Egyptian Scarabs from Western Asia from the Collections of the British Museum. Raphael Giveon.

The Guilloche

Antiquity ◽

10.1017/s0003598x00007924 ◽

1933 ◽

Vol 7 (26) ◽

pp. 184-189

Author(s):

Allen W. Seaby

Keyword(s):

Gold Foil ◽

British Museum ◽

Decorative Arts ◽

Geometric Construction ◽

16Th Century ◽

Single Row ◽

Western Asia ◽

Symbolic Content ◽

La Madeleine

Any child provided with his first pair of compasses essays a row of tangential circles: if he adds a second row touching the first and maybe a third row, he has constructed the geometric basis of the classical Guilloche. The term is sometimes used to cover not only circular bands but crossing ones as well, and interlaced ornament generally.While the engravers of La Madeleine were working on their bones, and the women sewing skins together with their bone needles, in Egypt and Western Asia the decorative arts were being perfected. Fig. I is a sketch of a motive on the gold-foil covering of a flint knife from a grave of the predynastic period. In Elam this can be matched on a seal with a pair of lions, ‘sejant rampant regardant’, their tails intertwined (fig. 2). A non-representational treatment is seen on an early Sumerian votive plaque (fig. 3). Disregarding its symbolic content, the strictly geometric construction may be noted. This ‘twist’, as a single row of circular bands is termed here, occurs in Cretan art of the 16th century B.C., and later, in Assyrian art. It may be surmised that, with other motives, as the rosette, lotus and palmette (but not the fret), the twist was handed on to the Greeks from the East. It reached Scandinavia, where it is found on hanging bowls, and is seen inlaid in coral at the base of the Gaulish flagon in the British Museum. The lip of that vessel bears a very rare variety of the twist, an angular one.

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Bronze-working centres of Western Asia C.1000-539 B.C., John Curtis (Ed.), 1988, Kegan Paul International, London (in association with the British Museum), 342 pp., 183 plates, $59.95 (clothbound)

Geoarchaeology ◽

10.1002/gea.3340050111 ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 89-93

Author(s):

Vincent C. Pigott

Keyword(s):

British Museum ◽

Western Asia

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X. The Deity of the Crescent Venus in Ancient Western Asia

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland ◽

10.1017/s0035869x00048115 ◽

1915 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 197-203

Author(s):

Joseph Offord

Keyword(s):

British Museum ◽

Naked Eye ◽

Western Asia

A Cuneiform tablet in the British Museum referring to the celebrated deity of the Babylonians, Merodach (who is identified with the planet Jupiter), states that he possessed four attendant dogs, and gives their names. It is possible that these represent the four largest of the planet's moons, because instances have been known of these having been discerned with the naked eye.

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