21 - METALWORK AND GLYPTIC

Summary

METALWORK

Without a body of material from controlled excavations in western Iran on sites of the 7th and early 6th centuries B.C. the special character of Median metalwork is still largely a matter of surmise. Western influences, from Assyria and Urartu, were undoubtedly strong, but the Medes were also heirs to a native tradition of fine metalworking for the moment known only from cemeteries of the late second millennium B.C. like that at Mārlīk in Gīlān. How this craft was transmitted and modified in the following three or four hundred years is as yet unknown. Of possible Median artefacts the most outstanding is the decorated gold cover for a short-sword scabbard in the “Oxus Treasure” (pl. 42). It is chased with a frieze of mounted huntsmen, who wear Median costume and what seems to be a version of the Assyrian royal crown. An elaborate beak-head border and rapacious bird-head terminals on the guard-cover also clearly illustrate the impact of Scythian art in Iran. But whether this is indeed an early 6th-century Median craftsman's work or closer in time to such scabbards clearly represented a century or so later on the Persepolis reliefs is an open question. Barnett has associated with it, as examples of Median art, the decorated gold scabbards from the south-Russian barrows of Kelermes, Chertomlyk and Melgunov generally, and more probably, regarded as the work of Scythian craftsmen strongly influenced by Urartian artists.

Although an ever increasing body of objects is available for study, it is no more easy to present a comprehensive and coherent account of Achaemenian metalwork. The exact locations of ore-sources are largely unknown, individual workshops have not been identified and techniques have rarely been studied. Many of the finest pieces are chance finds widely dispersed through the empire and beyond its frontiers, inhibiting the reconstruction of a reliable chronology and often obscuring the strength of provincial traditions of metal-working.