1. By: Katie Kozy

2.  Sumerian art is mainly about exploring and supporting the relationships between people, gods, plants, and animals  Sumerian art is represented in many ways  Almost all Sumerian sculptures served as a dormant or ritual equipment for the temples

3.  Clay was common in west Asia and stone was not, most of the earliest statues were made out of clay  Its hard to make sharp edges when working with clay, most of west Asia sculptures looked round and soft  When they started carving with stone the kept this round, soft look

4.  Sumerian craftsmanship was of marked excellence from very early times  They have the smooth perfection and idealized features of the classical period of Sumerian art  Painting and sculpture were the main medians used and art was primarily used for religious purposes

5.  A sculpture was set upon a mound and the platform built to support its crowning shrine was 40 feet high  Sumerian art had 3-dimentional statues made of marble with an obvious hierarchy  Some Sumerian portraits are in marble and others were in black-grey diorite

6.  Invasions of Semitic peoples, present day Iran and Syria, ended the last Sumerian golden age  Stone, wood, and metal had to be imported into Sumer  The vast royal cemetery at UR has yielded many masterpieces of Sumerian art  Outstanding among these are a wooden harp detailed with gold and mosaic inlay picturing mythological scenes on the sound box

7.  The tallest statues of the vegetation god almost about 30 inches in height  A number of statues and sculptures were religious and depicted the mother goddess

8.  Sumerian art was complex and ornate with clay being the most abundantly used material  Clay’s qualities determined their style of baked-mud building and the nature of their fine textured pottery  Clay was their most abundant material

9.  Excavations have unearthed great skill and artistry in Sumerian art  Sumerian art can easily be separated into ritual objects, state objects, and personal objects  Sumerian art forms reflect on the culture and lifestyle

10.  At Lagash a strongly modeled head of stone portraits a Sumerian man  Its large and widely spaced features set on a heavy round skull are revealed in relief and inlay work of the period  Among the other Sumerian art, one of the most sophisticated was the cylinder seal

11.  With the assent to power Sargon of Akkad Sumerian art reached new heights of expression particularly in sculpture  The Ziggurat Temple form was the most striking architectural achievement of the Sumerians  One Ziggurat at Erech extended over an area of half a million square feet

12.  Education. Yahoo  Cristalinks.com  Historyforkids.org  Ezineathicles.com  Google images