In the harsher conditions
of that other early civilization which for convenience we may
call Mesopotamian such sentiments could not exist. The two great achievements of
Mesopotamia, from Ur onwards, were the creation of cities and the invention of a
written language. The cities accumulated wealth, traded and fought with one another,
but, in so far as animals entered the Mesopotamian mind, they were symbols of
strength and ferocity. This is how they appear in the earliest cylinder seals, and they
continue to confront one.
The generalizing historian
must always be prepared for surprises, none more
peculiar than the discovery of a harp from Ur, now in the University Museum at
Philadelphia, which shows a strip comic of animals enacting human roles,
somewhere between Goya and Disne another in a manner that we have come to call
'heraldic'. In later Mesopotamian art lions are the chief subject of sculptured friezes,
and appear as guardians outside the doors of palaces and temples. The sense of
kinship with animals has been superseded by an overawed recognition of their
strength, which can be used to symbolize the terrible power of the king. Love has
changed into an exploitation of fear.
There is no need to
explain why lions and bulls were the semi-sacred animals of the
Middle East. Their strength and potency made them the obvious symbols for a
succession of warlike kingdoms. In Persia they might have had wings which would
have made them supernatural, but hardly more awe-inspiring. But it is worth
recording two curious episodes in the history of the bull as a symbol of power, the
first quite early in the history of the ancient world, the other very late. The first is the
introduction of the bull as a spectacle in Knossos, in about the year 1500 bc. Of this,
of course, we have no information except what is provided by scanty, and often
suspect, visual images. But there is no doubt that a bull was let loose in an arena,
where athletes, both male and female, teased it with extraordinary agility.
Anthropologists would no doubt wish to interpret this as some kind of religious
ceremony; but the Cretans of the second millennium seem to have been less
religiously minded than their contemporaries on the mainland, and, in spite of the
legend of the Minotaur. The bull-ring at Knossos was something unique in the
ancient world, and the forerunner of the Roman amphitheatre and the Spanish bull-
ring, with the difference that we have no representation of the bull being killed, or, for
that matter, one of the athletes being gored, although it is almost unthinkable that all
of them survived. Perhaps the Cretan bulls were more formidable than the
fragmentary representations of them in the frescoes from Knossos would indicate,
for almost the most magnificent bulls in art are on a work of Cretan inspiration,
although actually made in Greece: the superb gold cups (known as the Vaphio Cups)
found near Sparta.
