Asian Art and Architecture: Art & Design 382/582

2 Great Bath Mohenjo-daro Indus Valley CV 2600-1900 BCE

4 Male Torso Harappa Indus Valley CV 2600-1900 BCE

6 Storage Jar Chanu daro Indus Valley CV 2600-1900 BCE

Trade and migration map

ceramic shards

The sculptor working down

In class you'll be taking notes on illustrated objects. A good way to deal with these will be by including sketches in your notes. Such sketching will enhance your understanding, as the high-lighting of picture captions in books-so popular locally-will impede it. As each discussion tends to draw on the past ones it is most important to keep your study up as you go along. I t is easier to follow what's going on in class this way, and a lot easier in studying for exams. Cramming 50 designs into your head at the last minute will crumple them into an unintelligible mash, and what isn't lost immediately afterward will be sadly distorted.

I recommend your choosing a study partner or two for this course. This is a useful way to learn the material and also useful in preparing for exams. One of the best ways to master such unfamiliar material is to be able to talk about it out loud, and the easiest way to do that—without arousing your house mates’ suspicions that you have joined an esoteric cult, when they overhear your muttering Sanskrit and Chinese terms—is to have someone to discuss them with.

In each lecture I will select four or five images that I will expect you to know for the examinations. I will expect you to be able to identify those works by name, period, period dates, and provenance (regional or textual source). In the rare case that it is known I will also want the designer. I will also expect you to be able to discuss each in terms of its social and art historical significance. That is, in terms of its manufacture, symbolism and use, and in terms of its fit into the historical development of Buddhist or national culture. There will be about 50 of these key works in each half of the course.

The course presupposes no previous experience with Asian traditions on your part. It does, however, require your interest in learning about the cultures involved, and your active consideration of the issues discussed in class.

I like questions. They will be welcomed in class. The idea of centering the course upon a dialogue in class is to make your questions an important element of the discussion.

Our assumptions are all suspect when we get into another culture. We must proceed on the basis of our assumptions, but keep them extremely flexible as we learn to alter them to fit in their new social context.

Lee’s Introduction p. 18

Okakura Kokuzo’s "Asia is one" and ideas of the "Oriental mind" are false. As were Coomaraswamy’s acceptance of them and his contention that the all Eastern artists worked in similar ways. Though much of the East —the Far East—developed far from the West until the unfortunate event of Western Imperialism, there are many contrasts in Asia as well. Aggressive materialism versus a supposedly self-sufficient spiritualism is not a true reality. Biases are common on all sides . Christians called other’s savages, but Muslims have not been much different about Hindus and the Chinese have always considered their nation the center of the world. This book doesn’t accept this attitude.

There are many different nations in Asia, an there have been many different visions in each, such as China’s many different ages. There were periods when Japanese art was seriously indebted to the Chinese and those in which it differed dramatically "not only in appearance but in motivation."

This is Lee’s intro. And it makes a good point. Though it does so by placing its rejected thesis into the mouths of a pair of Boston Museum of Fine Arts curators, one of whom had his entire education in the West. The fact is, these are old Western caricatures of Asia, not the view found in any strictly Asian source that I have found!

And this will be my point of departure. It is indeed very difficult to grasp such a large area with so many peoples and distinctive cultures. And what makes it most difficult is not that they have either a worse or better view of the whole than we do, or can, but that we must begin in the realm of our own cultures already well developed caricatures and stereotypes of both those other cultures and of our relation with them.

So I want to begin with a couple of simple of definitions and the attitude that we will try to approach our survey of a selection of what has been for us, the East’s most significant cultures.

Orientalism is the title now given to the negative and competitive attitude that has permeated most of the Western attitude toward Asian culture. More specifically, the Anglo-French-Germanic attitude. For as you realize without too much trouble, your idea of European culture is your idea these three of its many branches. You really don’t think of Bulgaria, Latvia, Albania, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, or the Ukraine when you speak of Europe, or of Mexicans and Brazilians when you think of "the West."

