star." For man had already noted that round this as a
center circled nightly a ring of constellations. Here was
a visible guarantee of recurrent order in the universe,
reassurance that day would return after night, and above
all that the fruitful would follow the barren seasons.
Because the constellations went round and round, they
were thought of as a wheel, that important device which
had only recently been invented; hence the North Star,
seen as a spot, was depicted as an axle, that is, a rod or
pole. But the little triangle on a stick is also the arrow,
a major weapon of the time and so another fit symbol
for the Power.

The symbolic vocabulary in the first millenia of man's
effort to understand and manage the universe, was rich,
partly because play of fancy is in itself satisfying, but
fundamentally because, when one is trying to influence
the unknown, the more means of contact through which
to manipulate it, the better the chance of success. Hence
early prayers are repetitious, with multiple slightly vary-
ing names and qualifications for the divinity. Similarly
the sky, besides being symbolized by a mountain and an
arrow, was also seen as a bird with outstretched wings
( Pl. 3 ), and thus it is represented a thousand years
later, the bird highly conventionalized and endowed with
multiple heads, while between is the undulant water,
but falling like rain, flanked by coniferous branches or
trees. The moon, in addition to being a horned animal
and a lozenge, which divides into quadrants each the
replica of itself, is a tree on the mountain of the sky as
is the sun, the moon an evergreen because it is dominant
during winter.

Early pottery shapes were almost all imitated from
vessels in other materials -- wood, leather, baskets --
which man had used for thousands of years before he
invented pottery. The cylindrical goblet is a typical wood
shape. This deep jar is copied from leather; the bowl-
shaped bottom was a bag, rounded by pounding from
the inside to harden the material and make it more im-
pervious; the marked "shoulder" was a seam where a
ring of leather was attached, then stretched and turned
over to make the lip. But though thus technically deter-
mined by imitation from another material, and in that
sense accidental, the shape has a fortunate effect of
strength and inner energy which comes from the con-
trolled bulge of the lower body, emphasized by the con-
trast with the sharp edge above.

When another dozen centuries had elapsed, the pot-
ters had developed forms of their own determined by
their material and techniques, such as globular jars and
ewers. To one type they added a curious long, open-
topped channel-spout with a bulb at the base, balanced
by a high loop-handle ( Pl. 4 ). This, however, was no
arbitrary fantasy. The construction facilitates the even,
regular pouring of an impressively slow libation.

Ornament, too, is now becoming more free; for while
it is still symbolic, it develops details for the sake of
variation and invention. Thus the radiant figure round
the base of the spout very probably refers to the sun, but
the differentiations of the multiple concentric bands are
almost certainly decorative. Complementing the sun is
the horned moon-animal, now the bull (valuable by this
time in the herd economy), whose horns make the cres-
cent, and whose neck is arched to make the decrescent
moon, while the eye is drawn as a diamond. Alongside
is the field for which fertility is sought.

The bull as a focus of the Power was so important
that the idea had developed of the Primeval Ox, a
mythical creature out of whose blood had first sprouted
the useful plants ( Pl. 5 ), and so leaves are shown grow-
ing from the creature's body. Most interesting, however,
is the origin of this particular version of the beast,
for it bears witness to international exchange: it came
from the Indus Valley where the queer dotted shoulder
and rump, the single forward-curving horn, the series
of rings about the neck and the huge eye (because the
Power gleams out of the eye) had already been familiar
a thousand years earlier.

To the west of Iran painted pottery had long since
gone out of fashion and now, with the development of
the Iron Age, it begins to wane on the plateau also,
giving place to a burnished dark gray (carboniferous)
ware, effective artistically only by virtue of the widely
varied shapes. The pottery painter would not come into
his own again for nearly 2000 years.

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