4 Ancient Miniature Animals + Luristan Bronze Zebu and Deer, Seljuk

Near East, Persia, Luristan; Seljuk; Roman. A quartet of diminutive cast animals, each no larger than a thumb, assembled across two millennia of Near Eastern and Mediterranean metalworking. The largest is a copper alloy zebu bull of Luristan manufacture, its humped shoulder, tapering muzzle, and crescent horns reduced to confident planes. Beside it stands a leaded bronze deer, likewise Luristan, with columnar legs and a small alert head. A Seljuk copper alloy horse follows, arched of neck and pricked of ear, its body burnished to a mottled olive patina. The group closes with a Roman lead alloy bird, a compact rounded form perched on a low base, perhaps a votive offering or weight. Such miniature animals often served as amulets, harness ornaments, or votives, portable talismans of herd wealth and fertility. Note the miniature scale throughout. The Luristan bronzeworkers of the western Zagros highlands produced some of antiquity's most inventive animal imagery between roughly the twelfth and seventh centuries BCE, casting horse bits, standards, pins, and small votive beasts by the lost-wax method. The zebu, the humped Bos indicus, was a marker of pastoral wealth across the ancient Near East and recurs constantly in Iranian highland metalwork. Cervids carried parallel associations with fertility and the hunt. The horse belongs to a much later horizon: under the Seljuks (eleventh to thirteenth centuries CE), Persian and Anatolian workshops cast small copper alloy animals as finials, weights, and ornamental fittings, often with the same taste for compact, muscular silhouettes their Turkic patrons brought from the steppe. Please note that items in this lot contain up to 73% lead. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 204628

Estimate:$300

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