How can you make ancient Mesopotamia speak to modern generations? How difficult is it to present Assyriological-related issues to a large and non-specialist audience? These are but two of the questions that we asked to Eckart Frahm, Agnete Wisti Lassen and Klaus Wagensonner – the curators of a major exhibition currently ongoing (until June, 30th 2020) at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Through their answers, we learn more about the major challenges to be faced when showing ancient Mesopotamia to a modern public, understand how the exhibition was conceived and built, and discover what events will accompany it in the coming months.
Please tell us about yourself!
The three of us are all at Yale and, in different capacities, associated with the Yale Babylonian Collection. Eckart Frahm is Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Faculty Affiliate of the Anthropology Division with Responsibility for Research on Cuneiform Tablets. Agnete Wisti Lassen is the associate curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection. She has been at Yale since 2013. Klaus Wagensonner, who holds a degree from the University of Vienna, is a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale since 2017. After serving as a researcher with the Cuneiform Commentaries Project, he is now working on the project “Digitizing the Yale Babylonian Collection.”
Recently, you have been busy with the set-up of the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks. Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” (Peabody Museum, April 6 2019 – June 30 2020). Could you explain to us why did you decide to organize such a major event, and how you planned it?
The incentive to curate this exhibition was the decision, made in 2017 by Yale’s administration, to affiliate the Babylonian Collection with the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. The Peabody’s willingness to provide us with space in its large museum building gave us the opportunity to put on display a significant number of objects from the collection before a general audience.
© Klaus Wagensonner
From the start, we set ourselves the additional task of also producing a catalogue, to describe in some detail all the 150 artifacts on display and provide introductions to various aspects of Mesopotamia’s history and culture, both material and intellectual. Thanks to the fast work of our contributors, the catalogue (published by the Peabody Museum and distributed by Yale University Press) came out in time for the opening of the exhibition.
Throughout the process of creating the exhibition, we greatly profited from the experienced museum staff that helped us design it. The exhibition development was a pretty involved process. Over an extended period, we met once a week for several hours with the design team to work through every detail. We presented objects we had selected for display and received feedback on how to put them on view effectively and how best to communicate their stories. Based on our suggestions, the design team prepared detailed plans and layouts of the individual sections of the exhibition. We also included several graduate students in our work. During the Fall semester before the opening, we taught a seminar on museums and exhibitions, with a focus on our own. Each student picked objects that were scheduled for display, researched them, and wrote entries for the forthcoming catalogue.
© Klaus Wagensonner
How is the exhibition structured in its final shape? What is the common thread that develops from one showcase to the other?
The overarching goal we are pursuing with the exhibition is, on one hand, to make the long-gone civilizations of Mesopotamia speak again to a modern audience – hence the exhibition title – and, on the other, to present selected clay tablets, cylinder seals, and clay plaques from the Yale Babylonian Collection as the “miniscule monuments” that they actually are.
The exhibition is divided into several sections. Following an introductory panel that introduces the visitor to the geography of ancient Mesopotamia and the time range of the objects on display, and another panel on issues related to archaeology and cultural heritage, the first section of the exhibition is concerned with early information technology and writing. Here we present seals and sealings, the development of the cuneiform script, the materials on which the script was used, and its decipherment in the 19th century.
© Alberto Urcia
The second section deals with the supernatural world, from gods and heroes to demonic forces like the evil female child-snatcher Lamashtu. It includes two Neo-Assyrian reliefs from Nimrud showing genies facing sacred trees and, next to them, a screen that provides a reconstruction of their original colors. In the third section, on daily life, we move from the sublime to the mundane. On display here are a list of love incantations, cuneiform lullabies, a letter in which a son wishes his mother a 3600 years-long life, a riddle about an adulterer, and, a perpetual favorite with the audience, one of Yale’s famous culinary tablets. A video shows the preparation of a few of the dishes described, and a discovery table allows visitors to listen to the recipes in Akkadian. Visitors then move on to a section on politics and law, which provides them with a bit of a déjà vu by showcasing three documents related to Shu-Sin’s attempt in the 21st century BCE to build a wall against the evil Amorites. Images and texts propagating the official ideology of ancient Near Eastern rulers are contrasted with documents concerned with rebellions and acts of lèse-majesté. A penultimate section explores the trials and tribulations of Babylonian scribal students and illustrates Mesopotamian intellectual life, from astronomy and astrology to medicine and commentary-writing. Finally, we showcase the Babylonian Collection itself, with a focus on its origins in the early 20th century and current activities such as the Cuneiform Commentaries Project and a new project aimed at digitizing the collection, which started this year. This last section includes a cuneiform letter written in the summer of 1911 by the founder of the Babylonian Collection, Albert T. Clay, to the Yale Semitist Charles Torrey. Cuneiform is not as dead as it may seem.
