Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant [Hardcover]

Communities of Style?examines the production and circulation of portable luxury goods throughout the Levant in the early Iron Age (1200600 BCE). In particular it focuses on how societies in flux came together around the material effects of art and style, and their role in collective memory.

Marian H. Feldman brings her dual training as an art historian and an archaeologist to bear on the networks that were essential to the movement and trade of luxury goodsparticularly ivories and metal worksand how they were also central to community formation. The interest in, and relationships to, these art objects, Feldman shows, led to wide-ranging interactions and transformations both within and between communities. Ultimately, she argues, the production and movement of luxury goods in the period demands a rethinking of our very geo-cultural conception of the Levant, as well as its influence beyond what have traditionally been thought of as its borders.

Marian H. Feldmanis professor of Near Eastern studies and art history at Johns Hopkins University.

List of Illustrations
Authors Note
Acknowledgments
?
Introduction
Ivories and Metalworks in a Levantine Context
Networks and Communities in the Early Iron Age
?
1? ?Workshops, Connoisseurship, and Levantine Style(s)
First-Millennium Levantine Ivories
Connoisseurship and the Study of the Ancient Near East
Attributing Levantine Ivories
The Mobility of Style
Slippery Identities
Conclusions
?
2? ?Levantine Stylistic Practices in Collective Memory
The Problem of Artistic Intentionality
Rendering Animals and the Logic of Stylistic Practice
Habitus in Levantine Style
Stylistic Practices in Collective Memory
Late Bronze Age Memories in the Early Iron Age
Continuity, Rediscovery, or Invention?
Remembering a Golden Age
Conclusions
?
3? ?Creating Assyria in Its Own Image
An Assyrian Court Style
Assyrian Represl+