Shane Williamson’s Reviews > The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria > Status Update
Shane Williamson
is on page 174 of 256
An integral part of all substitution rituals was the act of naming. The image was first fashioned and then given a specific person's name in order to function as a valid substitute for the person in question...The name was so consequential because Babylonian theological thought held the basic doctrine that the naming of a thing was tantamount to its existence and that a thing did not exist unless it was named. (174)
— May 27, 2025 01:10PM
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Shane Williamson
is on page 182 of 256
...Royal images were not stolen and mutilated in a moment of barbaric looting. They were taken into captivity and punished as if live beings because of a complex religious and philosophical world-view in which representation by image was a real, not a symbolic, substitution, and having control of a person's image was one more way of having control of that person. (182)
— May 27, 2025 01:46PM
Shane Williamson
is on page 167 of 256
It is considered a transcendental truth by many art historians that a text is not part of an image, but this is in fact a Western concept articulated in the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant...Kant's aesthetic theory forms the basis for the Western discipline of art history, but this is a theoretical choice that is anachronistic and foreign to the art of Iraq and Iran. (166-67)
— May 27, 2025 08:50AM
Shane Williamson
is on page 145 of 256
...the [Assyro-Babylonian] image is no longer a representation but a being in its own right. The system functions through the ontological notion of the word-image-being entity. If this system served the ideology of kingship, so much the better, but it is not a simple propagandistic assertion of absolute power as a way of manipulating public opinion by means of a mediated image. (145)
— May 27, 2025 08:04AM
Shane Williamson
is on page 145 of 256
In the framework of Assyro-Babylonian ontology, kingship is not the usurpation of a sign because that usurpation implies a binary division of essence and sign. There is not even an attempted erasure of the representational mechanisms or processes of signification that we would consider necessary for ideological image making. (145)
— May 27, 2025 08:01AM
Shane Williamson
is on page 136 of 256
The difference between material reality and semiosis, which is based on scientific reason in the modern view, was an intertwined area in Assyro-Babylonian thought. (136)
— May 26, 2025 08:16PM
Shane Williamson
is on page 119 of 256
According to the developmental theory of linguistics, cuneiform writing (and Egyptian writing) failed because it was never able to free itself from the realm of the symbol in order to become a pure mode of signification, in order to enter the realm of the sign. In the post-Enlightenment science of the world, sign and symbol were repeatedly used to separate civilized from primitive, science from magic. (119)
— May 26, 2025 06:26PM
Shane Williamson
is on page 116 of 256
This notion, described by Derrida and Lacan, that the verbal text is as much concealment as revelation is not unlike the Assyro-Babylonian conception of words referring to things, thus revealing them, but always containing the concealed contiguous and iconic relationships of metaphor, metonymy, or homophony. (116)
— May 26, 2025 06:15PM
Shane Williamson
is on page 80 of 256
Indigenous notions of aesthetics in alien cultures are established by means of anthropologically determined categories that appear to be contained and "found" but are nevertheless determined by interpretation. (80)
— May 26, 2025 10:48AM
Shane Williamson
is on page 72 of 256
The image of Mesopotamia, upon which we still depend, was necessary for a march of progress from East to West, a concept of world cultural development that is explicitly Eurocentric and imperialist. Perhaps the time has come that we, Middle Eastern scholars and scholars of the ancient Middle East both, dissociate ourselves from this imperial triumphal procession and look toward a redefinition of the land in between.
— May 26, 2025 09:57AM
