All Things Assyrian
The Rise and Fall of Great Empires
By Melik Kaylan
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When John Kerry made a public appearance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sept. 22, he toured "From Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age," the new exhibition about the Middle East's ancient civilizations of the first millennium B.C. He had just delivered a speech in the nearby Temple of Dendur gallery on the danger ISIS poses to the region's heritage. His visit and his comments merely punctuated what any visitor to the show will feel: that it has a somber contemporary resonance no curator could have anticipated. "From Assyria to Iberia" features some 260 objects, most of them ancient, from institutions as far afield as North Africa, the Caucasus and the Middle East as well as the Met's own collection.

As the eye absorbs the resplendent beauty and ingenuity of the artworks made 3,000 or so years ago--the delicate ostrich-egg ewer, the grand statue of Ashurnasirpal II--the mind can't help pondering the threat to other such artifacts today in the exact area where the Assyrian and Babylonian empires flourished. You look at the displays, you imagine the ancient cities, the luminous ruins--Nineveh, Nimrud, Babylon--and you are grateful for the accidents that permitted the survival of what you see. You also wonder what the precedents from antiquity can teach you about the chaos of the present: What clues do the objects hold?

According to the show's chief organizer, Joan Aruz, "our intention was to focus on a time of transition, upheaval and globalization, how even as empires fell new entities rose, ideas spread, civilization took off in new directions which you can see in the shared motifs and aesthetics right across the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. This time also gave birth to seminal influences on Western civilization--from the Bible to Homer." So: a region of seesawing violence and destruction--an enduring refrain--also introduced a kind of productive, outward-rippling dawn. One can only hope. Meanwhile, we have a glorious view onto a distant epochal cycle that feels, at times, uncannily close.

The show begins roughly at the end of the Bronze Age (12th to 11th centuries B.C.) and the start of the Iron Age (1000 B.C.), the period immediately following the collapse of the Hittie Empire, when its leftover fragments formed little trading states that would soon be dominated by the last and greatest Assyrian expansion. Shared cultural themes begin to pop up across the region. In the first gallery's section entitled "The Age of Homer" we see, on a 12th-century ceramic, how the Griffin and the Sphinx have migrated as motifs to Greece from Egypt and elsewhere. Variations on these mythic figures percolate down the centuries from what is now eastern Turkey to the farthest western Mediterranean. Also in the first gallery we catch a glimpse of the Levantine Philistines of Goliath fame, who only lasted two centuries, notably through a coffin-lid with Egyptian influences. Those vectors of shared ideas, in other words, have been with us forever.

The second gallery introduces us to the Assyrians, already extant for over a millennium by the ninth century B.C., a cruel, domineering, highly literate and compulsively self-chronicling race. They found expression in the cultural selfies and YouTube videos of their time: cylinder seals, tiles, glazed ceramics and the like. That their civilization was centered for a while in what is now Mosul, Iraq, gives us pause. Many such objects would now be endangered--originating, as they do, from the famed palace of Nimrud and its environs. The familiar curly-bearded Assyrian statue style incarnates here as Ashurnasirpal ll, who made westward territorial gains that led to Assyria dominating the seafaring Phoenicians and launching its imperial fame by sea.

We forget that ancient art often featured lots of color. The show grants us tantalizing glimpses of original hues, particularly in the Assyrian tile showing a court scene from ninth-century B.C. Nimrud. In the YouTube video category would fall Assyrian bas-reliefs of war, a Pharaonic narrative style updated with greater realism and explicit violence--the kind of aesthetic innovation that lasted up to the Bayeux Tapestry and beyond.

For several galleries, the show dwells on the neo-Assyrian era (ninth to sixth centuries B.C.) and the globalized cultural epiphenomena of that time. Even conflict spread ideas. So we have a long look at the Urartu civilization based in what is now eastern Turkey around Lake Van. Also a warlike people, with a previous history of fighting the Assyrians to a standstill, Urartians left behind the most astonishing bronzeware in styles that recur far afield in Cyprus--helmets, shields, caldrons and the like. The next section on Sirro-Hittite statelets haunts the visitor on multiple levels. One particular object says it all: a large "Scorpion Bird-Man" sculpture, found near the now-troubled Turco-Syrian border and taken during the 1920s to Germany. It was hit by Allied bombing during World War ll and stayed in East Berlin in fragments until German reunification allowed its restoration through the sharing of expertise. In these galleries we also see images of the Bible's Jezebel, the first ever coins (invented in the kingdom of Midas and Croesus), the ur-image of the monster face that evolved into Medusa, and other wonders that stir tendrils deep in our collective memory.

From Assyria's zenith to Babylon's rise, the Phoenicians acted as the universalizing mediators of culture via the Internet of their time: the sea. They invented the phonetic alphabet. They founded Carthage. They took their multicultural spores to Etruscan Italy and as far as Seville, Spain, thereby feeding the roots of later Roman and Western art. Along the way, repeatedly, we feel the powerful charm of gorgeous or poignant objects, such as the exquisitely inscribed large seashells that are displayed together here but were found across continents. The most striking artifacts of all, for this reviewer, turned out to be the chunky gold bracelets and royal jewelry of the Carambolo Treasure, from an ancient Phoenician city that became Seville, Spain--it is the first time they've been loaned out, according to Ms. Aruz.

In the last galleries, we look at Babylon's rise in the region. We are shown, through a juxtaposing of ancient artifacts and Renaissance paintings, how enduringly it pollinated our Western historical consciousness. The brick reliefs of famous striding lions and models of the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way remind us that Babylon is still there in Iraq, for now. But for how long? Such thoughts build throughout the show. Ultimately we, too, feel on the cusp of history, and the objects seem all the more luminously crucial to our own sense of continuity.



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