Paris, Louvre

Persian soldier from Susa

It is hard to write a review of the Louvre in Paris, because it is one of the world’s largest museums. There are many departments, and each one of them might, in its field, have been a museum of the first order. For example, it is hard to find another Egyptological museum in Europa that equals the Louvre.

The museum also has a reputation for interesting expositions – one on Meroe and one on the archaeology of Saudi Arabia during my latest visit – and one ought to visit the Louvre twice a year to keep in touch. The people of Paris are unusually blessed.

Echnaton

If you visit the museum for the first time, you will be surprised by the pyramid-shaped entrance. Use the time you lose to pass the bomb check and buy a ticket to look at it, because it is a monument of the first order.

I already mentioned the Egyptian department, where you can easily spend a full day. There are portraits of the Egyptian kings and objects from daily life, and what is even better: the full history is dealth with, so you will also find objects from the first millennium BCE. The Greek, Roman, and Coptic age are not ignored either, although you need to go to Greek department for the royal portraits of the Ptolemies.

An Arabian warrior

The Egyptian department is deservedly famous, and attracts many visitors, who are usually exhausted when they are half-way their tour. Usually, they will take the shortest route to the exit, which brings them through the departments of Cypriote, Arabian, Palmyrene, and Phoenician art – which are, as a consequence, full of people who are not interested in the objects. That is pity, because these rooms alone justify a trip to Paris. Still, if you manage to ignore the crowd of tired visitors to the Egyptian department, you will certainly enjoy coffins from Sidon, Byblus, and Carthage, Nabataean inscriptions, and statues from Cyprus. One of my favorites is a relief of one of the divine triad of Palmyra. You will need half a day to study it well.

The Code of Hammurabi

Next to it is the Oriental department. The most famous object is, of course, the Code of Hammurabi. Don’t concentrate on the diorite monolith only, but also look in the small display in the same room, because there you will see cuneiform tablets with the same text – one of them written more than a millennium later and proving that these laws had become some kind of Mesopotamian classic, and it is probably no coincidence that the division of these Old Babylonian laws returns in the Ten Commandments.

Early Sumerian mask

The Code of Hammurabi was found in Susa, which is a prominent part of the oriental collection. You will also see a wall decorated with Achaemenid soldiers and cuneiform tablets from this Iranian town. Other important excavations are Mari and Khorsabad, but there is a lot more to see. There are also rooms devoted to Jordan and western Syria; they are not adjacent to the eastern Syria and the other Levantine rooms, which is a bit impractical – but the Mesha stela is worth the detour. You need a full day to study the entire oriental department.

Pompey

The Roman department is surprisingly small. Yet, there is a lot of fine sculpture, including a nice series of portraits of Roman rulers – including the emperor Inconnus about whom I already blogged. Next to it is a comparatively small Etruscan department. A galery of rather mediocre statues brings you to the room devoted to Roman art that was later restored, which is great fun: usually, you can immediately see which part is ancient and which is an addition. (Here, you will also find Canova’s famous Amor and Psyche.) You need about half a day to see it all, read the explanatory signs, and take your photos.

Alexander: the Azara herm

The Greek department is larger – you again need a full day to study it all. The two most famous pieces are the expressive Nike of Samothrake and the famous Venus of Milo. The latter is more or less the museum’s raison d’être. Napoleon had looted the Italian museums, but after he had found his Waterloo, all those works of art had to be returned. In an age in which it was believed that inspiration by great art created great minds, and that Greek art was the most inspirational, the emptying of the Louvre was believed to be a national disaster, but fortunately, the Venus of Milo was found. Now, France could compete again with the British, who had the Elgin Marbles. That the armless deity was a Hellenistic and not a Classical statue, was ignored – the inscription which proves it, is now conveniently lost.

Croesus

The Greek department also has some fine temple remains (from a/o Assos), the Tanagra statuettes that I increasingly love, and lots of pottery. Unfortunately, the rooms with Greek ceramics have rcently been closed. I haven’t seen the Croesus to the left for quite some time: last time, the room was closed to install better protection; before that, it was on loan to another museum.

The crowds are very large, and you may count yourself lucky that I did not bring you to the paintings. This makes a visit to the Louvre a bit difficult, and you must prepare yourself well; fortunately, the museum’s website is excellent. Four days is the minimum for the ancient departments.

Demetrius Poliorcetes

Finally, I must mention one little gem that is often ignored and where you can, consequently, quietly look at the objects: the room with metal objects. There is some fine silver work, but you will also see the helmet of a gladiator, a nice statuette of the Tyche of Antioch, the head of Demetrius Poliorcetes, a hoplite’s panoply, a curse tablet from the Crimea, Roman military diploma’s, and so on.

But unfortunately, that’s the only part of the museum where you will not meet many other people. In fact, the museum is too big, and I think that it would be wiser to split it into smaller museums.