The event is obviously open to all sorts of visitors, with many different backgrounds, provenance, and previous knowledge of Mesopotamia. Was the need of presenting Assyriological-related issues to such a large audience challenging? If so, which solutions did you find to make sure that Mesopotamia could indeed “speak” to everyone?
The Peabody Museum is visited by families, schoolchildren, and other people who normally don’t have any background knowledge on Mesopotamia. Engaging such audiences is indeed not easy. We have tried to contextualize the objects on display with the help of our introductory panels and additional text panels attached to each section. But having too much text is problematic in an exhibition, and so we have also used other forms of communicating information, such as video installations.
© Klaus Wagensonner
A video in the first section, for example, shows visitors how clay tablets and envelopes are formed, how cuneiform is inscribed on a tablet, and how tablets are sealed with a cylinder seal. The exhibition includes, moreover, a “discovery table” with touchable 3D prints of objects, something that is very popular with children, and two interactive terminals that offer activities such as listening to recipes in the original language, viewing 3D models of various artifacts, and virtually rolling a cylinder seal over a clay tablet.
© Alberto Urcia
Displaying cuneiform tablets in a museum may be particularly challenging, since their aspect may not be particularly ‘attractive’ and their content is not so self-evident. How did you make the tablets “speak” in the exhibition?
Around half of the exhibited materials are clay tablets, which means that an ordinary visitor would not be able to tell half the objects on display apart. A concern from the beginning was that one brown lump of clay after another would create a dull, monotonous ‘wall-paper’ and quickly make the visitor loose interest. We very intentionally used design, lighting, and color to counter this problem. The ambient lighting is low and the color scheme in the exhibition is dark, creating a cave-like effect. Using hundreds of spotlights, each object is highlighted and stands out of the dark background. We tried to make the objects – tablets, but also seals and plaques – look precious and enticing. People like to look at pretty things and once they are there, studying an object in detail, they also take the time to read the labels and the partial translations that accompany several particularly prominent tablets.
Another challenge was the size of most of the objects. They tend to be very small, and most of the seals on display are cylindrical and thus cannot be easily viewed. We reduced the distance between the display case glass and the objects by placing the vertical mounting boards in the middle of the cases. This allows visitors to get close to the objects, so they can inspect them in detail and see the tiny carvings and inscriptions. The cylinder seals we rolled out on a polymer surface, presented next to the seal. In several instances, we magnified digital rollouts of the seals and used them as graphics on the mounting walls. In one case we took a seal of 2.5 cm height and blew the digital rollout up to a height of roughly 130 cm, thus magnifying this partially translucent chalcedony seal more than fifty times.
Are you receiving positive feedback after these first months? Are you satisfied with the result so far? Is there anything that you would improve?
© Klaus Wagensonner
The exhibition seems to be quite popular. It is visited not only by individual museum-goers, but also, on a regular basis, by school classes and other groups. We have given many guided tours, which have usually drawn enthusiastic responses. People generally praise the beautiful display, are excited by the aura of the age-old artifacts, and tell us that they learnt something about a world they did not know when they walked in. Children are particularly drawn to the tactile and interactive elements of the exhibition, whereas adults tend to spend more time exploring the individual sections. Everyone likes the videos. Reactions in the press have also been overwhelmingly positive. More than a dozen articles on the exhibition have appeared, we have been interviewed by several radio stations, and excerpts from the catalogue have been republished in prominent nation-wide journals. One journalist sought more reflection about cultural heritage, but had missed the panel by the entrance to the exhibition that addresses this issue. It is clear, however, that any exhibition of this type requires choices with which not everyone will agree.
Are there any side-events and activities that you would like to describe to us – either some that already took place and of which you are particularly proud, or events that may take place in the future months before the end of the exhibition?
The exhibition has been accompanied by a series of programming events. There will be a family day in connection with equinox next year (March 20-21st 2020), which will include storytelling, a cooking demonstration, food sampling, a cuneiform scavenger hunt, rolling out seals, and much more. Similar activities took place on the weekend of the opening of the exhibition. Several Yale graduate and undergraduate classes have visited the exhibition over the past months, which we hope will contribute to more Yale students becoming interested in the world of the ancient Near East.
In February 2020, the three curators will host a symposium open to the general public with invited speakers to talk about “Women at the Dawn of History.” The event will be held in conjunction with the exhibition, but it is also part of the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Yale. In addition, Agnete Lassen and Klaus Wagensonner are planning an exhibition on women in the ancient Near East in in the collection space at Sterling Memorial Library. It will open early next year.
© Klaus Wagensonner