which likely hosted ceremonial banqueting.¹² In addition, some contexts at Zincirli (Building L) and Hama (Building IV) seem to have functioned as storerooms in which the equipment used for such gatherings was kept and possibly even minor repairs to it made. That all this activity occurred on the highest elevation of the ancient cities further underlines elite associations for the pieces. Also perhaps to be associated with a major public building, Building 338, a fragmentary bronze bowl depicting a frieze of figures was excavated at Megiddo.¹³

At Tell Halaf, ivories and gold ornaments were found in apparently funerary structures: one near the citadel gate and the other directly in front of the so-called Temple-Palace.¹⁴ The prominent location of these burials near the entrance to and at the center of the city’s citadel area, along with their rich burial goods, point to the high social standing of the associated individuals, and more critically to the centrality of the burials within the socio-politics of pre-Assyrian Tell Halaf. Another funerary context—this time containing a worked and inscribed bronze bowl—has been excavated from a cave in the southern part of the Levant at Kefar Veradim.¹⁵

We can, therefore, argue for the potential, in principle at least, for an indigenous Levantine usage for (most of) the ivories and metalworks comprising the evidence at the core of this book. This usage appears to have included display during ceremonial receptions and deposition in high-status burials, both social contexts that are central for generating collective memory and community identity. That many of the objects in non-Levantine contexts appear to have arrived at these locales through secondary (or even tertiary or greater) means of movement, such as tribute, booty, or opportunistic exchanges, further suggests that some part of their new value derived from their prior privileged status in the Levant.

However, that so many of the pieces we classify, on a stylistic basis, as Levantine (whether North Syrian, Phoenician, or some other designation) derive from archaeological contexts outside the greater Levant has had profound implications for the study of these objects. Most critically, it has concentrated scholarly interest on the project of attribution to specific region and city-state. This, I argue over the course of the first two chapters, has revealed challenges to the very attribution project itself, and I suggest reconsidering this project through alternative methodological frameworks, in particular that of practice theory. When viewed through this lens, other questions emerge concerning the role these artworks played in generating social communities—local Levantine communities as well as other non-Levantine communities—through time and across space. Such concerns include questions relating to collective memory and the Late Bronze Age past (chapter 2), communities of practice that formed around the production and appreciation of artistic styles (chapter 3), the engagement and entanglement of human users-viewers with material objects in ritualized settings (chapter 4), and the rich diversity of circulation and reuse (chapter 5).

Networks and Communities in the Early Iron Age

More than simply a guide to attribution, style serves to establish and structure communities through the engagement of human participants with material objects. Style is thus not autochthonous and bound to geography but rather, through its activation of collective memories, constitutive of communities along both spatial and temporal axes. Concentrating on this aspect of style in the first three chapters of the book, I highlight the early phases of an art object’s life, revolving around issues of production and the social efficacy of style. The first two of these chapters focus on the role of style within the realm of the greater Levantine area itself. Chapter 3 presents a contrasting situation—that of the Assyrian state—for which I pose similar questions.

The Levantine ivories have been divided traditionally between so-called Phoenician and North Syrian styles, with an ongoing interest in determining substyles within these two larger classifications. Connoisseurship, as the principal means of attribution, assumes prominence in this endeavor. In the first chapter, I argue that the ivories’ heterogeneous styles, which exist along a continuum rather than divide into discrete groups, present challenges in applying to this body of material traditional connoisseurial approaches derived from studies of the Italian Renaissance. Comparisons with several other media (carved orthostat reliefs, decorated metal bowls, engraved tridacna shells, and stamped ceramic vessels) map a mobility of style that highlights a pan-Levantine network of skilled practices (and skilled practitioners) instead of a mosaic of bounded independent workshops. In this way, the relationship between human beings, geography, and culture is problematized, and I conclude that we cannot arrange Iron Age Levantine style-groups so that they neatly overlay specific geographic locales at the level of the city-state polity. While geography and place can play a role in community identity, they need not do so in straightforward ways or solely at the level of the political unit. In the early Iron Age Levant, the artistic evidence points to multiple fluid, intersecting, and overlapping networks of skilled artistic practices.

