March 13, 2008: World's Oldest Animation

[Clodfobble]

What is believed to be the world's oldest example of animation has been discovered on an Iranian ceramic bowl approximately 5,200 years old. Though it was found in a grave in the Burnt City in the 1970s, it was only recently that someone noticed the 5 images of a goat and a tree formed a series. Below is a panoramic spread of the ouside of the bowl.



Sadly, it seems that The Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization, which has just released an 11-minute documentary about the bowl, feels people are too dumb to look at a series of images, so they have released an artist's interpretation .gif of what the animation might look like, which is the primary image making the rounds with this news article. Except the artist's interpretation is actually pretty crappy, the most grievous insult being that it uses at least seven images to make the goat jump twice, when there are only five images on the bowl to begin with. Apparently they also claimed that the tree was a depiction of the Assyrian Tree of Life, which according to the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies is impossible, as the bowl predates Assyrian culture by over 1,000 years. (The offending .gif is too large to be attached here, but can be seen at the link above.)

Nonetheless, I think the little goat is plenty cool enough even when the hype is stripped away. Being on the outside of a bowl, the images easily could have been spun, which has been fueling speculation that a second piece could have been used to make the bowl into a proper zoetrope.