MUSEUM

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East

"For over three centuries, the territories and trading networks of the Middle East were contested between the Roman and Parthian Empires (ca. 100 B.C.–A.D. 250), yet across the region life was not defined by these two superpowers alone. Local cultural and religious traditions flourished, and sculptures, wall paintings, jewelry, and other objects reveal how ancient identities were expressed through art. Featuring 190 works from museums in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, this exhibition follows a journey along the great incense and silk routes that connected cities in southwestern Arabia, Nabataea, Judaea, Syria, and Mesopotamia, making the region a center of global trade. Several of the archaeological sites featured, including Palmyra, Dura-Europos, and Hatra, have been damaged in recent years by deliberate destruction and looting, and the exhibition also examines these events and responses to them."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-between-empires-art-and-identity-in-the-ancient-middle-east-review-a-creative-explosion-where-superpowers-collide-11553633958?mod=MorningEditorialReport&mod=&mod=djemMER_h

‘The World Between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East’ Review: A Creative Explosion Where Superpowers Collide

An exhibition at the Met features some 190 spectacular objects made in important, and often contested, cities along ancient trading routes.

March 26, 2019 4:59 p.m. ET

The World Between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East

The Met Fifth Avenue 
Through June 23

The area in question goes from present day Yemen to Syria and Iraq, covering ancient trade routes that carried frankincense and myrrh northward, ultimately out to the wider classical world and even China. On the way, the camel caravans enriched pivotal (and iconic) oasis cities such as Petra in Jordan, Palmyra and Dura-Europos in Syria, Hatra and storied Mesopotamian centers in Iraq. Wealth of commerce inevitably made them strategically desirable, coveted, oft-times prone to conflict. Some of the locations have succumbed again to their intermittently tragic cycle, and the show devotes sections to several, not least Palmyra and Iraqi sites attacked by Islamic State.

The curators, Blair Fowlkes-Childs and Michael Seymour, both from the Met, are asking us throughout to view the objects against that background, often explicitly on wall panels. There’s a 12-minute video where three experts on the region’s sites discuss the destruction of recent years. Obliteration of history amounts to an attack on memory and identity, in effect “a form of genocide” says one. And there’s the room devoted to the Judean Bar Kokhba rebellion that was brutally suppressed by Roman legions. Domestic tools, mirrors and ewers, found in a cave where Jewish refugees hid, remind us of genocides long past and recent.

Stele of a Goddess (‘Goddess of Hayyan’) (first-second century Photo: Department of Antiquities of Jordan

Yet the show’s overall drift is chiefly about prosperity, pluralism and synthesis across 11 sections under such titles as “Southwestern Arabia,” “Nabataea,” “Judaea,” “Palmyra,” “Mesopotamia.” The statuette of a nude goddess in alabaster confronts you upon entry, her gold jewelry as well as tiny rubies for eyes and navel all intact. A cheerfully defiant survivor of the millennia virtually in mint condition, she could be Roman or Mesopotamian. She’s both. That her rubies likely originated from Myanmar makes her also a product of far-flung trade influences, her composite identity shared with the region’s adaptable population. The neighboring display of a Palmyrene woman’s limestone funerary statue—her garment folds aesthetically Greco-Roman, her facial expression local—tells the same story. Next comes a roughly carved incense burner from South Arabia sporting a man on a camel. Crude initiator of the region’s affluence, physically and geographically he bears the frankincense and myrrh that he burns as incense atop his vessel.

Incense Burner With Scene of Man Riding Camel (third century)Photo: Trustees of the British Museum

In that first section, “The Middle East between Rome and Parthia,” we see the greatest number and variety of objects, introducing the show’s broad themes and dazzling the eye. Ornate vessels and lushly hued glassware illustrate a standard of luxury comparable with the imperial centers. Textile fragments with dyes still vibrant reveal patterns and weaving techniques that originate on the Silk Road. A lustrous display of 18 coins chronicles the confusing pageant of Roman and Parthian emperors who came and went, ruling from afar. A man-sized legionnaire’s shield, originally discovered in fragments, speaks of beauty imposed by power.

Statuette of Standing Nude Goddess (first century B.C.-first century A.D.) Photo: RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York

As always from a close-up view of the ancients, we catch angular glimpses of our own times. In the “Southwestern Arabia” section, we note cubist, abstract objects born of austere desert conditions that evoke our early modernists’ love of pure and elemental lines. Beside them, we see realist or decorative animal bronzes that show clear influence from Rome and Parthia—and link to Western pre-modernist aesthetics. Then there’s the stele from Timna: ovoid eyes, oblong nose, dash mouth. Potentially inspiring to Picasso and Brancusi; emoji-like to us. We see something similar in the “Nabataea” section, a stele of a goddess with cartoonish lips and eyebrows from a temple in Petra. Such highly simplified faces were found on idols inside houses whose facades displayed more Hellenistic deities. Was it a matter of hypocrisy or perhaps subterfuge, public gods outside and the real ones hidden inside? We don’t know.

Shield (Scutum) (mid-third century) Photo: Yale University Art Gallery

What we do know is that in religion, as in art and identity, the region mixed and matched freely, tolerated, integrated and got on with the business of surviving to affluence. Nowhere was this more evident than at Dura-Europos, famous for its house-church where Christians worshiped when churches were forbidden and the elaborately decorated synagogue, all cheek-by-jowl with polytheistic temples. Luckily, many of its treasures were removed to museums in Syria and the West years ago. The site recently suffered virtual erasure by lawless wartime looting. Here we see household objects, narrative murals and colored ceiling tiles, and suddenly the city’s gift of courteous humility comes clear through to us. As with Palmyra’s glorious sculptures and Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets from Iraq, we are haunted by what we see and what was lost, thankful for the show’s bounty, and thankful in particular for the funerary bust of Bat’a from Palmyra, her character and beauty so distinct, staring quizzically into our conscience across the centuries.

—Mr. Kaylan writes about culture and the arts for the Journal.