Reply To: Ruling Mesopotamia

[Gabe]

Going through the exhibit and the questions made me think about comparisons between the uses of art in ancient Mesopotamian cultures to way modern society uses photo-ops, sound bites, talking about their achievements etc. to portray leaders as powerful and legitimate. Of course there was no television in the ancient near east, so these works of art were probably all the access members of ancient Mesopotamian had to their leaders, and were the mass media of the time. Works such as ‘Assurnasirpal II Killing Lions’ is easily substituted for photos of ‘Vladimir Putin with a Tiger he shot with a tranquilizer dart’. Of course impressive architecture has always been a staple of demonstrating power. The Ziggurats that raised into the sky got worshipers closer to the gods. Whomever constructed these monuments was surely a force to be reckoned with. As was mentioned in the video, Saddam Hussein used a restoration of the Ishtar Gate to pull some of the clout that ancient Mesopotamian culture has to his own purposes. The legitimacy of these objects still carries weight today, albeit moreso because they are a connection to earliest civilization than the Gods.