Origin and influence-cultural contacts: Egypt, the Ancient Near East, and the Classical world

Motifs and techniques are traced across Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek and Roman art by comparing objects in the exhibition Origin and Influence by form, material, technique and imagery. The authors present contact as extensive but gradual: trade, mobile craftsmen and the movement of objects and artisans in warfare carried motifs across regional boundaries, and differences between models and imitations show how borrowers adapted foreign forms while their own institutions, beliefs and customs could remain relatively unchanged.

The examples begin with lotus vessels in Egyptian faience and alabaster, a silver vase from Egypt, a bronze vessel found in Iran and a glass vessel from Nippur, and continue with griffin imagery in Iranian, Mesopotamian, Assyrian and Greek seals, ivories and metalwork. A silver-gilt bowl found on Cyprus is set beside ivories from Nimrud, which the authors read as local interpretations of Egyptian subjects: clothing, crowns, attributes and divine gender differ from the Egyptian models. Mediterranean motifs on the Nimrud ivories the authors suggest they reflect western influence on Assyrian taste, through tribute, booty and foreign artisans working at Nimrud (pp. 320–323).

Later examples follow the leopard and grapevine motif through Roman and Sasanian objects, where the imagery is described as open to reinterpretation, and the article proposes Byzantine influence for the use of niello. An early Islamic vessel is identified as having Roman forms, related either to the western location of the Omayyad capital or to its reported Caucasus findspot. The survey ends with Etruscan, Hellenistic, Roman and Early Christian gold glass, and spans griffins in Iran around 3000 BCE to gold glass of the late fourth century CE (pp. 324–326).

Objects

Silver-gilt bowl