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Part I
Introductory
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1Curating the ancient Middle East1
Geoff Emberling and Lucas P. Petit
The ancient Middle East and museums
The ancient Middle East is a rich source of history and heritage for much of the world. Collectively, the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq (Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria), Persia to the east, the âlands of the Bibleâ to the west, Anatolia (the Hittites) to the north, and many others have come to define Western ideas about the ârise of civilizationâ (e.g., Breasted 1916)âthis is true even if we somewhat arbitrarily exclude ancient Egypt. It is also true if we stop the clock with the arrival of Alexander the Great in the region in 331 bce, as archaeological narratives often do.
Heritage connections to these ancient cultures are maintained today in some national and ethnic contexts in the Middle East (Iranâs connection to ancient Persia, for example, or the modern Assyrian communityâs connection to the Assyrian Empire) and in religious traditions. These connections are not universally claimed or maintained in the Middle East, however. But a claim on the heritage of the region is now ubiquitous in the West.
Among the many ways that knowledge about and memory of these cultures is preserved and presented to broad audiences is in museums in Europe and North America, as well as in the Middle East itself. Museums have developed relatively recently in western societies, with the rise of royal collections and cabinets of curiosities in 16th-century Europe (Impey and MacGregor 1985) and museums like the Louvre and the British Museum that became symbols of imperial identity in the centuries following. In an echo of these museums of empire, Ottoman Turkey established its own museum of ancient Middle Eastern cultures in Constantinople during the late 19th century (Shaw 2003; Bahrani et al. 2011).
Yet the preservation and display of material remains of the past have a much longer history in the societies of the ancient Middle East (Emberling and Hanson in press) and elsewhere (Kreps 2006), even older than the Musaeum in Alexandria as described by the ancient writer Strabo:
The Museum is also a part of the royal palaces; it has a public walk, and Exedra with seats, and a large house, in which is the common mess-hall of the men of learning who share the Museum. This group of men not only hold property in common, but also have a priest in charge of the Museum, who formerly was appointed by the kings, but is now appointed by Caesar.
(Strabo, Geogr. 17.1.8 [translated by Jones 1932])
Elamite kings in southwestern Iran raided the cities of Mesopotamia in the 14th century bce, captured monuments, and brought them back and displayed them in their capital at Susa (Thomason 2005).2 The Babylonian emperor Nabonidus (6th century bce) recovered artifacts found in renovations of temples and displayed them in the Temple of Shamash, the god of Justice, in the city of Sippar (Garrison 2012). During the Assyrian Empire, a massive cast copper head of an Akkadian king that was by then over 1,000 years old was set up in the temple of the goddess Ishtar in Nineveh (Mallowan 1936). And a king of the 2nd century bce recovered diorite statues of the Sumerian King Gudea of Lagash (21st century bce) and set them up in his palace in southern Mesopotamia (Suter 2012:69). These ancient displays, established and set up (as we would say, curated) by the kings themselves, made varied claims on the past and on their audiences. Some were propagandistic displays of royal power; others assertion of heritage connection with the kings, scribes, and artisans of the past.
Museums of these ancient cultures today establish different publics (Braae 2001), or audiences, and present more varied connections with the distant past. Museums attract large numbers of visitors and provide richly illustrated and authoritative accounts of topics of public interest. They are places to visit and even learn with friends and family (Falk and Dierking 2000), as well as places to stimulate interest and social dialogue. The stories they tell reveal as much about contemporary interests and concerns as they do about their ostensible subjects (e.g., Vergo 1989).
In part for that reason, museums are also increasingly the subject of critical scholarly interestâthey have become âgood to thinkâ (LĂ©vi-Strauss 1963:89). Most of the writing on museum exhibition practice has been done either by experts in museum education and exhibition, in visitor research and evaluation, or by scholars of museums (among many others: Bennett 1995; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006), rather than by curators, who have traditionally âfunctioned as arbiters of taste and qualityâ (Ramirez 1999:22). They have been the advocates who decide what was most interesting and valuable to present to the public (e.g., Davis 2007:57).
Yet the role of curators is under reconsideration, as many museums move towards greater emphasis on collaborative exhibit development that emphasizes social engagement and learning, as well as marketing and museum finances (e.g., Haas 2003; Shelton 2006:76; Schorch 2017). It is an interesting and important moment for curators to reflect on our practice: What are we trying to achieve? Where have we found success? How have audiences responded to our contributions? To what extent can we say that we have moved our museums from being âabout somethingâ to being âfor somebody,â as Stephen Weil (1999) asked (see now Silverman 2015)?
