Ceramic Imagery in Ancient Near Eastern Literature
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CERAMIC IMAGERY IN ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN LITERATURE"
Karen Polinger Foster, 40 Jones Road, Wallingford,
CT 06492
ABSTRACT Ancient Near Eastern literature includes numerous metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech referring to ceramics. This paper presents selected examples of Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, and Biblical texts using clay, empty or filled vessels, potsherds, potters and the tools of their trade, and potters' quarters. By examining systematically for the first time the literary, art historical, and archaeological contexts for ceramic imagery, new light may be shed on the role and meaning of ceramics in the ancient Near East. Among the topics considered are: (1) the importance of ceramics in creation imagery; (2) the nature of ceramic death and destruction imagery; (3) ceramic imagery with cornucopial connotations; and (4) literary perceptions of clay, pottery, and the status of potters. The material assembled in this study adds significantly to the evidence gleaned from stylistic and technical analysis of ancient Near Eastern ceramics.
INTRODUCTION Even in the modern age, so dominated by plastic and paper, ceramic imagery is still widely used in figurative language.1 In describing Brigit Pegeen Kelly's collected poems To the Place of Trumpets, for instance, James Merrill writes that her poems ". . .suggest a kind of folk art -- their clay washed of narrative grit, serviceably turned and fancifully decorated, fired, then filled at the creative instinct's oldest well. 2 John Hollander's poem "The Mad Potter," to cite another example, contains a series of ceramic images, from the opening line's "coil of clay" to the closing stanza's "words of my wheel's turning come to ring/ Truer than Truth itself does," with many unfinished, finished, and 3 inscribed cups in between. Another modern poet, Elizabeth Macklin, transfers ceramic imagery to "a potter fragile as porcelain" in her poem "Looking to
*For patiently answering many philological questions and for much literary guidance, I am indebted to Gary Beckman, W. Randall Garr, Robert M. Good, William K. Simpson, and especially Benjamin R. Foster. Particular thanks are due to Pamela B. Vandiver for steadfast encouragement throughout. As a historian of Bronze Age art, I have gratefully relied upon translations not my own, realizing that differences of scholarly opinion may change meanings, perhaps negating some of my points. Other examples and interpretations are welcomed; contra Hesiod, let not potter compete with potter (Works and Days, line 25). 1. For a lucid guide to theoretical, linguistical, historical, and other aspects of figurative language, see Terence Hawkes, Metaphor (London, 1972). 2.
Yale University Press,
Spring 1988 Prospectus,
p.
49.
3. The New Yorker, 18 January 1988, p. 27. One is reminded here of the Rubaiyat's sustained ceramic imagery, from the first line's "Morning in the Bowl of Night" to the quatrains set in the potter's shop crowded with discursive vessels (A. J. Arberry, ed. Persian Poems [London, 1964], pp. 3-15). Mat.
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