The Faience That Isn’t
In the Erzurum Museum, among the Kura-Araxes terracotta and the Urartian bronzes, my eye was caught by a very small object indeed: a faience vessel of Assyrian manufacture.
A word with the wrong address
Faience, in the Mesopotamian and Egyptian sense, is not what an English speaker usually means by the word, and the confusion is worth clearing up, because it is entirely the fault of the terminology.
Ordinary faience—the tin-glazed earthenware of European kitchens and delftware—takes its name from Faenza, the town in Emilia-Romagna that exported it. It is clay.
The material in this case is not clay at all. It is finely ground quartz with lime and alkali, coated in a glaze coloured with copper or iron and fired at high temperature. The result is a bright, faintly glassy substance: an imitation of precious stone—turquoise, malachite or lapis lazuli—available to a considerably broader slice of society than the real thing. Nineteenth-century scholars, casting about for a name, borrowed the Italian one, and we have been stuck with it ever since. Some specialists prefer glazed composition, which is accurate and has the disadvantage of sounding like a school report.
Vessels of this kind served as expensive tableware, as cult equipment and as prestige gifts. Their small size made them convenient objects of exchange and trade: they could hold perfumes, oils or pigments.
Assyria
Assyria was one of the key powers of the Near East in the second and first millennia BC. Its core lay along the middle Tigris, with major centres at Ashur, Nineveh and Nimrud, in what is now northern Iraq. In the ninth to seventh centuries BC the Assyrian empire reached from Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean to Iran. It was on Assyrian campaigns into Transcaucasia and eastern Anatolia that they collided with Urartu.
Nimrud, incidentally, is where Agatha Christie spent several seasons in the 1950s with her husband Max Mallowan, cleaning the excavated ivories with a knitting needle, an orange stick and—by her own account—her own face cream. The Assyrians thus have the distinction of having had their treasures conserved with cosmetics by the best-selling novelist in history.
Assyria could be merciless—the reliefs of sieges and executions are well known—and it could also be extremely practical. Its crafts, its architecture and its administrative system shaped every subsequent power in the region.
The people who are still there
And here is the part that tends to surprise. Unlike the populations of most ancient empires, the Assyrians still exist.
They are Christians, they call themselves Assyrians (or Suraye), and they still speak their own language: the Neo-Aramaic dialects—which are, as it happens, the living descendants of the Aramaic that was the everyday speech of the Near East for a thousand years, and the language spoken in first-century Galilee.
The twentieth century scattered them badly, and they are now concentrated in diasporas—Chicago and Detroit, Sydney, Södertälje in Sweden, and, since the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828, a noticeable community in Russia as well. Which means, among other things, that the closest living relative of the language of the Gospels is currently being spoken in the suburbs of Chicago.
What the empire left
The handsome little vessel in the photograph ties several strata of history together at once. It is a memory of the confrontation between Assyria and Urartu; of the trade roads that ran through Erzurum; and of a craft that could turn sand and copper into a bright, very nearly semi-precious shine.
And it is a reminder that what an empire leaves behind is not only its chronicles of glorious victories and inglorious defeats.
