Wall Street Journal
Jan 6 2009

When Civilization Went Global

By MELIK KAYLAN
New York

The curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current show about
ancient Mesopotamia, Joan Aruz, is adamant that she intended no
political comment, explicit or implicit, on present-day Iraq. "In
fact, I try to create a haven from politics. I had the idea for this
before the U.S. even went into Iraq," says Ms. Aruz, the Met’s curator
in charge of Ancient Middle Eastern Art.

The Met’s "Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade and Diplomacy in the Second
Millennium B.C." is about more than just Babylon the city or empire;
it’s about the first "global" moment in civilization, which at that
time meant the Middle East and environs. "This was an international
age," Ms. Aruz says, "where the arts flourish through interaction and
mutual exposure and influence." Appropriately, the show borrows pieces
from 13 countries, including Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Georgia, Armenia
and Greece, as well as from the Met’s own collections. Its central
exhibits derive from the contents of a sunken trading ship from the
late 13th century B.C., found off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey —
a Bronze Age ship with a polyglot story that neatly embodies
Ms. Aruz’s thesis.

The first room begins the exhibition’s narrative arc by illustrating
how the Bronze Age could only have existed through the combining of
two raw materials found in geographical locations far apart — tin
from Afghanistan and copper from Turkey. And just as materials blended
to create bronze, cultures interacted to create a flowering of the
arts. We are shown that, at first, in the era of Hammurabi Babylonian
art adhered to strict local conventions — static scenes of warfare
and prayer to the Gods — that through the Bronze Age and over the
course of the show evolve and expand through exposure to other
traditions.

One moves chronologically but also geographically from regional city
to regional city, guided by objects that gain in sophistication and
beauty down the years. From Byblos in Lebanon come gold objects of
stunning artistry from the middle Bronze Age, early second millennium
— dagger, pectoral, pendant — that look utterly Egyptian. The
pectoral is topped by a pair of falcon heads looking in opposite
directions, and a falcon with intricately carved wings spreading from
the center. The pendant is a broad pear-shape of gold inlaid with
polychrome precious stones. From the temple of Tod, south of Luxor in
Egypt, come delicately fluted silver bowls, fine as paper, that
originated from somewhere in the Greek-Minoan world.

The show whisks us along on complementary interlocking narratives that
take the visitor down a spaghetti junction of cultural confluences. We
learn that in the 1950s a prominent Turkish archaeologist excavated a
site known locally as Kultepe. It yielded a vast hoard of cuneiform
tablets that record in detail the town’s trade in copper and numerous
aspects of its domestic life, including letters home — many of which
are on display. As a result, we know that Assyrian merchants in the
copper trade moved en masse to Central Anatolia and founded the town,
and many like it, to feed the burgeoning trade in what Ms. Aruz calls
"the luxury goods of the time." She adds that "potentates competed to
possess artifacts like these — the more distant and exotic their
origins, the more desirable because their possession denoted power and
prestige."

Visitors should, in particular, feast their eyes on the smoothly
burnished terra-cotta spouted vessels from Kultepe and Hittite sites
in Turkey. Outlandishly geometric and eerily modern, futuristic even,
they alone are worth the price of admission.

In following the visual motif of bull-leaping acrobats from Crete to
Anatolia to Egypt on everything from Minoan vases to cylinder seals
and carved boxes, the show makes the point that commerce in goods
brought with it commerce in entertainment, music, ideas, gods and
cults. Suddenly images of Sphinxes and Gryphons pop up all over the
15th-century B.C. geosphere, as do toys and board games and
educational institutions.

For the central exhibit of the sunken ship, the show actually
recreates a massive part of the vessel’s hull; you enter the exhibit
space as if through a hole in the hull. Within are videos and images
of the underwater dig from the site (Uluburun in Turkish). The ship,
run by four Canaanite owners, traded by hopping along the coastline of
the eastern Mediterranean. It contained, among a vast amount of
freight, 10 tons of copper and one ton of tin, the exact proportions
to make bronze. Other raw materials included 14 hippo tusks and one
large chunk of elephant tusk, glass ingots in various colors to
imitate precious stones, and various fully finished objects intended
as gifts or for personal use by the passengers who hailed from various
lands.

One object on board, a tiny item, is freighted with its own haunting
narrative: Queen Nefertiti’s scarab — which, after the downfall of
her husband, Akhenaten, was treated as cheap junk, to be sold with
other rummage in alien ports.

The show builds up to the final room — a treasure trove filled with
objects of wonder and masterpieces by any measure. The eye gets a
sense of what megawealth looked like in ancient times: Behold Egyptian
faiences — colored tiles, and objects that were made from
thousand-year-old Egyptian artifacts. See a boar’s tusk helmet, of the
kind mentioned nearly five centuries later by Homer as the helmet of
kings — each took 33 boars to make. And cast your gaze on perhaps the
most beautiful single piece of jewelry anywhere, one normally
displayed on a bust and often overlooked in the Met’s Egyptian
rooms. Here, spread like a fan, the headdress of gold, carnelian,
turquoise and glass that belonged to one of the foreign wives of
Thutmose III smites the eye. It is a tribute to a dazzling show and a
curator who knows her calling.

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

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