I just had a wonderful experience
going to the special exhibit Mesopotamian:
Inventing our World Exraordinary
Treasures of Sumer, Assyria & Babylon at the Royal Ontario Museum
(June 22 2013 to January 5, 2014). It is
truly a remarkable experience to have the opportunity to see some of these
wonderful works in Toronto. The show
spans the history of Mesopotamia from the 4th millennium down to the
capture of Babylon by the Persians, and explores the major trends during this
long span including the rise of writing, development of complex societies, the
nature and iconography of Meopotamian Kingship and Empire, and Mesopotamian
Gods and Religion.
The first section deals with writing
and displays some very small objects.
These clay tablets and stone cylinder seals richly reward examination as
they have been carefully chosen to show the development of writing from
pictographs to cuneiform, and then provide examples of every type of document
there is from the sublime (Epic of Gilgamesh) to the mundane (talleys of
beer!). Related to the documents are a
wonderful collection of cylinder seals which have been chosen well to
complement the themes of the show, allowing the visitor to understand that all
the visual arts were closely related.
The Ur room, displaying finds from
the Royal Cemetery of Ur excavated by Sir C. Leonard Woolley and his wife
Katherine from 1922 to 1934 for the British Museum and the University of
Pennsylvania Museum (now the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology),
dazzles with beautiful jewellery weapons and other objects which were interred
with the dead for the afterlife. My
personal favourite object is the oval golden drinking cup from the Queen’s grave
PG800. The long narrow spout must have been used as a
straw to drink beer. The exhibit
showcases numerous scenes on cylinder seals showing divinities drinking from
long straws. The chased decoration on
the delicate vessel is comprised of chevrons and double zigzags.
One of my favourite antiquities has
made the journey to Toronto from Detroit to be part of the show. The exquisite statue of Gudea King of Lagash
was acquired by the Detroit Institute of Art the year I first went to the
University of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor as a graduate student. This amazing statue made of paragonite
captured the media’s heart and I made several trip to the DIA to see it with
students, friends and family. The quiet
calm of the piece also has a wonderful sense of power despite its small
size. The artist used the natural veining
in the stone to suggest the woolly hat and fold of the mantle. It has its own space and the curators
appropriately chose it as the area to discuss the nature of leadership.
Close by, the statue of Ashurnasirpal
II 883-859 BCE stands proudly at the entrance way to the later materials
belonging to the Assyrian Empire. The statue
is identified by an inscription on his chest naming him and giving all his
titles and honours. The figure has a calm and powerful dignity even after so
much time.
The show stoppers are the large
scale fragments of the palace reliefs from the palaces of the neo Assyrian
kings. There are many interactive
components and animations which explain and literally bring the reliefs to
life.
The show ends with a discussion of
Babylon through time. There is a lovely
model of the entranceway to the Ishtar Gate and the ROM’s lion panel of glazed
bricks from the Southern Citadel dominates the room. The discussions of the hanging gardens and
the tower of Babel are interesting reading.
A show of this chronological and
geographical scope could easily have been confusing and jumpy and I have often
found that Mesopotamian materials are difficult to grasp in museum galleries
which do not have enough materials to convey the full sweep of history. But here the curators of the show have
avoided the usual pitfalls and centred the material on broad themes central to
the understanding of Mesopotamian material culture and history. While loosely chronological, they have not
been slaves to that organizing principal and allow you to build your knowledge
gradually. Having now seen the show
twice, I can say that it is a show that is comprehensible in a single visit (albeit a long visit as
there is tons of material to read, videos to walk and interactive graphics to
explore), but it really rewards a second
visit when you can look at the materials with all the themes in mind.
Throughout the show there are small
and extended references to the history of the archaeology of the area and the
present state of the area’s sites and museums.
These tie the complementary exhibition Catastrophe! Ten years Later: The Looting and Destruction of Iraq’s Past
developed, written and produced by the Oriental Istitute of the University of
Chicago, into the dialogue and when those images are contrasted with the
brilliance of the objects on display in the Mesopotamian show, the losses are more keenly felt.
All in all, I think it is a
marvellous show and intend to take advantage of it being here in Toronto by
visiting it many more times!
