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kinship with animals has been superseded by an overawed recognition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.
