ANATOLIAN ARTS

the arts and architecture of ancient Anatolian civilizations. Anatolia is the name that is currently applied to the whole Asian territory of modern Turkey. Its western half is a broad peninsula connecting the continent of Asia with Europe. Because the country lacks geographic unity, its component regions being widely differentiated in climate and economy, early students of antiquity doubted the probability of its ever having acquired an overall cultural identity and considered its contributions to ancient art to have been provincial and intermittent. Archaeological research in more recent years, however, revealed in Anatolia a deep-seated aboriginal culture productive of ideas that are reflected in the art of the peninsula throughout its history. Written history in Anatolia commences with the introduction of cuneiform writing (composed of wedge-shaped characters) by Assyrian merchants resident at Kanesh (Kltepe) and elsewhere in the 19th and 18th centuries BC. A conventional terminology is used in reference to the previous ages, knowledge of which is entirely dependent on the results of archaeological excavations. The earliest of these periods, the chronology of which is still imprecisely defined, are the Neolithic and the Chalcolithic. An Early Bronze Age takes up the greater part of the 3rd millennium BC. During the Middle Bronze Age the central Anatolian principalities with whom the Assyrian merchants were in contact were amalgamated in the Hittite old kingdom (c. 1700c. 1500 BC), and in the Late Bronze Age they made up the homeland of the Hittite empire (c. 1400c. 1190 BC). The seven centuries that followed are loosely referred to as the Iron Age. Additional reading General works on ancient Middle Eastern arts include Henri Frankfort, The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient (1954, reissued 1995), a full critical study by an eminent scholar, now somewhat outdated; H.A. Groenewegen-Frankfort, Arrest and Movement: An Essay on Space and Time in the Representational Art of the Ancient Near East (1951, reprinted 1987), a detailed study of aesthetic values and symbolic abstractions; and Seton Lloyd, The Art of the Ancient Near East (1961), a well-illustrated survey for the general reader.Ekrem Akurgal, The Art of the Hittites (1962; originally published in German, 1961), is the best illustrated book on the subject of Anatolian arts. Other works of interest include Maurice Vieyra, Hittite Art, 2300750 BC (1955); Maurits Nanning van Loon, Urartian Art (1966); and B.B. Piotrovskii, Urartu: The Kingdom of Van and Its Art (1967; originally published in Russian, 1962). Seton H.F. Lloyd The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica