Content area
Full text
Zainab Bahrani The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 256 pp.; 28 ills. Cloth $59.95 (0812236483)
Ancient Near Eastern art is considered the poor stepchild of all ancient art, banished to the basement of the canon yet somehow supporting the whole structure of art that followed it. In her latest book, Zainab Bahrani attempts to bring the study of ancient Near Eastern art out of the proverbial cellar and into the forefront of academic attention. Considering the conservative nature of past scholarship in the field, it is somewhat unusual that the author chooses to view the most ancient traces of civilization through the most modern of theoretical lenses. As a "culture translator," Bahrani concedes that she can only bring her own modern theoretical assumptions to bear on the ancient evidence. With her contemporary filter acknowledged, she proceeds to shine a light into the proverbial black box of ancient Mesopotamian thinking about images. She suggests that our entire way of understanding ancient Assyrian and Babylonian art has been ethnocentrically, and mistakenly, fixated on the Platonic idea of mimesis, in which reality and representation are linked yet remain separate entities. In place of this, Bahrani argues that the Mesopotamian conception of images was closer to the Derridian structure of différance, where image and reality are intricately connected in a "circulation" (205) of reference, rather than to the standard Platonic bipolarity in which art and life are discrete, opposed, and hierarchically ordered.
Bahrani divides her book into an introduction, a conclusion, and seven chapters that focus on issues of representation, some of which she has previously addressed elsewhere. The first three chapters deal with methodology and historiography. In the introduction, Bahrani explains that she employs what she calls "theoretical bricolage," in which critical terms and concepts are borrowed from deconstruction philosophy and postcolonial theory "as needed" (9). This method serves her intentions well, as she hopes to make an understanding of Mesopotamian art practices "a means of historicizing contemporary theories of representation" (10) within art history, while at the same time bringing an awareness of ontology and Derridian critique to scholars of the ancient Near East. In chapters 1 and 2, Bahrani explores how Mesopotamian art was relegated to the...