The Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing some renovation works; so what better excuse for its Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art to loan 10 artifacts from its collection to the department des Antiquités Orientales du Louvre for a temporary exhibition that will run until the end of September? Great equally for children and adults: this is small & fascinating exhibition!
The objects that came across the Ocean, cover a period of around 5000 years and the Louvre has put them close to similar objects in its collection. In a very French way, they have called it “Dialogues d’antiquites orientales”. Instead of putting them all in one room, the Louvre has decided to do something much cleverer: they have distributed the objects between room 236 and 308 of the Ground floor of the Richelieu and Sully wings (they had done something very similar last year). This is a very sleek way to incentivize the visitors to survey the whole Near Eastern collection (and in a chronological order to boot); but more importantly, it is a way to provide precious context for each of the artifacts by pairing them with one or more objects from the permanent collection. It covers an area that goes approximately from present day Iran to Siria.
Some of the objects from the Met are exquisite. We have chosen five of them.
The silver auroch is kneeling on his tight robe and holding a cup in its hands. Although aurochs are now extinct, they were a common motif of the time (the Louvre has an older version). The one from the Met is from around 3300 B.C. In the Proto-Elamite art, also known as Susa III, it was common to show scenes from everyday life, but conducted by animals. It is believed that this piece was used during ritual to make noises. Whatever its purpose, it is superb and THATMuse favourite piece from the exhibition.
A head of natural size made of copper from about the 22nd century B.C. Because it is not common to recover bronze pieces of this size and quality from over 4000 years ago, this is the artifact that the Louvre chose to promote the exhibition. There is a bit of debate where this important official’s head is coming from. But the most likely possibilities are from either Tello in Mesopotamia or from Western Iran.
This ceremonial axe interlaces three almost fantastical animals in a lethal combat. On one side, a winged dragon with the body of a lion. On the other, a giant boar. In the middle, a muscular human with a two-headed eagle for a noggin. The axes were a symbol status and are found in the tombs of soldiers buried 2000 years ago. In that time, they believed in a Great Goddess that guaranteed fertility and fecundity. The half-human, half-animal genie in the middle is one of her acolytes and controls the natural forces that destroy the vegetation and checks the water, represented in this axe by the dragon/lion and the boar.
This curved vase with an animal at the end, is called a rhyton and the Louvre has many, especially Greek in the Galerie Campana (these are mainly in ceramic). But unlike most of these that were made for the common people, this rhyton, crafted for kings, is in silver. The cat-looking animal is a caracal, common in the Middle East and Central Asia. The vine grape on top is the obvious symbol of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and debauchery. Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian empire 200 years earlier, on 330 B.C., and the Seleucid Empire that followed him were heavily influenced by Greek art and traditions (something similar happened in Egypt, another of the territories conquered by the Great Greek), including the realistic treatment of the body, as this caracal shows.
Diplomatic gifts are nothing new: ancient cultures used to give them to tighten relationship with foreign kings or ambassadors while also transmitting the idea of their splendour and power. The Sassanids (they dynasty that followed the Seleucids and that were the last Iranian empire before the Muslim conquest) are no different. This silver plate showing a king hunting a deer is from around 400 AD. The king can be identified by the crown. His name was Yazdgird I, and he ruled at the beginning of the 5th century.
Come, bring your kids, and enjoy this exhibition: it is small, crowds-free and THATMuse found if fascinating!
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