One of the things we will try to do here is to overcome soft stereotypes and replace them with more effective but limited terms that we can truly control To do that I will relatively regularly refer to the Orientalist traditions we are not trying to overcome. Lee often does a relatively good job at this, but as one of the most successful Orientalists of the last generation he is also sometimes guilty of it as well. As I may be. I am the generation of his students. And some of what I know I have learned from him.

The second thing I will do to try to keep our study concretely in control will be to select out of the great variety of materials his book does cover largely the Buddhist material that represent only one of its themes. There is no way to cover everything in Asia. As it is he leaves out Russia and Western Asia entirely and covers only the largest traditions in what is left. We must select and so I have chosen to select a tradition into which we can get a degree of contextual understanding that will carry over from one nation to the next.

And finally I am going to begin with the acknowledgment that what we are doing is not learning the art of the History Far Eastern Art, but studying some things about some of the imageries that have been most interesting to our culture. Lee, of course knew the title that his publisher stuck on his book was a misleading one, but he was willing to put up with that. What is more difficult to grasp is that he has built his history of South, Southeast, and East Asian art around a combination of the trophies that the West has taken from the region and monuments that its ruling elites have guarded most assiduously since. That is, it is less a history of the region’s art than a narrative linking its most prestigious artifacts.

Our response to that will not be to offer an alternative canon, neither I nor anyone I know has one available. And indeed many today feel such surveys must be incomplete and biased no matter how assembled. My alternative is to take advantage of his collection of well researched and photographed items and their centrality to our culture’s vision of those cultures and see what we can learn of them, without claiming that they are either the finest or the most typical works, but only that they are an enjoyable and revealing selection.

What we will study will be less the finite and difficult understanding of what these pieces actually mean and more the American educational ideal of how we can go about trying to understand and interpret the productions of another culture, and so by that means, understand other cultures and our relation to them.

In the West since the 18th century and in India itself for the last three millennia or so Indian history began with the coming of the Arya. But since around 1924 we have learned a good deal about the Indus Valley or Harappa Civilization, a late contemporary of the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near and Far East. From about the 7th to the 13th Dynasties in Egypt or the Neo-Sumerian period at Ur , there existed in the flood plane of the Indus river an archaic civilization of about the same social and technological level as those of the Nile, Mesopotamia. It was a community of farmers with some irrigation skills that covered an area about a thousand miles east to west and the same north to south and included a number of large settlements, some reaching as large as 50-60 thousand inhabitants.

The most striking aspect of both of its largest excavated cities is their use of a quite regular solar grid layout. Both Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were walled cities built of baked clay bricks, more or less square in outline and broken up into major and minor quarters by streets laid out in a rectalinear grid fashion, with the orientation established to accord with the observed motion of the heavenly bodies.

For the most of the period of their existence these roads were maintained unchangingly in the same, unencroached, locations. Only in the last century or so does the dogmatic regularity break down, as the people of the great cities migrated slowly back out into the local hinterlands.

/Lee’s attribution of the discovery to British and Indians, naming Marshall, the head of the Archaeological Survey of India, is a bit misleading. It was one of the few Indians allowed into the Survey, R. D. Banerjea, who identified Mohenjo Daro as the site of an ancient civilization and convinced the British to dig there. Banerjea was led to the site by finds of seals published without much interpretation by Alexander Cunningham, a half century earlier. Marshall then supervised and published the findings of a rather unprofessional excavation.

Interestingly enough there have been no unequivocally ritual locations found in any if the sites so far identified. There is in both Mohenjo-daro and Harappa a super block raised at the central west of the site that seems to have been the location of their administrative centers. On this so-called "citadel" at Mohenjo-daro the largest structure was a large tank, constructed of carefully fit and bitumen-sealed bricks suitable for maintaining a body of water.

Though even this was little larger than a big backyard swimming pool. The tank itself being only eight feet deep and 39’ x 23’ in extent. It was surrounded by a complex of smaller rooms that increased its overall size to x .

Though it is shear speculation to suggest, as Lee does, that there may have been reptiles kept here, it does not seem out of the way to point out either that ritual bathing is a prominent aspect of later Indian religious expression or that the plan—with its central gathering area and its surrounding enclosure of grided cells—is a model for many later Indian spatial organizations.

