Bernard Smith Collection

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http://hdl.handle.net/11343/56257
Bernard Smith was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic, including at the University of Melbourne. He has been described as the founder of Australian Art History, and his presence and influence in Australian cultural life immense. This is one of many of his lectures given in the Fine Arts Department of the University of Melbourne between 1956 and 1966 and at a time when it was the only art history department in an Australian university. They are lectures in the history of art that range from Palaeolithic to the Romantic Movement. These lectures are presented as originally written and are archival in nature with no attempt to bring them up-to-date. They belong to their time

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Subject: Art, Ancient × Subject: Middle East × Author: Smith, Bernard ×

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    Mesopotamian art, Parts 1 and 2
    Smith, Bernard (1959)
    Lecture
    Let us begin, by looking briefly at the development of architecture in ancient Mesopotamia. As in Egypt, each city possessed its own deity, worshipped by the citizens as their guardian, in a shrine which was usually built within the city. The temples were constructed with mud-dried brick. One of the earliest temples excavated is that at Tepe Gawra in the north. The temples were buttressed to strengthen the brick walls especially where they held the rafters to the roof and took its weight. Already there is a tendency to separate the central shrine from other parts by means of an entrance porch and subsidiary offices. Our next slide of Temple VII at Abu Sharein [Eridu] reveals the buttressing of external walls become much more regular. A sense of balance and order appears. Note too the forward thrust of the corner bastions. This affords a close parallel with early temple construction in Egypt. Now the central shrine is surrounded by subsidiary offices, an altar to the civic deity being placed at one end, and an offering table at the other. The temple was entered by means of steps which led up to the platform on which the temple was built, and entered by means of a door in the middle of the long axis. As time passed the platform on which the temples were built increased in size to become a ziggurat or artificial mountain. In Mesopotamia the mountain became an important religious symbol: it produced the rain and the vegetation, from it sprang all forms of life, the great mother-goddess was known as the Lady of the Mountain.