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A Melting Pot
Ugarit (Ras Shamra) offers from the 16th to the 13th century B.C. a more colorful picture as it integrates a
cultural component until now strangely discrete on the territory of ancient Syria. This new element came from Egypt,
but it remained restricted to the coast while Babylonian and Assyrian influences were more dominant in the hinterland.
The Aleppo museum houses a number of sculptures, steles with bas-relief, and statues (often of bronze) showing
Pharaonic influence on the art of the Syrian coast, as well as aesthetic echoes from Anatolia and especially the
East Mediterranean:Cyprus, Minos and Mycenia, often redesigned to give an indisputable originality to the work
of bronze casters, goldsmiths, ivory sculptors and seal and cylinder-seal engravers of the Syro-Palestinian shoreline.
This phase of Syrian history witnessed a succession of Egyptian intrusions in reply to the often successful Hittites
attempts for domination.
They left behind treasures which are in the museums; the museum of Aleppo especially received, very interesting
clay pieces from ancient Emar.
The downfall of law and order in this part of the world, due to invasions from the People of the Sea, gave birth
to many small Aramaean kingdoms which were little by little dominated by the Assyrians. The Hittites cultural influence
imposed itself in the 10th and 9th centuries B.C. in Syria. They are the Hittites, called "hieroglyphic"
to distinguish them from the Hittites of the Anatolian plateau, before the catastrophe of the end of the 12th century
B.C., who ruled the major part of Asia Minor and wrote with cuneiform letters. Aleppo and the Louvre museums possess
beautiful collections of these basalt slabs, ornamented with strong relief, which were built upright on the bases
of walls of palaces and temples of important cities of Aramaean principalities, scattered throughout the Fertile
Crescent from the High Djezirah to the region of Hama. Starting from the ninth century, art is composite and bears
the marks of Assyrian, Egyptian, Syro-Phoenician additions (to the latter belong the wonderful ivory sculptures
of Arslan Tash of Damascus origin, exhibited in the museum of Aleppo), while Hittite influence fades out but prevails
in some Aramaean works.
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