This month we speak to curator Dr. Agnete Lassen about the Yale Babylonian Collection’s first permanent exhibition space at the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut.
Interview, images and video by Pavla Rosenstein
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What has been your path towards Assyriology and your current role?
I have my degree from University of Copenhagen where I studied Assyriology and Near Eastern Archaeology. I have worked at the Yale Babylonian Collection since 2013, first as a postdoctoral associate and then as a curator. I am particularly interested in seals, how they were used and owned, and what role they played as objects of prestige.
Dr. Agnete Lassen at the Yale Peabody Museum
What is the history of the Yale Babylonian Collection?
Since its founding by Albert T. Clay around 1911, the mission of the Yale Babylonian Collection has been to preserve and publish its holdings, to educate new generations of scholars, and to advance the understanding of ancient Western Asia. The collection consists of some 40,000 pieces, primarily cuneiform tablets and seals, mostly acquired through donations and purchases on the art market.
It is a legacy collection, which means it is no longer actively growing, although we will consider receiving well-provenanced gifts. The collection is located in Yale University’s central library, the Sterling Memorial Library, and it houses a storage room, workspaces and offices, and a research library with dedicated desks for Assyriology students. On a given day, typical activities in the collection can encompass teaching, imaging and digitization of the artefacts, exhibit planning and development, publication and editorial efforts, collection management, such as rehousing of objects, location tracking and processing of loan requests, as well as hosting visiting research scholars and day to day maintenance.
What are the collection’s and your current projects?
The last few years have been a whirlwind of activity for the Babylonian Collection. In 2017, we joined the Yale Peabody Museum, in the heart of New Haven. This gave the collection a new public-facing side and allowed us to showcase objects in broad, public exhibits. In 2019, Eckart Frahm, Klaus Wagensonner and I curated the special exhibit “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights of the Yale Babylonian Collection,” accompanied by a catalogue by the same name. In 2020, Klaus and I developed an exhibit dedicated to the “Women at the Dawn of history,” also with a catalogue, and just a few weeks ago, the newly renovated and free to enter Yale Peabody Museum opened with a gallery dedicated to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, co-curated by Professor of Egyptology John Darnell and myself with collaboration from Klaus.
In addition to these exhibits, we have made the whole collection discoverable through the Yale Peabody Museum’s online search portal. We have digitized the collection and are in the process of uploading digitized images to the online database. The digitization was made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council for Library and Information Resources.
We also decided to change the scope of the collection-supported publication series. We have changed the subtitle of Yale Oriental Series, YOS, to the broader “Cuneiform Texts” and the volumes now include text editions and treatments of seal impressions. The series is still published and distributed by Yale University Press. We have two YOS volumes set to appear this year, vols. 23 (on Middle Assyrian texts, seals and impressions) and 24 (on Late Babylonian administrative and legal texts).
How has it been working with an academic collection and a local public museum?
The Babylonian Collection is often described as a ‘hidden gem’ on Yale’s campus. While we encourage engagement with the collection, it is accessible only with a Yale ID and upon appointment. And so, while we have had various outreach efforts aimed at K-12 school kids and other public audiences, most people in New Haven will never have heard about the Babylonian Collection. On the other hand, the Yale Peabody Museum is the most visited attraction among school kids in all of Connecticut. Having a permanent gallery, there is a unique opportunity for us to educate and raise awareness of the ancient past in a much broader audience. In the development of the gallery, we have made efforts to involve stakeholder communities and hard-to-reach audiences. Some 10% of the labels in the gallery are community curated. They offer perspectives on objects and themes by people who were not part of the museum’s curatorial team, including, for example, an Iraqi chef, a Mathematics lecturer, an organic residue researcher, and a professor of Finance.
One of the centerpieces in the gallery is a 5×8 feet miniature cityscape called “Eternal Cities” created by Mohamad Hafez, who is a community leader, artist, architect, restaurateur as well as a Syrian refugee living in New Haven. The artwork incorporates almost a hundred seal impressions and 3D prints of Babylonian Collection pieces, reimagined as architectural elements in the cityscape.
Detail from “Eternal Cities” by Mohamad Hafez.
Until the end of June, we also have a special loan exhibit co-curated by Eckart Frahm, featuring the Cyrus Cylinder. While on long-term loan to the British Museum, one fragment of the Cylinder comes from the Babylonian Collection, and this is the first time the whole cylinder visits New Haven. The exhibit and the associated programming, which includes a symposium and big public lecture, has received more attention than anyone anticipated. The tickets to the symposium sold out in just a few days.
Joined Cyrus Cylinder fragments at the Yale Peabody Museum.
What were some of the considerations in curating permanent highlights of the collection
I did not want the gallery to be a chronological overview of Mesopotamian history. Instead, the gallery tells separate, stand-alone stories that highlight an aspect of ancient life in a way that is, hopefully, interesting and relatable for today’s visitors. Often, the themes include materials from different periods. For example, a theme highlighting the experiences of women includes objects from the late Uruk to the Hellenistic periods. Another case juxtaposes the development and uses of writing in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
There are many stories to tell about ancient Mesopotamia and it is not always easy to prioritize. To a degree, the selection reflects general interest in the collection and what is best known about ancient Mesopotamia: A small group of tablets stands out in the number of image requests and inquiries we receive about them: the Babylonian culinary tablet, YBC 7289 and the Gilgamesh Epic. We also wanted to showcase new research and so an installation using colored light shows the color scheme of two Neo-Assyrian reliefs based on pigment trace analysis recently conducted at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage:
What’s next for the collection?
Increased accessibility for the collection was a key motivation for the digitization project and the refocusing of the publication series. A natural extension of that is making transliterations and translations available online, both through internal efforts and in collaboration with external projects. We are collaborating with a number of digital projects, including eBL, CDLI, the newly established DigEanna, as well as others, for increased accessibility.
Provenance research will certainly also receive an ever greater focus going forward. We currently have a temporary provenance researcher, and we aim to make provenance information available on the online portal.
Ancient Egypt & Mesopotamia gallery at the Yale Peabody Museum
And finally, how can scholars engage with the artifacts?
The entire collection is discoverable on https://collections.peabody.yale.edu/search and through https://babylonian-collection.yale.edu. Our materials are also represented on CDLI, eBL, BDTNS and other digital hubs for cuneiform. We also welcome researchers and other specialists to visit and work first-hand with collection materials. We have traditionally hosted visitors working on the tablets, but in recent years, also our archives, terracottas and seals, in particular, have received increased interest among visitors.
For further information or to arrange a visit you can contact Babylonian.collection@yale.edu. We are also featuring highlights from the new permanent exhibition space as well as other artifacts and educational series at instagram.com/yalebabyloniancollection.