Shane Williamson’s Reviews > The Infinite Image: Art, Time and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity > Status Update

According to the Mesopotamian system of belief, the image was a valid substitute for the person, a place in which the essence of the represented person was manifest, the votive portrait [thus] became a double of the individual represented and could become a form of presence, a substitute, praying in place of that person, for all time. (211)

Profound implications for Torah-as-monument studies:

"The epilogue of the Codex Hammurabi states that Hammurabi set up his laws in Babylon, before his image as Sar Mišarim, King of Justice, thus presenting himself as one who dispenses the law...The Codex Hammurabi is therefore a monument that also reconfigures the relationship of the ruler to the law." (187)

Nineteenth-century classifications of Assyrian sculpture as uncreative or despotic, and impervious to change, continue to form the basis of the way that we view and study these works today, and these interpretations are still in need of a thorough reassessment. (118)

This idea that the work of art is the uncovering of a reality of a historical truth, that it is the 'worlding of a world in the work', is shared by a generation of early twentieth-century thinkers and philosophers who wrote on aesthetics and representation. For the ancients, the found object, the ancient work of art and artefact, was likewise seen as a thing that embodies time and a world. (112)

Centuries before Plato, in ancient Mesopotamia, the complexity of images was already well understood and notions of representation were classified under specific words and concepts...there were in fact numerous words in use at the same time, from the eighth to the fourth centuries BC and these words had already been in circulation for well over a millennium. (61-62)

The aesthetic, whether it is taken to mean a type of dis-course, as philosophers understand it, or the intrinsic quality required of the artwork, as art historians and anthropologists use the term, is a notion that leads us back to the question of the ontological status of images. (48)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, the twentieth-century philosopher, said that, in order to be art, a work of art must change your world—and ancient art, certainly ancient Near Eastern art, does that superbly. (47)