'Beyond Babylon' - Global Exchange, Early Version
By HOLLAND COTTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/arts/design/21baby.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Published: November 20, 2008
Réunion Des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, Ny
Influences from Egypt and Mediterranean Asia appear to merge in this container, from around 1390 to 1352 B.C.
Macroeconomically speaking, nations float or sink as one in a global age. Connectivity, we are learning, is the new history. But in fact this is nothing new. It has been true for some 4,000 years, and that is the subject of “Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.,” a big, prescient, concentration-taxing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology
This bronze and gold figure from around 1300 B.C., on view at the Met, came from a shipwreck.
It is the latest in the museum’s illustrious line of panoramic archaeological shows, and a direct sequel to the 2003 “Art of the First Cities,” which covered the third millennium B.C. Of American institutions, only the Met has the resources to pull off such projects, which depend as much on diplomatic clout as on cash, and which always carry the risk that long-made plans will capsize on the shifting tides of international politics.
“Beyond Babylon” has not escaped trouble. In a discreet wall card near the beginning of the show, the Met thanks the Syrian government for its willingness to lend important objects to the exhibition, but expresses “deep regret that recent legislation in the United States has made it too difficult and risky for the planned loans to proceed.” That legislation, an amendment made in January to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, permits private individuals claiming to be victims of state-sponsored terrorism to file liens against property belonging to that state while the property, which could include museum loans, is in the United States.
The Met submitted applications for immunity from seizure for all the borrowed foreign works — including pieces from Armenia, Georgia, Greece, Lebanon and Turkey, as well as Syria — but finally decided that the amendment jeopardized the Syrian loans, so decided not to go through with them.
These objects, 55 in all — stone sculptures; fresco fragments; ultrarefined goldwork, including a stupendous bowl from the ancient city of Ugarit — are in the catalog. There you can see how important a role they played in the internationalist narrative conceived by Joan Aruz, the curator in charge of the Met’s department of ancient Near Eastern art.
Still, with some 300 objects from other sources, there is more than enough material in the galleries to see and absorb. This is not a quick-take exhibition. Many pieces are small and intimate, made to be worn, handled and easily transported for sale or exchange: passed from hand to hand, from land to shipboard, and across seas to markets in other, often distant lands.
For viewers who equate archaeological with monumental, the reduced scale can require some adjustment. The allure of cylinder seals, tiny, carved objects that fully reveal their images only when an impression is made, may at first be hard to grasp. But just a glance at an impression taken from one northern Assyrian seal, of a lithe stag leaping through brush and, it seems, scattering sparks as he goes, will be a convincer.
If the size of such intricately made things encourages slow perusal, so does the proliferation of wall texts. Dense with place names, dates and information, they give the show the pace of a lavishly illustrated book, one composed of many short chapters broken up into subsections accompanied by occasional maps.
Using an acoustic guide, the museum equivalent of E-ZPass, will speed up the tour. But a patient, step-by-step approach, looking and reading and looking again, is the best way to track the complex cultural interactions that made the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean regions in the Bronze Age (roughly 2200-800 B.C.) the proto-global phenomenon that they were.
At the Met these interactions begin in Babylon, the melting pot city made powerful by Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.) and the source of an eclectic art. A bronze statue of a kneeling soldier, his face masked with gold, his finger to his lips as if asking for silence, was a votive offering to a Sumerian deity of an earlier age, while a ceramic goddess with wings and talons for feet is an exuberant arrival from cultural sources unknown.
Referred to by archaeologists as “The Queen of the Night,” she is so hybrid a creation that she was at one time labeled a fake. She is now considered authentic, but authentically what is the question.
Beyond this point, the geographic scope of networking expands exponentially, much of it driven by practical needs. The Bronze Age is named for an alloy of copper and tin essential to advancing technology, though its two basic ingredients were rarely found in the same place, requiring cooperative trade to bring them together.
Such exchanges also embraced all kinds of other things, from raw materials to manufactured goods to intellectual and aesthetic influences. And by the middle of the Bronze Age, the eastern Mediterranean was bristling with commercial interdependencies, each of which had its own links to far-flung inland sources.
Byblos, a coastal city in the Levant, just north of present-day Beirut, was a major supplier of raw materials to Egypt and a sponge for all things Egyptian. The Obelisk Temple excavated there has yielded hundreds of small male votive figures. (A handful are in this show.) Wearing cone-shaped hats and gold skirts, they clearly reflect Egyptian models. So does an exquisite gold image of a vulture with outstretched wings, though whether it was imported or locally made we don’t know.
