We continue our progress through the rooms of the Van Museum. After the accountancy toys of Early Bronze Age Dilkaya Höyük we come to the next chapter: the Middle Bronze Age, 2000–1400/1300 BC. Here craft becomes art, and form becomes a statement.
One of the leading players is a rhyton in the shape of a pair of boots. A rhyton is a vessel for libations: you pour in at the top and it runs out at the bottom, generally for ritual purposes. But is this a vessel? It is a joke. It is poetry in clay. Whose footwear is it—a god’s? a shaman’s? the potter’s own? We have no idea, but it looks cheerful.
A word that runs through
While we are here: rhyton comes from the Greek ῥυτόν, from ῥέω, ‘to flow’—it is, in effect, “the flowing thing,” named not for its shape but for what passes through it.
And that root has relations you would not immediately seat at the same table. Rheumatism, catarrh, and diarrhoea are all, etymologically, flowings. So is English stream. And so, most usefully for our purposes, is rhythm—ῥυθμός, that which flows evenly.
Which means the vessel and the beat are cousins. Both are named for the fact that something passes through them without stopping. Bear that in mind for the next paragraph, where the word turns up again on its own.
Geometry, movement, rhythm
Next comes a vessel painted with what may be a snake or may be a serpentine fish, and an ornament resembling woven cloth (first photograph). Geometry, movement, rhythm. Compare it with another vessel of the same period (third photograph)—restrained, very nearly severe. And against them both, a modelled, coal-black beauty on three legs (second photograph), as though it had surfaced out of the dark. Its origins may lie with the highland cultures of the Middle Bronze Age—the same people who left their distinctive painted pottery across the uplands between the Kura and the Araxes.
The cheerful department
And now the fun. A vessel in the form of a bird with beady eyes. A toy cart with wheels and a “driver’s seat.” And a whole flock of bird-shaped whistles.
Those whistles are worth a pause of their own, because they are the only objects in this room that were designed to make a noise, and they still can. Blow into a four-thousand-year-old clay bird and it does exactly what its maker intended. Very little else in an archaeological museum can be said to still work.
Artefacts of this kind are found throughout eastern Anatolia, but here they are striking in their precision and grace. And all of it is the same terracotta—the same fired clay as at Dilkaya. But how the style has grown!
All of this belongs to what the museum calls the highland cultures of the Middle Bronze Age: herders who took their flocks up to the summer pastures of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, north-western Iran and north-eastern Anatolia. Their pottery has a name of its own—Araxes painted ware, after the river we were discussing in the last post. And they buried their dead under kurgans; the panel beside the cases carries a plan and section of one.
The Turkish for those summer pastures is yayla, and it is not a museum word but a living one: the same high grazing, the same seasonal move, still made today. Four thousand years on, the route has not changed.
We are still in the Bronze Age—but we are already in a professional’s workshop.
