Some Observations on the Representation of the Divine and Numinous in Persepolitan Glyptic
Abstract
The texts and seals (preserved as impressions) from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, 509–493 BCE, have revealed new perspectives on various issues surrounding the much-debated questions of religion and the representation of the divine in the early Achaemenid Persian period. This paper will highlight two topics. The first concerns a long-standing interest of scholarship in the study of the religions of ancient western Asia, namely, the nature of the relationship between the king and the divine. The second explores a millennium-old tradition of the representation of the divine and numinous on the backs of animals and fantastical creatures, what we term, within the context of Persepolitan glyptic, “pedestal creatures.” A commonality that emerges in both topics is the critical role played by the visual heritage of the Neo-Assyrian period in the representation of kingship and the divine in the early Achaemenid period.
Citation
Garrison, Mark. "Some Observations on the Representation of the Divine and Numinous in Persepolitan Glyptic," Contextualizing Iranian Religions in the Ancient World - 14th Melammu Symposium. February 19, 2020.
About the Speakers
Emma Petersen
University of California, Los Angeles
Emma Petersen is a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.
Mark Garrison
Trinity University
Mark B. Garrison holds the Alice Pratt Brown Distinguished Professorship in Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, USA. His primary research interests are the glyptic arts of ancient Iran and Iraq in the first half of the first millennium BC. He specializes in the glyptic preserved on two large archives from Persepolis, the Persepolis Fortification archive and the Persepolis Treasury archive. With Margaret Cool Root, he is author of Seals on the Persepolis Fortification Tablets, Volume I: Images of Heroic Encounter, Oriental Institute Publications 117 (Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2001). In addition that documentary work, his publications have addressed the emergence and development of royal ideology in glyptic at Persepolis, religious imagery in Achaemenid art, and the relationship of glyptic of the Achaemenid period with earlier glyptic traditions in Assyria, Babylonia, and Elam. His most recent book is: The Ritual Landscape at Persepolis: Glyptic Imagery from the Persepolis Fortification and Treasury Archives, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 72 (Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2017), which won the 2018 Ehsan Yarshater Book Award.