Ancient Near Eastern art is considered the poor stepchild of all ancient art, banished to the basement of the canon yet somehow supporting the whole structure of art that followed it. In her latest book, Zainab Bahrani attempts to bring the study of ancient Near Eastern art out of the proverbial cellar and into the forefront of academic attention. Considering the conservative nature of past scholarship in the field, it is somewhat unusual that the author chooses to view the most ancient traces of civilization through the most modern of theoretical lenses. As a “culture translator,” Bahrani concedes that she can only bring her own modern theoretical assumptions to bear on the ancient evidence. With her contemporary filter acknowledged, she proceeds to shine a light into the proverbial black box of ancient Mesopotamian thinking about images. She suggests that our entire way of understanding ancient Assyrian and Babylonian art has been ethnocentrically, and mistakenly, fixated on the Platonic idea of mimesis, in which reality and representation are linked yet remain separate entities. In place of this, Bahrani argues that the Mesopotamian conception of images was closer to the Derridian structure of différance, where image and reality are intricately connected in a “circulation” (205) of reference, rather than to the standard Platonic bipolarity in which art and life are discrete, opposed, and hierarchically ordered.

Bahrani divides her book into an introduction, a conclusion, and seven chapters that focus on issues of representation, some of which she has previously addressed elsewhere. The first three chapters deal with methodology and historiography. In the introduction, Bahrani explains that she employs what she calls “theoretical bricolage,” in which critical terms and concepts are borrowed from deconstruction philosophy and postcolonial theory “as needed” (9). This method serves her intentions well, as she hopes to make an understanding of Mesopotamian art practices “a means of historicizing contemporary theories of representation” (10) within art history, while at the same time bringing an awareness of ontology and Derridian critique to scholars of the ancient Near East. In chapters 1 and 2, Bahrani explores how Mesopotamian art was relegated to the fringes of the art-historical canon that developed in the nineteenth century. She exposes the tendency of scholars to essentialize Mesopotamian civilization in an Orientalist manner, as elucidated by Edward Said, when they describe its art as “infantile” and “propagandistic” and its rulers as “despotic” (54). While a historiographic critique of this subfield of art history is much needed, her arguments may have been better supported through more direct quotation of previous scholarship and the myths perpetuated about ancient Near Eastern art, lest she risk essentializing that scholarship herself. In an informative discussion in chapter 2 inspired by postcolonial thought, Bahrani argues that the very concept of Mesopotamia itself as a distinct geographic entity was created in the imperialist West during the nineteenth century in order to “dissociate” (58) modern Ottoman Iraq from its ancient predecessors. Instead, she prefers to call the area Assyria and Babylonia, hence the subtitle of the book. Indeed, one of the volume’s many strengths is Bahrani’s cognizance of the politically loaded value of words and of the consequent necessity to define them precisely and consciously. In chapter 3, Bahrani contends that Eurocentric art historians have been wedded to the idea that high art must involve some degree of mimesis. She suggests that as ethnographers, art historians must be critically aware of their adherence to certain Western concepts. Anthropologists have embraced this idea readily and have already turned a self-critical eye on their Western style of ethnography and interpretations of other cultures. Considering the recent work of the visual-culture specialists Keith Moxey and Norman Bryson, Bahrani strongly urges art historians to follow this lead.

In chapter 4, on page 100, Bahrani begins her specific discussion of Assyrian and Babylonian aesthetic concepts and the word–image dialectic. She argues that cuneiform script, which was initially pictographic, forms the basis of the Mesopotamian system of thought about the relationship between texts and objects. This chapter is grounded in recent archaeological and philological research on the origin and evolution of the cuneiform writing system. Bahrani claims that at the heart of the Mesopotamian conception of the word–image relationship is the polyvalent nature of each cuneiform sign. This Derridian approach to an understanding of the Mesopotamian writing system eradicates the strict polarity of word and image. Initially, art historians may find this essay the least grounded in visual evidence, as it deals less with objects and art and more with issues of texts and semiotics. However, Bahrani makes the point that “in Assyro-Babylonian thought, images and words were never completely separated” (118) and that Mesopotamians “were unaware of writing and pictures as different modes of communication” (119). Thus an attempt to consider the two genres separately is a modern imposition on an ancient worldview. For the Assyriologist, this chapter might prove thought provoking, if not controversial, as Bahrani makes new universal claims about a complicated and long-standing written tradition.

