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THE CLOTHED BODY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
17-19 January 2002Amy Barron
TorontoCeramic Boot Vessels - A Mystery Of Form And Function
Ceramic vessels in the form of footwear have been discovered in various parts of the ancient Near East and from a variety of chronological periods. While they come in a variety of sizes and shapes most represent boots with upturned toes. These interesting objects have often been associated with Mesopotamia, but comparisons with reliefs show this assumption to be incorrect.
Footwear had many symbolic attributes in the ancient world as is indicated in literary, legal and religious texts. Texts from Mesopotamia use the shoe as an idiom for taking a long journey. Hence, the wish that a sorceress might "place her shoes on her feet forever", in other words, she should go away and never come back. Another example implies the desire for one to have a long and safe journey by being "shod with everlasting sandals". Legal connotations were also possible as indicated by both ancient Mesopotamian texts and the Bible. For example, Ruth 4:7: "for the redemption and transfer of property to become final, one party took off his sandal and gave it to the other." Hence the discovery of these ceramic boots in funerary, and perhaps even legalistic situations is not without justification.
A careful typology of these boots reveals both their widespread geography, from central Anatolia to northwestern Iran, and chronology, 1800 to 800 BCE. Between these places and dates a great deal of variation in type and meaning exists. Their true symbolism, ritualistic, funerary or legal, may well be hidden by the lack of provenance of far too many of these artifacts. Further comparisons can be made to contemporary booted pouring vessels from similar regions, and later boot-shaped amphora from Greece and Etruria.
Clearly ceramic boot vessels as a group have a meaning and significance that goes well beyond their mundane appearance and surely deserve further study.