Word: glazes
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First among this class of objects should be mentioned the sculpture in glazed terra cotta. That people in Mesopotamia should at so early a date have mastered the art of glaze and been able to use it with such skill and control is almost as amazing as the perfection of the sculpture itself. Antedating the Assyrian and late Babylonian glazing by many hundreds of years, one finds here a fully perfected technique where might be expected the stumblings of a beginner...
...doubt the prime piece is the figure of a lion couchant in terra cotta with an all over turquoise colored glaze which has in time taken on an irridesence not unlike that of the Han dynasty in China. Here is a boldness of design, a delicacy and subtlety of modelling that makes it one of the great pieces of Babylonian naturalistic without being imitative, and conventionalized without being studied. It has neither the dull realism of much of the late Assyrian works nor the unnatural grotesqueness of many early Sumerian works; coming in the era that it does one finds...
Another lion figure of more elaborate design is worthy of earnest attention. This beast, whose body is covered with red paint and whose mane, head, tail, and paws are in a splendid, firm, yellow glaze, has not perhaps the natural grace of the first one but substitutes for it a force and feeling of austere power that the other lacks. If one allows the imagination to roam one can see here the beginning of the supremacy of realism in Babylonian and Assyrian art. This piece is not the conquest; it is but a preliminary invasion...
...which the diggers could find no obvious use. The peasants thereabout still living in a partly Stone Age condition solved the difficulties by exhibiting some of their own utensils of husbandry-flint-pronged threshing boards, wooden water jars, grain cradles, grinding stones. The relics, some of them beautiful in glaze and form, with an estimated age of 4,000 years, point to an ample trade with Egypt. They go automatically into the possession of the Turkish Government...
Potter Poor's method is Persian and difficult. Known today as "under-glaze decoration," his method involves metallic oxide colors which must fuse with a glaze fully to reveal their tones. Most pottery methods involve repeated firings, which allow plenty of time for the potter to decorate and redecorate if he is not satisfied. Not so with the oldtime Persians, and Potter Poor. He must do his decorating swiftly and surely, and only once, for the glaze must quickly follow and the piece be fired without delay...