(piano music) Voiceover: We're in the
Louvre in Paris that holds one of the most important collections of clay vessels from Ancient Susa. Voiceover: Ancient Susa
is in modern day Iran, going back about 6,000
years to 4,000 B.C.E., and we're looking at a beautiful beaker decorated with animal forms
and geometric patterns. Voiceover: So, 6,000 years
ago, this is right at the cusp of the Neolithic
and the Historical Era, just before the great
cities of Mesopotamia rise. Voiceover: In fact, this area
at certain moments in history becomes politically part
of southern Mesopotamia, the cities of Uruk and
Ur, but at this point, 4,000 B.C.E, this is still prehistoric. We are looking at people
who lived in a very fertile river valley who painted beautiful vessels and buried them in their cemetaries. Voiceover: At about 4,000
B.C., we believe that they built a raised mound
and had a temple on top, and the whole area was
continuously occupied for about 5,000 years, so we have this extraordinary accumulation,
but when we dig all the way down, we get to
this pot and pots like it. Voiceover: And because
this is prehistoric, this is before writing
and we have no records of why they bury their dead with the pots, what they believe, what
their religion was, the gods or goddesses they were worshiping on that temple mount, but we do have extraordinarily beautiful pots. Voiceover: It's handmade,
it's clay, and it's painted. It's quite thin and it
doesn't have the perfection you get from something
that's made on a wheel, though some archaeologists
have conjectured it was perhaps made on a slow wheel, although others think it
was completely handmade. In any case, it was clearly hand-painted. Voiceover: The circular forms balanced by forms that are linear, balanced by geometric, hard-edged
forms, like rectangles. Voiceover: They mentioned animals but the most obvious is the mountain goat. The mountain goat occupies
the large rectangle, and the body is actually made out of two arcs to create this
very geometric form. Voiceover: But it's mostly
his horns that take up the...
(laughs) Voiceover: (laughs) Yeah. Voiceover: So, this is not a naturalistic image of a mountain goat. His body is reduced to triangles. So, very stylized images
of these natural forms. Voiceover: Nevertheless,
there is real detail here. We can make out the
goat's beard, his ears. We can make out his nose,
where his eyes would be. We can see the bush of his tail, and we see that kind
of detail in the other animals that are represented here. Just above the rectangle
that holds the goat, we see a band that
wraps around the vessel, that has a kind of dog that's
rather like a greyhound. Voiceover: Very thin and elongated, perhaps it's reclining,
perhaps it's running, and then above that we see wading birds with elongated necks. Voiceover: The necks speak to the verticality of the vessel, and the roundness of the horns speak to the cylindrical shape of the vessel. It's wonderful the way
these geometric elements reflect the shape of the object itself. There's this beautiful integration between the pictorial and the
actual body of the pot. Voiceover: Look at how
the tails of the dogs spin back in the opposite direction of the horns of the mountain
goat, of the ibex. But then we have these
things we can't identify, this criss-cross pattern
with these angular forms in the center almost looks
like stitching on a baseball. We see that shape
repeated on other vessels, so perhaps it has meaning...in fact, perhaps the animals
themselves had meaning, and were associated with different ideas, perhaps fertility, or water, because we know that those associations were made later on in Ancient Mesopotamia. Voiceover: Right, but
we don't know if those meanings are in play here in Susa. Voiceover: The name
"Susa" may be familiar, because later on it figures
in the Prophecy of Daniel, and it also figures in the Book of Esther, variously [Esusa], or sometimes Shushan. Voiceover: And in fact, the reason that these pots were found is because an archaeologist was looking
for the tomb of Daniel and came upon this extraordinary cemetary. (piano music)