A Little Known Roman Emperor

Inconnus (Museum Jára Cimrman, Prague)

Long time ago, we drove to Italy, and someone joked that he wanted to meet that miss Caduta Massi, whose name was written on so many road signs. It became a running gag during a great holiday: we praised the paintings of Vietato Fumare in the Roman museum of contemporary art, asked directions to the home of Senso Unico, and were happy when A.S. Roma finally bought a new striker, Totò Calcio.

Some time ago, I was in the Louvre to take photos of Roman portrait busts, when a Dutch tour guide parked her group next to me, had a quick look at the explanatory sign, and asked attention for the bust of the Emperor Inconnus. Unfortunately, that was not a joke.

Susa: 12 pages, 126 new photos

Mountain goat on a cup from Susa (Archaeological Museum, Tehran)

I finally finished my pages on Susa, the capital of ancient Elam, well-known from Greek, Jewish (Esther), Persian, and Babylonian sources. The site was in the nineteenth century for a very large part excavated by French archaeologists, which explains why so many objects are in the Louvre. All in all, there are twelve pages, which contain 126 photos made in Susa and the museums in Tehran, London, Paris, and of course Susa itself.

For a general history of the ancient city, go here. Other links of interest: the Acropolis (oldest part of the city) with the remains of the Dynastic Temple of the Šutrukids; the Palace of Darius I the Great with its Apadana and Great Gate, its splendid Soldiers’ Relief and the Statue of Darius, situated on a terrace. Across the river Shaour, you will find the Palace of Artaxerxes, and at the foot of the hill are the Tomb of Daniel, a Muslim shrine, and the lovely museum about which I blogged earlier. Your satellite photo is here.

Also available: all Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions from Susa:DSa, DSb, DSc, DSd, DSe, DSf, DSg, DSi, DSj, DSk, DSl, DSm, DSn, DSo, DSp, DSq, DSs, DSt, DSu, DSv, DSw, DSy, DSz, DSaa, DSab, XSa, XSb, XSc, XSd, XSe, D2Sa, D2Sb, A2Sa, A2Sb, A2Sc,  A2Sd. Enjoy!

The Awan King List & other things

The Awan King List

As the regular reader of this little blog will have noticed, I am currently occupied with all kinds of things related to the ancient city of Susa. It is almost finished.

Today, one photo of a well-preserved cuneiform tablet in the Louvre, which records the name of two times twelve rulers of Elamite princedoms, Awan and Simaški, who ruled in the last third of the third millennium. The text was written in the second quarter of the second millennium, by someone who will have been as puzzled by those names as we are: who was king Šušuntarana? what kind of man was Tan-Ruhurater? what happened to the dynasty after the reign of Puzur-Inšušinak?

There’s more here, but don’t expect too much; however, the real pages on Susa are worth waiting for. And BTW, I have moved the page on Kangavar to this place.

Motya and other Mediterranean towns

A Greek-Phoenician female mask; Museum Villa Whittaker.

Motya is a Phoenician city, situated on a small island in a lagoon in the west of Sicily. The city was destroyed in 396 BCE by Dionysius of Syracuse, but was not really abandoned: archaeologists have found villas from the fourth century. Still, the island had become more or less empty, and remained so until archaeologists started to dig. They found city walls, a port, sanctuaries, and tombs. The finds are now in museums on the island itself, in Marsala, and in Palermo. You can find the first of three pages devoted to Motya here; a satellite photo is here.

I was also occupied with Assos, in the west of Assos. We visited the site in 2004, and later, we saw many finds in the Paris Louvre and the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul. Everything is brought together on this page.

Slonta in Libya is one of the weirdest ancient sanctuaries, as you will see on this page; for a more regular ancient city, go to Roman Cordoba; and for the delighs of rural life, go to Suq al-Awty, which was part of the Limes Tripolitanus.

The regular reader of this blog will have noted that I am still moving pages. I still have 154 pages to go.

The Bloodsucker Award

I have never met Mr. Roger Pearse in real life, but I am a very regular visitor of his great website, the Tertullian Project, which not only offers a lot of information on the great Christian author, but also an impressive amount of online Patristic and other sources from Late Antiquity.

We have exchanged several messages and I imagine he is a mild-mannered, soft-spoken man, who will not be angry soon. I was somewhat surprised when I discovered that he also has a gift of satire worthy of Tertullian, when he announced the Bloodsucker Award on his blog, which he will award

to institutions in receipt of state funding which in order to make money violate their primary directive; to make books available and promote learning.

The first recipient is the John Rylands Library in Manchester; you can read Pearse’s story here – and he is absolutely right in accusing this institution of obstructing the cause of research.

Unfortunately, the John Rylands Library is not the only institution that forgets that the first and foremost task of libraries and museums is to allow people to investigate things. I can add several museums: cf. this posting about the Bundeskunsthalle, this one about the Louvre, and this article about three expositions in Paris by my friend Marco Prins. Of course these institutions have a responsibility to the tax payer as well, but the demands of a decent budget may never become more important than the institution’s primary directive.

