Following on from yesterday's post highlighting some delightful early Victorian animation toys there is this:



This represents the images found on an earthen goblet dug up during excavations at Iran's Shahr-e Sukhteh (the Burnt City) site, a Bronze Age settlement discovered first by Aurel Stein in 1910 and then extensively excavated from 1967. The site has consistently thrown up some quite amazing discoveries; evidence of brain surgery, the world's oldest backgammon board, the world's oldest known artificial eye, and this beautifully adorned drinking goblet depicting a goat in various stages of leaping up to eat tall foliage.

What makes the painting even more remarkable (and this is surely something the artist intended to achieve, probably by rotating the goblet between two hands) is that the images, when run in quick succession, transform into pretty good animation, easily the world's oldest example of the art form.

The World's Oldest Piece of Animation

Or is it?

Thanks Ferval for this.

Kind regards, Paul.

I was only out by 25,000 years!

I've been reading articles by and about Azema since yesterday and I have to say that the artistic renditions he and his colleague have created in order to illustrate (literally) their contentions are not exactly faithful to the original material. Interesting theory though.

An interesting thread. Does anyone know the likely origin of shadow puppets (clever coneys  like the  one Temperance posted on the relevant thread aside)?   Of  course they are later than the examples earlier on this  thread.   My laptop key*oard  is on its  way out - * denotes key  that won't print and  Windows is refusing to recognise a generic  plug in key*oard so I'm  not trying  to use quirky wording  for  the sake  of it  with 'coney'.