Children of the Gods

SUMER: THE DAWN OF ART (397 pp.) --Andre Parrot--Golden Press ($20).

"If Delacroix, a hundred years ago, had been shown the works illustrated in this volume, he would not have seen them," writes Andre Malraux in his introduction. "They lay outside his range of vision and, had his attention been directed to them, they would have seemed to him devoid of any esthetic value." Half a century ago, the civilization of Sumer was scarcely known; more important, the vision of even Europe's finest artists was almost entirely bound by their own tradition. It has long been Malraux's thesis that only lately has man been able to peer into the darkest crannies of history to see his art as a whole. This volume is the first of some 40 that Malraux and Georges Salles, former director of the National Museums of France, will edit under the title, The Arts of Mankind. The panoramic view of the human imagination should do much to bear out Malraux's thesis. It promises to be the celebrated "Museum Without Walls" reduced to paper.

Few publishing ventures have been more ambitious. The next volumes will range from Assyria to the post-Carolingian art that flourished around Autun; by the time the $7,000,000 project is complete, virtually every place and period will have been covered. With six publishing houses in various countries involved, each volume will appear in Paris, Milan, Madrid, Munich, London, New York and eventually Tokyo. For Sumer, Malraux himself chose the 557 black-and-white and color illustrations, often sending photographers back to shoot a particular work for a second time. Once Malraux was satisfied, the photographs were dispatched to the various publishers in specially upholstered, hermetically sealed trucks that were ordered to travel no faster than 25 m.p.h. This, it was decided after a 24-hour experimental run around Paris, was the maximum speed at which a truck could go before the precious cases inside began to jounce.

Constant Symbols. It was logical that The Arts of Mankind should begin with Sumer, for it was there, in lower Mesopotamia--the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers--that the world's first major civilization was born. The book might have degenerated into a dry catalogue of archaeological finds; but the author of the text, Andre Parrot, a chief curator of the Louvre, is happily free from fustiness. Text and illustrations have been carefully synchronized: what the eye reads, it can also see at the same instant.

The Sumerians invented writing around 3000 B.C., when their civilization was already nearly 2,000 years old. Even without writing, in every detail on every clay pot, they revealed a consistency about themselves. Neither the animal nor the vegetable kingdom had many secrets from them, and when nature was recorded, it was transformed into symbols that have run through every civilization. The racing antelope became a triangle, and four such triangles formed a Maltese cross; four women, their hair streaming in the wind, turned into a swastika to symbolize the cycle of life.

Clasped Hands. At the great city of Eridu, once dedicated to the god of waters, archaeologists have found no fewer than 16 temples built in successive generations one on top of another at the same site. The Sumerians created at Eridu, Nippur, Uruk, Ur and Lagash a complex of city-states more sophisticated than anything man had previously known. But however mature they became politically, they remained children of the gods. They portrayed themselves in statues with hands clasped in prayer, their huge, vacant eyes staring heavenward as if they themselves were in a trance. When it came to worship, all distinctions between rich and poor vanished, and the civilization was getting old before the individual presumed to proclaim himself. Even the greatest warrior hero, Sargon, left no known portrait behind him, and all the grand viziers of Sumer were made to look almost exactly alike.

The great exception to the rule was the master statesman Gudea, of whom 30-odd statues have been found--"the most impressive body of sculpture," says Parrot, "erected at the behest of a single man in a single space." But even Gudea has his hands clasped, for to the Sumerians the human figure was always the worshiper. Art was a bridge between the ephemeral and the eternal; a statue was, in fact, a liberation from the world of men to the world beyond.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.