Mesopotamian Art: From Sumer to Assyria

The earliest surviving works of art belong to the Upper Paleolithic, when groups of Homo sapiens across Europe produced cave paintings and small portable sculptures. The Chauvet cave, in the French Ardèche and discovered only in 1994, contains charcoal and ochre depictions of lions, rhinoceroses, and horses that radiocarbon dating places at more than 30,000 years old, making it among the oldest known figurative art. The Lascaux cave, in the Vézère valley and discovered in 1940, is famous for its 'Hall of the Bulls', while the polychrome bison ceiling of Altamira, in Cantabria, was made known to the scientific world by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola in 1880. Alongside these paintings, small carved figures survive, such as the limestone Venus of Willendorf, found in Austria and dated to roughly 25,000 BCE, and the mammoth-ivory Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, carved in Germany some 40,000 years ago and regarded as the oldest known figurative sculpture in the world.