Monument and Memory: Kudurru, Stele, and Obelisk.
Discussion Questions
- Renata Holod's One Minute Lecture Site of Sight, Right of Sight, and Rite of Sight: Exploring the Cultures of Seeing. Let's discuss. (Vimeo Link)
- My intention for this week's collection of readings and discussion is to bring to the table the question of the monument in a serious and more direct way. In studying ancient art, a great deal of what we work with is a series of monuments raised by political agents or various communities in the past. These monuments somehow relate to and often configure a society's relationship to the past, presenting to its audience(s) contested versions of that past. For this reason, monuments are inherently political, and entangled with issues of memory and history. If we associate history with official narratives of the past, and memory with collectively shared understandings of the past, how are the monuments shaped. Which of the two streams of knowledge production are more effective or more dominant in the making of monuments? Monuments can be complex like the Trajan's Column in Rome or Nereid Monument at Xanthos or the Altar of Zeus at Pergamon, or the orthostat relief program of Assurnasirpal II's Northwest palace at Nimrud, where narratives of the state is dominant and mixed with mythological or supernatural tales. Or monuments have a more symbolic or more spatial emphasis like the two monuments below: Mount Rushmore National memorial and Saddam Hussain's Swords of Qadissiya, a.k.a. Hands of Victory- both spatial interventions to the public sphere, configuring spaces with complex political ideologies. They both link themselves old media of representation: ironically first one rock reliefs of the Middle East, the second one triumphal arches of the Roman Empire.
There are other types of monuments too such as spontaneous monuments- which are made up of accumulations of memory objects into an intensely emotional memorial. So the question of the monuments is rich. The examples that are drawn from the ancient Near East are the obelisk, the kudurru, and the stele (we will add the rock relief to this list in 2 weeks). What exactly was the function of these monuments and the images and texts that were inscribed on them. Who were their publics? Did they constitute centers or boundaries?