Egypt itself functioned as a kind of cultural collection agency, equally in love with oldness and newness. Copper chests discovered in 1936 in a temple at Tod, near Luxor, were filled with non-Egyptian objects. The chest on view in the Met show includes Central Asian amulets, silver cups from Anatolia or Syria and fluted silver bowls with wavelike patterns associated with Minoan Crete.
Most exotic of all are the samples of raw and cut lapis lazuli, a blue stone mined primarily in Afghanistan. Some of these things were probably already antiquities at the time they were hidden away.
For a truly cornucopian example of multiculturalism, though, nothing matches the contents of the Late Bronze Age merchant ship recovered from the sea off the southern coast of Turkey. Discovered by a sponge diver in 1984 and considered the oldest surviving example of a seagoing ship, it probably sank around 1300 B.C., packed with cargo representing a dozen cultures, from Nubia to the Balkans.
Although the ship’s home port is unknown, it appears to have traveled a circular route through the Mediterranean and Aegean, stopping in Greece, Crete, Turkey, Syria and Egypt, picking up and unloading as it went. Bulk materials included copper ingots, Cypriot pottery, African wood and Near Eastern textiles, all for waiting markets.
Divers also found luxury items, possibly personal possessions of the ship’s crew and passengers. Examples of ivory containers in the form of ducks have parallels with Egyptian prototypes, but were probably made in Mediterranean Asia. The two sources merge in a figure found in a tomb: a nude female swimmer with a chic, Nile-style pageboy who is hitching a ride behind an ivory-headed bird.
More precious and enigmatic is a standing bronze figure of a woman, probably a goddess, her head and face still covered with the sheet gold that may once have encased her whole body in a radiant epidermis. The exhibition catalog suggests that she might be a talismanic charm intended to protect the ship from harm.
Harm came anyway, as it did to much of the Mediterranean world, around 1200 B.C. with the arrival of mysterious, sea-based invaders, who conquered most of the great maritime cities, interrupting trade and easy cultural exchange, and bringing on a dark age, a depression. The depression — or was it severe recession? — didn’t last forever. The passion for acquisition, exchange and accumulation survived it, as it always does.
This passion is, of course, our own. It is one reason that we can, if we try, identify with the diverse people who, thousands of years ago, made the objects in this show. The globalist, all-in-it-together world model they invented is another reason. Their dark age could be one too.
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Quite important an event. Here are more bonus items:
Photo by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY / courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
&
Past Perfect
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2008/12/08/081208gonb_GOAT_notebook_schjeldahl
by Peter Schjeldahl
December 8, 2008
“Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.”; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Artifacts; Art Exhibitions; Shipwrecks; Archeology; “Queen of the Night”
Archeology wonks aside, “Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.,” at the Met, is sure to beggar viewers’ sensibilities. Let it. The show is a rare chance to assess, at one go, what one doesn’t know about makings and doings in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, and the Aegean, circa the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Those were globalist times, on the evidence of cargo—artifacts from twelve cultures—recovered from a fourteenth-century B.C. shipwreck and displayed alongside a life-size mockup of the ship, as one part of a show that careens from Mycenae and Crete to Ashur and Ur. Battalions of pitilessly educational wall texts and labels besiege about three hundred and fifty often tiny, mostly terrific objects in ivory, gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and lots else. Duly benumbed, you may slip the odd item of power or caprice into a pocket of memory, to take home. I have dibs on the Old Babylonian ceramic relief of a naked, steamily erotic “Queen of the Night” (perhaps Ishtar, the versatile goddess of love and war) who rests her clawed feet on lions, flanked by owls.
- posted on 12/07/2008
谢xw介绍, 会有循回到西岸展出吗?
前几天在国家地理的网站看到video, 讲的是阿伊•哈努姆遗址, 在bluestone出产处。唯一完整的希腊式城市在中亚地区原巴克特里亚。从该遗址上,既可以感受到明显的希腊文化特征,也可以感受到当地文化的强烈影响。 其他阿富汗地区也有各种文化的影响, 希腊,罗马, 印度, 中国。
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mission/afghanistan-treasures/
现在在旧金山有展览“hidden treasure from the national museum ,kabul”
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2008/afghanistan/timeline.shtm
希腊風格的阿富漢古物。
- Re: 'Beyond Babylon' - Global Exchange, Early Versionposted on 12/10/2008
我这边巴比伦(伊拉克),你那边阿富汗,是不是这英美联军把别人
国宝都掏空掉了的:-?