A community of curators and colleagues 3
In some sense the focus in this volume on curatorial practice in museums of the ancient Middle East is arbitrary. Curators working on other times, places, and media certainly have many of the same challenges and opportunities (see, e.g., Obrist 2014). However, curators who work with collections of art and artifacts from the ancient Middle East form a âcommunity of practiceâ (Wenger 1998).4 This resonant phrase and analytical perspective comes from theories about learning, and it proposes that we define values and knowledge relating to them through our participation in social networks. Wenger (1998:5) suggests four key terms that define social learning:
1 Meaning: a way of talking about our (changing) ability, individually and collectively, to experience our life and the world as meaningful.
2 Practice: a way of talking about the shared historical and social resources, frameworks, and perspectives that can sustain mutual engagement in action.
3 Community: a way of talking about the social configurations in which our enterprises are defined as worth pursuing and our participation is recognizable as competence.
4 Identity: a way of talking about how learning changes who we are and creates personal histories of becoming in the context of our communities.
Curators are members of a range of different social networksâwe are scholars (archaeologists, art historians, historians) who engage with scholars in a range of other institutions and disciplines; we are specialists with connections to curators working in other museums and other fields; and we are museum professionals who work with other museum disciplines ranging from exhibition, interpretation, and education, to conservation and development.
Curators working on the ancient Middle East are frequently in contact with other Middle East curators. We may see the exhibits that others have done, informally discuss the opportunities and challenges in our work, arrange loans, and we stay in touch.
However, curators working on ancient Middle East collections as a group rarely discuss or write about curatorial practice. By contrast, discussions of theory and method in archaeology, art history, and philology are common (and understood as necessary in those disciplines)âthe contrast is stark. This volume represents one of the first efforts to engage this community in broader discussion.5 With contributions from 20 authors working in nine different countries and working in national museums and university museums, museums of art and museums of archaeology, the essays in this book serve as a snapshot of the field in 2018, of how we curators think about our work and how we engage with other related communities of practice.
Who are curators in this community, and what do they do?
Many if not most of us currently doing curatorial work did not begin our academic training expecting to work in museums. Perhaps this will change with the recent growth of museum studies programs and the arrival of a new generation of museum curators who are versed in analytical literature about museums as well as knowledge of archaeology, art, and history of the region.
Curators are closely connected with our collections and with our institutions, as the essays in this volume show. We know the objects and have a sense of their interpretive possibilities as well as their limitations and challenges (like authenticity, for example). As a consequence, we usually take the perspective of our museums, whether we are telling a story about art or archaeology, for example, or whether our audience is a broad public or a narrower group like a university community.
Curators are also engaged with researchâarchaeological fieldwork and art historical analysis (Azara and MarĂn âMiro,â this volume) that may or may not be closely related to collections in our museums. We also carry out research on the collections themselves. Active research allows us to find and convey the resonant stories that the objects and collections can present, which may change with current events and interests.
Curators care deeply about the physical space of exhibits and the way that space engages our idealized exhibit narratives, but work as part of larger teams to install exhibits.
Finally, curators have an interest in audience response to our work, although as this volume shows, our engagement with audiences varies widely.
The Middle East has been very much in the news in recent years, and many recent events have directly affected antiquities, including the extensive looting of sites in Iraq and the looting of the Iraq Museum (see, among others, Emberling and Hanson eds. 2008), and the deliberate destruction of ancient and more recent monuments and museums in Syria and northern Iraq by ISIS (e.g., De Cesari 2015; Casana 2015).6 Public interest turns to the ancient history of the Middle East by these devastating events. We curators have opportunities to provide context to show other sides of the region and its history.
How we collectively have tried to do that is shown in part by the essays presented here, which we intend to represent the beginning of conversations surrounding curatorial practice. We have in some cases continued various well-established traditions of story-telling and display in our community. We often fall back on the role of the region in the ârise of civilizationâ (see critique by Petit, this volume). We tell stories of important sites like Babylon or distinctive ancient cultures like the Phoenicians (Badre, this volume) or the ancient cultures of an entire country, like Jordan (Alamri and Kafafi, this volume). We find new ways to make connections to what museum visitors bring to our exhibits, now that knowledge of the Bible, for example, can no longer be taken for granted (as our British colleagues have reminded us: see chapters by Collins and by Finkel and Fletcher, this volume). We have connected the ancient world to modern phenomena like globalization (as a series of exhibits at The Metropolitan Museum have done; see Aruz and Rakic, this volume). And some are engaging with audiences in ways that are new to us (even if they are increasingly widespread in the museum field more broadly). These developments are visible in national museums like the Louvre and the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin (Thomas, this volume; Martin, this volume), in art museums like the Detroit Institute of Arts (Anila and Emberling, this volume), and in university museums like the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne (Van de Ven and Jamieson, this volume).
Museums of the ancient Middle East
The volume is divided into sections that group papers on national museums, art museums, and university museums, and thus proposes that there are similarities among those groups in terms of how...
