It's something like 'chitlins?'
this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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To be fair, if those palm trees are intended to be full height, those are some exceptionally big adults, lol.
And we all know how exceptionally good and important it was for ancient people to have art with accurate and always on proportion perspective.
Oh, absolutely. It's directly proportional to their scientific understanding of the origin of mankind, lol. :P
I'm no expert in Babylonian mythology, but if this were in fact a depiction of giants/gods as part of their creation mythos, that makes more sense to me than the OPs insistence that the little one is intended to be a child.
It doesn't mean that there really were giants any more than the existence of a mythical Zeus means people could once throw lightning bolts for fun.
Just saying that the picture probably isn't intending the small ones to be children.
It really looks like a child and mother reacting to each other.
Eh, the "child" looks to have much more adult-like proportions to me. The head is to small.
But, as you say, analyzing ancient Sumerian drawings and interpreting them through a modern lense is guesswork at best. Especially since I assume neither of us have the context surrounding this image.
Your gut feeling is that it looks like a mom and child. My gut feeling is that that looks like a small adult. Without further evidence, we're just in a feelings war.
Which, to be clear, doesn't mean giants were real in either case. But ancient people pretty holistically believed they did, so seeing them depicted in art wouldn't be unusual.
Theu have limited space. The palm trees are just inteded as background. They could have made the people muuch shorter, but that would have made it difficult to give them more details. The workers are the main focus, so they are drawn/chiseled on first and then the palms were added to show an activity and fill in the background.
The kid looks like that because children are crazy hard to get right in art
We're both just guessing intent though, right? Is there any evidence for either position beyond, "that's how I feel"?
I'd be happy to change my mind if someone informed on ancient Babylonian art weighed in, but right now we're both just asserting why we think the picture asserts our interpretation with no basis.
When you look out the window, do you think the buildings and trees gradually get smaller?
No, but I also don't think their base lines up with something closer to me either. I get that drawing with perspective isn't something mastered in all cultures for all time, but without that it's an impossible distinction.
Do you think cultures have only ever done drawings of things in real life and have never depicted anything fictional?
Gods
As was said, perspective was not a thing. Also, date palms don't start tall. And dates are smaller than that. I'm pretty sure those are supposed to be dates.
Wasn't it typical to size figures by their importance? IE. Depict Gods as huge, Kings slightly smaller, etc?