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

She is brilliant. They don't usually convince me when they bring Kafka's Trial and current habeas corpus in the US and UK into discussion of Hammurabi's monument of law.

It sounds an odd way to begin her book -- with Henry Moore and Georges Bataille -- but the Surrealists had an aesthetic appreciation of Sumerian art that has since been abandoned [as archaeology became a science and Marxist history took to the power & propaganda theme].

'Art is for eternity in Mesopotamia. It resists death. Yet it does so in an entirely different way from the ancient Egyptian arts, the arts that provide for time in death, for another extended cycle of existence in the afterlife. In Mesopotamia, rather, the image is a resistance. It counters annihilation in a more directly existential way.'
Existential Mesopotamians: must be why I like them.