In chapter 5, art historians and Assyriologists will find Bahrani’s discussion of the Mesopotamian concept of tsalmu convincing, as her arguments are astute, clear, and well grounded in pictorial and documentary evidence. The Akkadian word tsalmu, traditionally translated as “image” or “statue,” has received a great deal of attention in the art-historical literature on the ancient Near East and is usually identified as existing in mimetic opposition to the real object. Bahrani argues that this understanding of tsalmu is problematic because “rather than being a copy of something in reality, the image itself was seen as a real thing” (127). To the Mesopotamians, an image of a person or thing, such as the canonical sculpture-in-the-round of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 B.C.), is a substitute or a “part of a configuration that enables presence through representation” (131). Bahrani convincingly supports this ontologically sophisticated argument through comparison to Louis Marin’s analysis of King Louis XIV of France and through examination of Mesopotamian texts in which the word tsalmu is used. Thus Bahrani engages both the ancient material and modern art-historical literature at once in this persuasive essay.

Bahrani develops her arguments about royal representation further in chapter 6, in which she addresses not the function of the intact images but rather the meaning of their desecration through purposeful destruction. Such acts have been identified for several Mesopotamian monuments, including certain wall reliefs from the Neo-Assyrian palaces and the famous bronze head of an Akkadian king from the site of Nineveh. She also adds the Mesopotamian treasures plundered by the Elamites and discovered at the Iranian site of Susa to the list of monuments that were targets of ancient iconoclasm. Bahrani suggests that the destructive blows unleashed upon these works, typically identified by scholars as barbaric acts of political revenge and attributed to the violent nature of ancient Near Easterners, should be read more ontologically as attempts to assassinate the Mesopotamian ruler. Following her arguments from chapter 5 that the tsalmu served as a substitute king, she concludes that the object’s “destruction became an uncanny embodiment of death’s threat to the ruler” (174).

In the seventh chapter, Bahrani departs slightly from her previous arguments about tsalmu to explore a canonical work of the Middle Assyrian period, the so-called Altar of King Tukulti-Ninurta I (r. 1243–1207 B.C.) from Ashur. The historiographic obstacle here has been the interpretation of the monument’s iconography, which shows two images of the same king standing and then kneeling in front of an altar marked with emblems of the god Nabu. The monument is inscribed with a text that mentions the king’s worship of another god, Nusku; thus prior scholarship has identified a “perceived disjuncture” (191) between image and text. Bahrani claims that we should set aside our Western expectation that the text should somehow illuminate and explain the image, and that we need to understand the monument’s text–image relationship from a Mesopotamian perspective. Her reinterpretation hinges on the identification of the objects shown on the altar, a tablet and writing stylus, as symbols of the god Nusku in his aspect as dream-bearer, with the instruments representing the tablets of destiny that decreed all Mesopotamians’ fate. If this identification is feasible, then the inscription, which elaborates on the king’s “destiny of power,” and the image refer to and repeat each other. Like an oneiromantic dream in Mesopotamia, the monument (and the dream it represents) is a “double of the destiny which it predicts” (196). With this interpretation, Bahrani does not escape a reliance on understanding the monument as a one-to-one iconographic relationship between the oneiromantic symbols of Nusku and the deity himself, exactly the conundrum that she was trying to avoid. On the whole, though, Bahrani’s novel approach to this work fits well with her earlier arguments about the dialogic relationship between word and image in Mesopotamia and contributes a fascinating new understanding to a canonical work.

On a basic level, the book is somewhat repetitive and could have benefited from tighter editing. However, the concepts that Bahrani introduces are at times complex, and the repetition and restatements serve the book beneficially by clarifying and strengthening the arguments. In her conclusion, she states that we “need to question how we as scholars re-create the native context and how we apprehend indigenous notions of representation” (207). Bahrani has successfully accomplished such an understanding, to get inside the black box of Assyro-Babylonian notions of representation. Indeed, the desire to understand a work of art from what anthropologists call the “emic” view—to grasp its meaning within the perception of the culture that created it—is in essence the goal for which all art historians strive. In this book, Bahrani deftly introduces the world of ancient Near Eastern studies to important modern theoretical concepts while at the same time bringing the stepchild of the canon out of the basement of art-historical scholarship. Through this engagement, Bahrani productively creates a dialogic relationship between the ancient and the modern.