草叶照片中的阿富汗简直比犍陀罗还古希腊嘛,简直就是古希腊的翻
版。这回巴比伦展,我看到了长羽的夜女王。看来夜女王的传奇渊源
流长,四千年前的文物,看着就有活了四千年的感觉。
要是大都会博物馆当年能把塔利班手下的两尊梵衍那(巴米扬)大佛
引渡出来,必能光耀北美佛教,也能救塔利班一劫,说不定九一一就
没有了,世界太平,阿拉丁不燃灯,繁荣也昌盛。。。
哈哈。 - Re: 'Beyond Babylon' - Global Exchange, Early Versionposted on 07/29/2009
这阿富汗国宝展览也转到纽约来了,昨天去了一趟,果然精彩。我记
得看到一尊阿芙罗狄忒,这回不说维纳斯了。
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/afghanistan_treasures/images.asp
要说犍陀罗,中国人说的是佛教,西方人说的是阿波罗。这草叶很久
没来了?
- Re: 'Beyond Babylon' - Global Exchange, Early Versionposted on 07/29/2009
她在中国上不了咖啡。也打算去看这展览。
xw wrote:
这阿富汗国宝展览也转到纽约来了,昨天去了一趟,果然精彩。我记
得看到一尊阿芙罗狄忒,这回不说维纳斯了。
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/afghanistan_treasures/images.asp 要说犍陀罗,中国人说的是佛教,西方人说的是阿波罗。这草叶很久
没来了?
- posted on 07/30/2009
rita 要去的话,那展览题头有一段诗体的话,我写在一张纸上,找不
到了。是说青年人火候要控,中年人正确判断,老年给意见,死而无
悔之类的。如果有可能,帮我再抄一下。
还有那个阿芙罗狄忒的全裸,想想前不咖啡讨论阿富汗的罩袍,这同
一个地理,人文天地果然不一样。我读洪堡游记,亚马逊原住民禁讳
穿衣,却爱纹身着色。他们说人穷,说穷得着半个身体的颜料都买不
起。尤其是在屋里,好象穿衣是蒙住什么不可告人的东西。
有可能的化也拍一下。大夏文化。先谢了!
rzp wrote:
她在中国上不了咖啡。也打算去看这展览。
xw wrote:
这阿富汗国宝展览也转到纽约来了,昨天去了一趟,果然精彩。我记
得看到一尊阿芙罗狄忒,这回不说维纳斯了。
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/afghanistan_treasures/images.asp 要说犍陀罗,中国人说的是佛教,西方人说的是阿波罗。这草叶很久
没来了?
- posted on 08/01/2009
As a child learn good manners
As a young man learn to control your passions
In the middle age be just
In old age give good advice
Then die without regret
-- Delphic Precepts
亚历山大当年是穿过阿富汗进军印度的,所以在阿富汗挖出这些多古希腊遗址也就可以理解了。阿芙罗狄忒的全裸是个出乎意外的很小(不到一尺)的石膏(plaster)浮雕。里面不让照相,拍了书上一张。
我很喜欢那几个女子象牙雕像:
Woman Standing on a Makara,
Begram 1st Century AD
xw wrote:
rita 要去的话,那展览题头有一段诗体的话,我写在一张纸上,找不
到了。是说青年人火候要控,中年人正确判断,老年给意见,死而无
悔之类的。如果有可能,帮我再抄一下。
还有那个阿芙罗狄忒的全裸,想想前不咖啡讨论阿富汗的罩袍,这同
一个地理,人文天地果然不一样。我读洪堡游记,亚马逊原住民禁讳
穿衣,却爱纹身着色。他们说人穷,说穷得着半个身体的颜料都买不
起。尤其是在屋里,好象穿衣是蒙住什么不可告人的东西。
有可能的化也拍一下。大夏文化。先谢了!
rzp wrote:
她在中国上不了咖啡。也打算去看这展览。
xw wrote:
这阿富汗国宝展览也转到纽约来了,昨天去了一趟,果然精彩。我记
得看到一尊阿芙罗狄忒,这回不说维纳斯了。
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/afghanistan_treasures/images.asp 要说犍陀罗,中国人说的是佛教,西方人说的是阿波罗。这草叶很久
没来了?
- posted on 08/01/2009
Thanks rita, 照片呢?书上拍的也成,等。。。
rzp wrote:
As a child learn good manners
As a young man learn to control your passions
In the middle age be just
In old age give good advice
Then die without regret
-- Delphic Precepts
这段话我最体悟第一句,三岁看老,也是最难的了。
亚历山大当年是穿过阿富汗进军印度的,所以在阿富汗挖出这些多古希腊遗址也就可以理解了。阿芙罗狄忒的全裸是个出乎意外的很小(不到一尺)的石膏(plaster)浮雕。里面不让照相,拍了书上一张。
怕我们谈的不是同一个,也许我名字记错了:)
我很喜欢那几个女子象牙雕像:
Woman Standing on a Makara,
Begram 1st Century AD
- posted on 08/02/2009
Aphrodite Begram,
1st century AD
Plaster
26.7cm
National Museum of Afghanistan 04.1.20
A SMALL STATUETTE of a naked woman cast from a mold. The left arm is stretched out, her hand holding a piece of fruit, perhaps a pomegranate. Her right arm is flexed upward, with her hand resting on the shoulder.