/Lee’s suggestion that the 21 bodies found by Mortimer Wheeler at Harappa indicate that the cities were destroyed by an Aryan invasion of around 1500 BCE is an attempt to salvage a guess that was already of date in the first edition of this book, in 1964. Carbon 14 dating makes it clear that the Indus Civilization and these cities were gone by around 1750 BCE. Our earliest date for the "Arya" is between 1100 and 1200. Though the fact is, we cannot be sure that the Indus Valley people themselves were not Indo-European speakers and so Arya themselves. There were no "waves." The Arya invasion theory, they shared with later Brahmans, was used by the Orientalists to suggest that Indian culture comes essentially from the West. A half-thousand year gap not withstanding in this case.

This 7" limestone bust, that Lee calls, speculatively, the High Priest was found along with several similar pieces, and is among the few survivals we can call sculpture. It’s design is "formal" or "hieratic." Lee links its "downcast eyes" to the later practice of yoga.

Let’s look at it. It is a solid block with few extensions that are not broken away. A thick head, a broad nose, eyes half closed and elongated, beard indicated by a striated pattern. It wears a robe that passes over the left arm but leaves the right arm free. The robe is covered with a raised trefoil pattern; bits of surviving color suggest that a paste may have been rubbed in between the raised ridges. It also has a ring attached to its right arm and its forehead by fillets.

If the half closed eyes suggest the trance state that is one of the later practice of Yoga’s goals, the placement of the forehead ring marks another of its elements. Yoga supposed a series of power centers in the body, called cakras or circles. The second highest of those cakras is located in the center of the forehead.

The red sandstone torso from the surface finds at Harappa, a second Indus Valley city, represents what Lee calls an organic style. He means that it is seems more intuitive and naturally representative and less conceptually geometric than the Limestone Bust. It is only 4" tall, and of a suavely naturalistic form. The only other naturalistic figure found in stone is of a dancer and not nearly so subtly modeled.

The holes at the nipples seem to be settings for some sort of addition. The drill circles at the shoulders are unexplained, though since they match as tenons the mortises of the neck above it can be suggested that they were for added elements, now lost.

Lee points out that there are suggestions that the piece may be later. There is little like it among the other Indus Valley Civilization finds. But on the other side there is nothing known in this stone among the voluminous regional finds of later times, and this would seem to exclude it from them even more strongly.

The copper dancing girl from Mohenjo-daro stands mid-way between the previous two in its degree of naturalism. Its head with its sensuous lips and nose and elongated, half-closed eyes, recalls the Limestone Bust. Lee connects her long twist of hair, bangles and lack of clothing with later Indian styles.

His other suggestions are a bit more confusing. He says "the type and pose...may be related to clay fertility images, such as those found throughout the ancient Near East." This is in line with much speculation in the Orientalist literature that Indus Valley art is modeled on art from the Iranian plateau to the west. The fact is, such clay fertility figurines exist in pre-Indus Valley times in India, and none of them, anywhere in the Near East or India has much real resemblance to this saucy dancer’s pose. The suggestion that her supposedly Negroid features may relate her to ethnic types forced out of the northwest by the Aryan invasion is similar. Are these Negroid features?

Or are they artistic forms we may interpret variously? That Indo-European speakers came by around 1200 is clear. That they forced anyone before them is not at all clear. The extremely important Rig Vedic hymns, that mark the passing of the Arya across the Indus region are in a language and ideology closely connected to that found among the Zoroastrians of Iran at about the same period. The speak of the difference in color between themselves and the darker people, with different gods, they met. They speak of vast warfare in which great villages with as many as three hundred and fifty people were conquered. They don’t talk of forcing migrations or of anything approaching the Indus Valley sort of population centers or culture can be recognized.

There is not a great deal of ceramic ware left from the Indus Valley Civilization, but the large storage jars, such as this 20" one did supply them with a surface to decorate. The lower registers contain simple geometric patterns. The upper register includes peacocks and pointed leaves that some students have likened to the leaves of the peepul tree. This is the ficus religiosa of the British, the same tree as the Buddha is depicted under at his enlightenment by later Indians and still the most holy of Indian trees today. I think the leap is a bit of a stretch. Though these leaves are pointed, they are narrow and the bodhi tree’s leaves are fat at the end opposite their narrowing.

