Greek Art and the Orient

by Ann Clyburn Gunter

For over a century, scholars have recognized an "orientalizing period" in the history of early Greek art, in which Greek artisans fashioned works of art under the stimulus of Near Eastern imports or resident foreign artisans. Previous studies have emphasized the role of Greek & Phoenician traders in bringing about these contacts with the civilizations of the ancient Near East & Egypt, debating their duration or intensity in the Greek world. In this study, Gunter interrogates the categories of "Greek" & "Oriental" as problematic & shifts emphasis to modes of contact & cultural transfers within a broader regional setting. Her provocative study places Greek encounters with the Near East & Egypt in the context of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which by the 8-7th centuries BCE extended from southern Turkey to western Iran. Using an expanded array of archeological & textual sources, she argues that crucial aspects of the identity & meaning of foreign works of art were constructed thru circumstances of transfer, ownership & display.
List of Illustrations
Preface & Acknowledgments
Art & 'Assyrianization' along the imperial frontiers
Conceptual geographies & frameworks
Defining & interpreting styles
Gifts, exchange & acquisition
Imperial ideologies & modes of appropriation
Conclusions
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

271 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2008

Reviews

[Erik Graff]

I recently received a copy of this book for review in the publication, The Ancient World. Not being particularly well versed in art history, I welcome the more informal venue of GoodReads as an opportunity to give it some preliminary consideration.
The title, Greek Art & the Orient, is misleading in that the Greeks are not discussed very much. The emphasis is on the Neo-Assyrian Empire which most readers will know only by the biblical references to some of its rulers. By the time of the "golden age of Athens" this polity was a memory, so such influence as it may have had would have been on early Greek art in, say, the time of Homer.
Gunter expends most of her energy on a variety of considerations pertinent to the place of art works in the Neo-Assyrian context, using them to implicitly suggest the kinds of considerations which should be relevant to any discussion of "Greek" art. Having museum associations, she naturally considers questions of provenance and dating, of particular pieces, of types and of styles. But few objects are adequately described by the labels affixed to the walls of art museums. Physical description must be supplemented by a commentary on signification and significations or meanings may change as a function of contexts and contexts will change over time and may change as the result of various modes of exchange or transmission. To further complicate matters, the Empire was known not only to employ foreign artisans, but also to practice massive population transfers. A "Neo-Assyrian" artifact found in its capital may in fact have been produced by an Egyptian artist for a Hebrew client.
Beyond such caveats and complexities arising from her Assyrian focus and pertaining presumably to Greek art, Gunter raises some serious points about the usual categories of classical art history, most particularly the distinction between a Greek and an oriental culture.
As regards Greece, a land in which no point is more than 36 miles from salt water, the modern boundaries of the state, indeed, the very name, do not convey the ancient realities of hundreds of poleis, more joined than separated by water, spanning the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Modern continental distinctions did not obtain. Indeed, as Edith Hamilton was wont to point out, classical Greece was far more barbaric and oriental by our standards than the faded copies of their arts and architecture in our capitals would suggest. Instead of a Greek culture, a proper history of art would have to distinguish periods and places with much greater precision than our cultural mythologies have allowed, would have to distinguish 5th century Rhodian manufactures from, say, 6th century Lesbian.
While I found the introductory critique of "Greek" versus "Oriental" categories apt and accessible, the book as a whole struck me as at once rather too specialized for the general reader and too scattershot for the scholar seeking an exhaustive treatment.

Here is the review submitted for publication:
Ann C. Gunter's Greek Art and the Orient has a misleading title for two reasons. First, she rejects any facile distinction between “East” and “West”. Second, she barely discusses Greek art. Instead, this is more a propaedeutic for a future study which might be entitled “Greek Art and the World”. Indeed, this preliminary study is virtually two books.
The first—and to the nonspecialist, more accessible and interesting—book is about the East/West distinction. The modern post-colonial lines drawn between Europe and Asia, the Occident and the Orient, are not applicable to the ancient world. Much of what we have adopted as the source of our “Western” cultural tradition actually stems from Greek-speaking peoples inhabiting the territories of modern Turkey, Egypt and Libya, areas in Asia and Africa. “Greece” proper, in the modern sense, with no point being over thirty-six miles from the sea, was oriented towards the Mediterranean as a source of sustenance and highway for trade and emigration. “Greece” as something akin to a geopolitical entity did not exist until, ironically, the short-lived Macedonian conquest. There never was a Greek state in the Hellenic period, neither a centralized government nor a single cult. Instead, there were peoples spread across the Mediterranean's littoral and islands who spoke a family of dialects and who, ironically again, only achieved something like a lasting geopolitical identity in Byzantine times—and then primarily as an “Eastern” power generally opposed to a Latin-speaking “West”.
But Byzantium is virtually contemporary and Gunter is concerned with origins and essences—if only to contest them. Her focus is on the period wherein a distinctive “Greek” art is commonly said to have originated. Her focus is on the putative age of Homer, the eighth and seventh centuries.
Gunter's second, far more technical, book is a case study of the transmission of art from and within the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Because “it was [in:] an Assyrianized Near East in which the Greeks were involved in the late eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E.” (p. 16). Here, in what is by far the major portion of her work, the Greeks are not much discussed. What she writes about the Assyrians is, however, intended to be paradigmatic, reflecting considerations relevant to later Greek history.
Primary to this discussion is Gunter's problematization of exchange. Contrasted to the all-too-simplistic model of Phoenician traders transferring commodities between an Assyrian and a Greek world, she adduces a host of complicating considerations. One is the mobility of whole peoples (mass resettlements being practiced in Neo-Assyrian lands), artisans and their techniques. Another is the important distinction between a material object and its meaning or signification. These contextualized associations would furthermore depend upon the mode of transmission, be it by commodity exchange, as a gift or as booty or tribute—one object possibly passing through several modes during its lifetime. Additionally, as evinced by gift and tribute transmissions, there is considerable evidence to suggest that bonds of identity between elites, political or cultic, were sometimes stronger than ethnic or linguistic ties.
More a suggestive than a definitive work, Greek Art and the Orient may be of great value to historians of ancient economics as well as of art. The general reader, however, may find the bulk of it too narrowly focused, too technical and too detailed.