Ivory statues: woman standing on mysterious creature
根据展览的介绍,阿富汉是如此文化悠久丰富,又是资源丰实土地肥沃的国度,为什么落得如此穷困呢?是因为它历来都是一个兵家必争之地的缘故吗?
- posted on 08/02/2009
嗯,是这一尊,当时觉得蛮高,怎么会一尺不到?
在展厅中比照片就要醒目,也许是衬托以太暗的背景的缘故,灯光。
thx.
rzp wrote:
Aphrodite Begram,
1st century AD
Plaster
26.7cm
National Museum of Afghanistan 04.1.20
A SMALL STATUETTE of a naked woman cast from a mold. The left arm is stretched out, her hand holding a piece of fruit, perhaps a pomegranate. Her right arm is flexed upward, with her hand resting on the shoulder.
- Re: 'Beyond Babylon' - Global Exchange, Early Versionposted on 09/18/2009
去看了那个阿富汗的展览,好激动啊:)以为会是Ghandara的东西,还要早些,很棒。 - Re: 'Beyond Babylon' - Global Exchange, Early Versionposted on 09/18/2009
呜呜,浮生再多替俺看几眼啊。。我还说下月去纽约时看呢,结果一查,展览这月就没了. 有几件在Guimet 里看过,但单独的印象不深。。 - posted on 09/20/2009
浮生来纽约了,我今天才去看最后一目,看到更多的东西。
严格来说这也不是犍陀罗不犍陀罗的,西方自有西方的编目。中国方
面的书籍,除了犍陀罗就是佛,希腊文化嘛,也是大夏,文献是玄奘
的。当然西方文献会更丰富一些。
这回更仔细地看了草叶附的盘,也不是盘,反正铅皮一块。上头的图
形可夺目,第一眼让我想起魔笛那萨拉斯特的狮车。里头还有大母神
西布莉,应该就是夜女王啦。。。
Johannes Vermeer那个展还凑合?
Woman with a Lute
浮生 wrote:
去看了那个阿富汗的展览,好激动啊:)以为会是Ghandara的东西,还要早些,很棒。 - Re: 'Beyond Babylon' - Global Exchange, Early Versionposted on 09/20/2009
xw还去看了两遍,够有闲心闲情的了。Vermeer的Milkmaid我没来得及看,一共只有三个小时。
是,一说犍陀罗我脑子里就是佛像,所以觉着这个更有意思,再看展品的来历更让人心痛。 - posted on 09/21/2009
我再三登这一幅,里面的内容确实值得着摩。应该说,故事比古董本
身更耐人寻味:
Ceremonial Plaque depicting Cybele on her chariot, early 3rd century B.C.
Afghanistan, Aï Khanum
Gilded silver; D. 1/25–2/25 in. x Diam. 9 7/8 in. (1–2 mm x 25 cm)
National Museum of Afghanistan, Kabul, 04.42.7
Photo: © Thierry Ollivier / Musée Guimet
One of the oldest antiquities found at Aï Khanum, this spectacular disk depicts Cybele, the goddess of nature, and Nike, the personification of Victory, on a chariot drawn by two lions through a mountainous landscape. It is a remarkable example of hybrid Greek and Oriental imagery that typified the arts of Hellenized Asia. Ancient Near Eastern features include: the parasol—a royal symbol—here held by a priest; the stepped altar; the shape of the chariot; the scalloped pattern indicating mountainous terrain; and the moon crescent and the star. The cult of Cybele originated in Anatolia but had long been adopted by the Greeks. Also borrowed from the Greek tradition are the representation of the winged Nike, the bust of the sun god Helios, and the naturalistic rendering of the drapery and the lions. The overall composition of the scene, however, lacking any indication of perspective, is more typical of Near Eastern art.
孩子倒更钟意那个人头鸡身像,真弥合得维妙惟肖,为什么?
- Re: 'Beyond Babylon' - Global Exchange, Early Versionposted on 09/22/2009
ADD 一下,這次到上海無意碰到美術館的DALI展。
- Re: 'Beyond Babylon' - Global Exchange, Early Versionposted on 09/22/2009
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