The Treasure of Ziwiye

Abstract

The first account of the discovery of the Treasure of Ziwiye was published in two places by the then Director of Antiquities of the Persian Government, M. Andre Godard. The first, Le Tresor de Ziwiye: (Editions de l'Institut Franco-Iranien) gave the text of his lecture to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. The other was Le Tresor de Ziwiye, a beautifully illustrated book published at Haarlem in 1950 by the Iranian Archaeological Service. For these publications we are deeply grateful to M. Godard. I need not describe this collection in detail, only mention that it consists of objects of gold, ivory and bronze of great beauty, variety and interest which were discovered, unfortunately in the course of clandestine excavations, at Ziwiye near Sakkez in Azerbaijan 120 km. south east of Lake Urmia. It is now dispersed, some pieces being in Teheran, others in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, others elsewhere. According to M. Godard, some of the pieces, e.g., those of ivory, are Assyrian work of the ninth-eighth century B.C., and were exported from Assyria to Sakkez. The other objects, in M. Godard's view, belong to the ninth century, or in some cases to the seventh century B.C. The fact that some of these pieces contain motifs and features hitherto regarded as characteristic of Phoenician, or in other cases of Scythian art of the sixth century B.C., is explained by M. Godard by means of a new and striking theory: that we have (except in the case of the ivories, which he considers Assyrian) in these mixed works of art examples of the native art of the kingdom of Mannai, an art which later was appropriated or copied by the immigrating Scythian tribes, who afterwards dispersed it widely, and thereby caused it to be known to the modern world as Scythian. I shall not discuss this theory here, I shall offer only some notes about the dating.