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Palaeolithic people led an unsettled life; this nomadic society of hunters and gatherers has little control over their food supply. Beginning around 8000 B.C. however, people began to grow their own food, raise their own animals, and organise into permanent communities. Although, like their Palaeolithic predecessors, the Neolithic people (from neos, meaning “new” in Greek) used stone to make basic weapons and tolls, organised agriculture and animal husbandry left more time and labour for other activities, including the production of clay vessels. Since their size and weight made them difficult to carry, clay vessels are characteristic of stationary communities.

Neolithic villages made their first appearance in the Near East, an area consisting roughly of modern-day Turkey, Iraq and Iran. A late example of Neolithic painted pottery from this region is a beaker from Susa (present day Shush in Iran) dating to c. 4000 B.C. The highly abstracted animal forms contained within patterned borders are common to many works of art from this area. Decoration takes precedence over naturalism to create designs with beautiful stylised animals, such as the thin band of elongated dogs beneath a frieze of graceful long necked birds around the top of the beaker, and the marvellous ibex with circular horns, it’s body composed of two curved triangles, that dominates the large central portion. In contrast with Palaeolithic depictions of animals, which may represent attempts to control the animal kingdom, animals, now domesticated, seem simply to decorate this Neolithic vase.

Beaker. c.4000 B.C.
Susa (modern Shush, Iran). Ceramic, painted in brown glaze. Height: 11″ (29cm). Musee du Louvre, Paris

The Paleolithic peoples who created cave paintings were monadic hunters and gathers. Neolithic culture (New Stone Age), which first appeared in the Near East c. 8000 B.C. is characterised by settled villages, domesticated plants and aminals, and the crafts of pottery and weaving. The highly abstracted, stylised animals forms, representative of the “Animal Style”, and patterns decorating this Neolithic beaker from Iran are commonly found in workds from the ancient Near East. An ibex (wild coat), with enlarged, circular horns and a body consisting of two curved triangles, decorates the centre of this vessel. The top band contains skinny, long-necked birds, and, directly below, a band of elongated dogs encircle the beaker.

The early Neolithic agricultural communities gradually evolved into more complex societies, with systems of government, law, formal religion, and, perhaps most importantly, the first appearance of writing, thus marking the end of prehistory and the beginning of recorded history. The political structures alternated between conglomerations of independently ruled city-states and centralised governments under a single leader.

The city-states of the Near East frequently fought one another. In addition, the lack of natural barriers made the area particularly vulnerable to invasion. This almost constant warfare was a frequent subject of art. A further destabilising factor was the unpredictable climate; floods, drought, storms, and the like plagued the inhabitants of this region. This, they understandably tended to worry considerably about survival in this world - a world of invasions, political instability and natural catastrophes.

From about the fourth millennium B.C. the Sumerians inhabited southern Mesopotamia, a Greek place name meaning “the land between the rivers”, that is the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. They invented the wheel and a form of writing in which a stylus, usually a length of reed cut at an angle, was used to impress characters on wet clay. Cuneiform, meaning “wedge shaped”, which aptly describes the appearance of this writing, has been deciphered; our ability to read ancient Mesopotamian texts makes the ancient art of the region more accessible to the contemporary viewer than the art of prehistoric societies. Ancient near Eastern images usually have clearly structured compositions, ground-lines and readable narratives emphasising human beings, their history, and their relation to their gods and goddesses. All of these characteristics enable us to interpret the art more easily than the more elusive prehistoric cave paintings discussed earlier.