Rendering the political aesthetic: Political legitimacy in Urartian representations of the built environment

Anthropological investigations of legitimacy in ancient polities have gener ally appealed to self-interested assessments of costs and benefits to expla in the commitments of subjects to a political apparatus. But ideological pr ograms also strive to create affective ties between regimes and those they rule by rendering the political aesthetic. From the mid-ninth to the lair s eventh century B.C. the Urartian Empire controlled the highlands of eastern Anatolia and southern Transcaucasia from the headwaters of the Euphrates t o the Lake Urmia basin, forwarding claims to legitimacy that redescribed th e political apparatus. This study investigates Urartian representations of the built environment in pictorial and epigraphic media in order to broaden anthropological understandings of legitimacy, pluralize our understanding of ideological production in ancient polities, and politicize the relations hip between artistic renaissance and state formation. (C) 2000 Academic Pre ss.