The Indus Valley seals, as I have already described them, are among the most important and characteristic of surviving remains. The most common form, around 95 % (?), are carry the fantastic "unicorn" we have already seen. Though each has a different inscription, thus rendering each one distance. Were they clan or national markers with individuals indicated in the script? We can’t yet say. And despite Lee’s comment, none of the 7 major attempts to translate them have been accepted by any specialists outside of those attempting the translation. We are not even sure in which direction they are to be read or whether or not they are an Indo-European or Dravidian language.

The "two-horned bull," is a naturalistic representation of the standard male oxen of India and West Asia. We can see them represented two millenium later on the Appadana at Persepolis as among the tribute the South Asian region of Kandahar sends to the capital of Persia. The hump at the shoulder and the wattle beneath the neck are characteristic. And as always we are shown the male gender. The head is turned to the side to indicate its characteristic pair of horns. The marks above are among the 200 plus signs of the Indus Script. It is an 1 1/4" square.

Both of Lee’s illustrations show estampages taken from the intaglio-cut seals in clay.

There are on the magnitude of a dozen seals with human figurative imagery, four have a seated figure such this one, which is not only the biggest of those but one of the largest and most complex of all surviving seals. It is 1 3/8" square.

In the center is a humanoid figure seated in a cross legged position on a low plat form. It’s arms are out symmetrically to each side. It may be wearing bangles. It has a three-lobed crown. Some have read it to have three faces. Most agree that it is show as a male with an erect penis. These characteristics are common to each of the related pieces. This one is more elaborate in having a surrounding group of animals. Reading clockwise from the left there are a tiger, a human, an elephant, a rhinoceros and a water buffalo.

Lee calls the figure "Shiva " with a question mark "(?)." This is because both the yogic pose and the displayed penis suggest depictions of Shiva from the fourth century CE on. Shiva indeed is the great yogi and often shown with a displayed erection. But since we don’t know Shiva by that name until about the beginning of the common era and his earlier forms carry the Vedic title of Rudra, this seems like too much of a jump. We certainly don’t know what the being depicted here was called. I am using the name Pasupati, or lord of beasts—one of Shiva’s later names and functions—as a more general description of his pose and associations.

Whatever designation was given to this figure in the Indus Civilization, there are an interesting set of connections with later Indian thought. The surrounding animals, yogic posture and displayed genitals are certainly characteristics found in the later Indian gods if not necessarily the later Shiva.

When we look under the figure’s seat, we see a deer with its head turned backwards and opposite it we see the remains of another symmetrically posed deer, now lost with the lower corner of the seal. With this pair of animals and the figure in yogic posture we also have two close connections with the later figure of the Buddha that emerges in the first centuries of the common era. Like Shiva the Buddha is commonly shown seated in a yogic posture. When the subject is the Buddha’s first sermon, its location in the Deer Park at Sarnath is indicated by a pair of deer in just this fashion.

Is this an early depiction of Shiva or the Buddha? It is not likely, but this is proof of a striking continuity in India’s visual imagery and its cultural context.

Dating the Indus Civilization to the period of between 2500 and 1500 BCE by the fact of some seals appearing in the Akkadian sites in Mesopotamia, as Lee does, has not been accepted by Archaeologists since about the middle of the century. The Akkadian period in Mesopotamia is well dated by lots of contemporary documents and cross references. It stretched between about 2300 and 2150 BCE. Indus Valley Seals found in Mesopotamia go back to this period. The end date of the Indus Civilization is understood today by archaeologists to be around 1900 BCE as its earliest period is around 2600, by carbon 14 dating. Contemporary archaeologists have also found the village cultures that preceded and developed into the Indus Valley Civilization dating back several millenium, and the later village cultures that succeeded it down to the historical period, when cities once again began to grow. The Indus Valley Civilization is now seen as the urban peak of a muc