The exhibition 'Routes of Arabia' at the Louvre in Paris is startling
PARIS - The most novel show of the year is now on view at the Louvre. “Routes d’Arabie” (Roads of Arabia) sets off the viewer’s mind dreaming like none other.
The revelations to be found in hundreds of artifacts never before seen outside Saudi Arabia are startling.
Forget about Arabia as a land without figural representation. It was already there in the fourth millennium B.C. In a small village near Ha’il, three sandstone steles were dug up within the last four decades. The geometric stylization of one, a standing man with two straps across his chest and a long dagger with split blade, would have appealed to Western avant-garde sculptors of the 20th century. Another stele represents the bust of a man, arms pressed against his chest, reduced to a nearly rectangular volume. By contrast, the head is extraordinarily expressive with its lips bitterly pressed and one eyebrow slightly raised, as if in puzzlement.
The Ha’il sculptures form part of a larger group of steles strewn around the Arabian Peninsula from the southernmost part of present-day Jordan to Yemen, with significant stylistic variations.
This funerary art was cultivated over a period of some 3,000 years. A rectangular headstone of a tomb, one of many from the Tayma’ or Teima oasis in the eastern region, is believed to date from the fifth or fourth century B.C. It displays the same inclination toward the reduction of human appearance to near abstraction paradoxically associated with the same sense of expressiveness. An inscription is carefully engraved in Aramaic, the ancient Semitic language that was widespread across the Near East by the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. The monumental lettering, evidently from a professional scribe’s hand, reads “In memory of Taym son of Zayd.” In formulation as in sound, the funerary memento barely differs from the inscriptions engraved in Arabic more than a thousand years later as Islam began spreading in Arabia and far beyond.
Even more extraordinary than the revelation of this long tradition in human figuration leaning toward abstraction is the discovery that it existed alongside full-fledged figural sculpture in a variety of styles from formalized rendition to realistic observation.
A stone head larger than life size was discovered by a joint German-Saudi archaeological team excavating an ancient temple at Tayma’ built between the fourth and the second centuries B.C. The wide-open eyes are reminiscent of the art of the Neo-Hittite empire in the southern areas of modern Turkey. The Hittite state had vanished by the seventh century B.C., wiped out by the Assyrians, who launched their assault from their power base in present-day Iraq. Hittite influence must therefore have reached the Arabian Peninsula at least three centuries before the Tayma’ monumental head was carved.
This is hardly surprising. Assyrian texts mention the Arabs as early as the eighth century B.C. and monumental bas-reliefs depict the Assyrians on horseback triumphantly attacking their nomadic foes riding camels. If Arab-Assyrian contacts are documented that far back, it makes it likely that Arabs were aware of the Hittites.
The nomadic heartland at the crossroads of international trade running from Yemen and the Gulf to the Levant and East Africa was certainly open to multiple influences.
A colossal sandstone statue discovered by a team from the archaeological department of the King Saud University at Al-‘Ula, ancient Dedan, reveals an art school in which familiarity with Egyptian sculpture is evident. The posture is hieratic but the very naturalistic handling of the musculature points to a time when Hellenism had left its mark on Egyptian art following Alexander’s conquest in 332 B.C. This highly sophisticated sculpture is not a one-off. Abdullah al-Saud, the director of the Riyadh National Museum, remarks in the ground-breaking exhibition book that other statues, large and small, have been excavated in ancient Dedan.
Here too, multiple trends coexisted. A colossal man’s head with a frown and lips open as if to erupt in rage is a masterpiece of expressiveness. In another monumental head, ancient stylization survives. The perfectly arched, joined-up eyebrows ultimately go back to the Sumerian art of the third Ur dynasty in southern Iraq.
That diversity itself is evidence of the remarkable vitality of this ancient Arab school in north Hejaz.
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