Today we will look closely at two more monuments intended to glorify kings, created about 500 years apart. Building on the skills of formal and contextual analysis that we have been developing, today we will layer in two more elements to our analysis of an art object: the interaction between image and text, and the transformations of meaning that can occur when objects are appropriated for new settings later in their “lives.” We will also discuss a recent critique of the historical focus on fancy monuments, a practice which this course is very guilty of.
Here are the images we will be looking at.
Readings:
- Victory Stele of Naram-Sin, on Smarthistory
- Law Code of Hammurabi, on Smarthistory
- David Wengrow, “A History of True Civilisation is Not One of Monuments,” Aeon, October 2, 2018.
Here is a model answer to the 10-point exam question, “How does Wengrow help us think about the Standard of Ur?”