Babylon Exhibition in the Louvre

The Codex of Hammurabi

The great Babylon Exhibition in the Louvre museum contains many interesting objects, but some of them are especially intriguing: they promise a story, but do not finish it. Take, for example, the request from the Babylonian king Burnabariash II to his Egyptian colleague Echnaton: will the pharaoh be so kind to execute two travelers, who have killed several merchants and stolen their silver?

That is all we know – the beginning of a story, but not the conclusion. Did Echnaton investigate the case, or was Burnabariash’ letter sufficient evidence? The only thing that is certain is that a Babylonian king in the fourteenth century believed his request was reasonable.

The Alexander Chronicle

All our knowledge of ancient Babylon is based on fragmentary data like these. Of course the inhabitants of the cultural capital of the ancient Near East wrote many texts. In the British Museum alone, some 100,000 cuneiform tablets are waiting to be deciphered. However, these tablets are often damaged. One example may suffice. In one of the displays in the Louvre is an ancient chronicle (photo to the left) that mentions Alexander the Great, but precisely at the point where it appears to mention the death of Darius III and the accession of Bessus, the text becomes illegible. There is a reference to Kidinnu – is it the astronomer? There is a reference to a plot – is the Philotas affair meant? We do not know.

Herodotus (bust from the Agora Museum, Athens)

Greek and Roman authors have given descriptions of Babylon, but often, they are unreliable. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (third picture) suggests he visited the city – although he does nowhere really say it explicitly, and merely makes remarks like “this was still the case in my days”. His description is full of mistakes. Still, several modern scholars continue to believe Herodotus’ tales, even now that we have thousands of cuneiform tablets that contradict him.

Archaeological research is difficult too. The rivers Euphrates and Tigris create problems, but the political situation is far too complex. At this moment, eleven teams are active, but it is not very inspiring that Babylon has for several years now been used as barracks by the forces that have liberated Iraq. The ancient city did in fact have the “honor” to be the first monument to be removed from the UNESCO world heritage list. Google Earth photos show how cars are riding across the ruins; a team from Germany is now trying to find out whether there’s still a possibility to recover something.

Researching ancient Babylonia and the roots of our civilization is, therefore, difficult, and this makes the well-balanced Louvre exhibition even more remarkable. You can see splendid works of art like the “treasure of Babylon”, which consists of crystal and onyx. Less beautiful, but very important for economic historians, is the archive of the Egibi family, a bank that was among the most important ones in the ancient Near East.

Tablet with a list of eclipses between 518 and 465, mentioning the death of king Xerxes (British Museum)

In one of the displays is the oldest tablet in which the zero is employed – not an Indian or Arab invention, as is often maintained. In mathematics, the Babylonians were very advanced; the same can be said about astronomy. (The photo shows a list of eclipses from the fifth century.) When Alexander the Great conquered the city in 331, he immediately ordered the records with observations to be translated and sent to Greece, where a pupil of Aristotle named Callipppus improved the calendar.

Cuneiform tablet mentioning the capture of Jerusalem in 597

There is also a wall of glazed bricks in the Louvre, and the visitor can also see a four millennia old wall painting from Mari. Right in front of it is the stone monolith on which the Laws of Hammurabi were writte, somewhere in the eighteenth century BCE. In another room, you will find Chronicle 5, which mentions Nebuchadnessar’s capture of Jerusalem (photo), and the blueprint of the Etemenanki sanctuary, also known as Tower of Babel.

Of course not many visitors can read those cuneiform tablets, but the explanations are clear. No visitor can be left in doubt: these objects really are the beginning of our civilization and much of our literature. In one display you will see the Epic of Atrahasis, a poem about the Great Flood that was composed about a millennium before the Bible – which actually quotes from the Babylonian text. It is also quoted in the Epic of Gilgamesh, to which an entire display is devoted.

In still another display are the fragments of the text known as “I will praise the lord of wisdom”, a poem that -like the Biblical book of Job- addresses the question how god can allow evil. Under normal circumstances, these fragments are not united, because they are in several museums. And this is an aspect of the exposition that somehow irritates me: why did we have to wait until 2008? It now turns out that bringing these objects together was easy – and it was always easy: of the 330 ancient objects, only 29 are not from the Louvre, the British Museum or the Vorderasiatisches Museum.

What the organizers wanted to show and what was the reason to organize this exposition, was the collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Iraq, which became accessible after the liberation of Baghdad. As is well-known, the museum was looted for three days – and instead of a splendid exhibition that would contain every important object, we are now left with an exposition that might have been organized ten years earlier. This makes the exhibition, impressive as it is, also a sad reminder that we have for good lost a part of our view on the roots of our civilization.

The website of the Louvre is incomplete, as it fails to mention that photography is strictly forbidden. If you want to study the objects at your leisure, you will be forced to buy the catalog, which is beautiful but of course never contains a photo of the particular details you would have photographed yourself. So, if you have already visited the main museums in Europe, or want to improve your knowledge by making photos, there is no need to go to Paris. Otherwise, there is no excuse: anyone interested in the cradle of our civilization, should go to the Louvre as soon as possible.

The exposition in the Louvre lasts until 2 June after that, it will visit Berlin and London.