In chapter 2, an alternative way of understanding the production and consumption of artistic styles in the early Iron Age Levant proposes that stylistic traits form a critical component of collective memory, being both the product and the source of shared social practices at the level of creation and appreciation. From such a perspective, visual similarities between first-millennium Levantine arts and objects from the preceding Late Bronze Age (circa 1600–1200 BCE), which have been noted by scholars for some time, take on heightened meaningfulness in the context of newly emerging communities of identity in the Iron Age. A particular continuity of co-occurring animal markings found among Levantine works, primarily in ivory but also on metal objects and carved stone reliefs, supplies a case study. Weaving the artworks into the historical and archaeological context of tradition-building during the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Ages (circa 1200–800 BCE), we can chart a more complicated relationship to the Late Bronze Age past than simply continuing a tradition. The Iron Age arts visually and materially manifested a connection to a past golden age through the selection of stylistic traits that were freighted with Late Bronze Age connotations of heroic kingship.

In a strikingly different sociopolitical situation from that of the Levant, the enactment of a consistently coherent set of stylistic practices contributed to a sense of community at the level of the Assyrian imperial court, a situation explored in chapter 3. Concentrating on small details of execution and the rendering of basic forms, the incredible homogeneity of Assyrian style comes into high relief and provides Assyrian art with its clear sense of Assyrianness. One particular case study—images of seized foreign items—highlights the oppositional nature of the Assyrian style. This performance of rigid stylistic homogenization was set in opposition to the diversity and flexibility of communities in the Levant. The Assyrian style defined itself chiefly in contrast to others, in sharp distinction from the multitude of intersecting stylistic interconnections found among the contemporary polities of the Levant. The strong, coherent, and consistent official style produced by the Assyrian state contributed to an active strategy for simultaneously maintaining a memory of conquest over the vanquished Other and neutralizing the Other so it could no longer threaten Assyria. If we consider community membership as potentially fluctuating, we can understand this Assyrian style as providing a materialized identity for those who wanted or were able to be part of the Assyrian courtly community. This courtly community, at least at the level of the rhetorical, was in turn precisely ordered and controlled by the king through the interface of his visual-artistic-material presence in artworks (such as is examined in the garden scene of King Ashurbanipal reclining on a couch) and analogies with cosmogonic myths like Enuma Elish.

In the last two chapters, the book shifts its emphasis to the significant community-building potential of art objects in subsequent phases of human-material engagement, such as ritual use and deposition, secondary inscriptions, reworking, bricolage, or displacement. Studying specific artworks and their diverse archaeological, social, political, and ritual contexts reveals a variety of entanglements through the differing patterns of use following their production. Chapter 4 considers how communities could form around a select group of metal bowls that participated in shared memorialization practices of ritualized drinking and libating. The objects of study—engraved metal bowls typically classified as Phoenician that also bear inscriptions on them—circulated around the Near East and Mediterranean during the first centuries of the first millennium. These form a group on the basis of the shared content of their inscriptions, which, despite different languages and scripts, declare possession by a named person. The complex situation of this particular group of bowls permits a glimpse into the ways in which such items operated as a central component in the emergence of new communities in the early Iron Age. The unusual addition on these bowls of an inscription that names a person activates memories self-consciously. Both the possessive inscriptions and the figured imagery helped to enact and reenact social, familial, and power relations through time. At the same time, community differences take shape through the inscriptions’ distinct linguistic affiliations.

Chapter 5 explores the many different ways in which communities could form around displaced artworks, noting that no single explanation fits all cases, and that we must be sensitive to the multiple possibilities for new community formation as objects move through time and space. It traces several case studies of Levantine artworks that circulated in more complicated ways than those proposed in systemwide models of trade or gift exchange. In addition, different associations of value and meaning can be inferred through a combined analysis of stylistic and technical features, archaeological contexts of deposition, and historical evidence. Through these, stories of access to and (re)use of portable luxury goods speak to their ongoing efficacy in social life. The case studies include bronzes found in Greece at pan-Hellenic sanctuaries (reworked bands at Olympia and horse bridle elements at Samos and Eretria), ivories in the Near East, both