Jonathan Taylor, Curator of cuneiform collections, British Museum
Visitors to Room 55, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gallery of Mesopotamia 1500–539 BC will find a radically transformed display. Often the galleries struggle to match the impact of temporary exhibitions, but over the last year a team of curators, designers, interpretation officers, conservators, assistant collections managers and others have worked hard to breathe fresh life into the permanent displays. In the south-east corner of Room 55 sits case 8, otherwise known as ‘The Ashurbanipal Library Case’. It is a museum’s worst nightmare – a whole case full of small, brown lumps of mud (‘dog biscuits’ as a former Director was once heard to call them). Even worse – they are there because they’re covered with writing that no-one can read. In reality, they are one of the jewels of the British Museum collection, and among the most important archaeological discoveries ever made. These are clay tablets from the cuneiform library of Ashurbanipal, 7th century BC king of Assyria. Here’s how we have tried to do justice to these marvels.
First we need to make sure people stop and look. Gone is the wall of grey beloved of past decades. In comes a rich green that contrasts beautifully with the reds and creams of the Library tablets, and conveys a feeling of opulence. Out go the diffuse overhead fluorescent lights. In come directional LEDs revealing the contours of the tablet surface. Each tablet looks special, and the cuneiform writing leaps from its surface. Here is something that is recognisably a document. The tablets sit on shelves in a ‘pigeonhole’ system, which was one of the methods by which ancient scribes stored their tablets. This allows us to conceal the new lights discreetly. More importantly, it suggests that this is a collection. The row of complete tablets stood on end (top row) shows us that we’re looking at a library.
Family dynamics, 7th- century BC style: ‘Why don’t you write your tablet and do your homework?!’ (Ashurbanipal’s sister to his wife). British Museum K 1619b
Now powerless to resist the temptation to explore this Library, the visitor can explore sections such as ‘Acquisitions’, ‘Enquiries’ and ‘The Chief Librarian’. Each tablet or group of tablets has its own label. Where possible, this is a quote from the text itself. Experience tells us that people always want to know what the texts actually say. It’s basic human curiosity that deserves to be satisfied. ‘Why don’t you write your tablet and do your homework?!’ (Ashurbanipal’s sister to his wife) has to be better than ‘This tablet is a letter from the king’s sister to the queen about completing writing practice’. Alongside exquisite copies of the accumulated knowledge of Mesopotamia sit a practice piece by the young boy who would grow up to become ‘King of the World’, detailed contemporary acquisition records and much later texts revealing the lasting fame of the Library in antiquity. Here is the world’s oldest universal library, preserved by the very fires that burnt it down, given new life for today’s readers – we hope you enjoy it. These tablets will never exceed their shelf life.
Want to know more?
A new, friendly introduction to cuneiform is now available:
The Museum’s ‘Ashurbanipal Library Project’ has been preparing a digital version of the Library. A complete set of new photos illustrates a revised electronic catalogue of all 30,000 tablets. This sits on a dedicated website (to appear soon on Oracc) that provides accessible introductions to the Library, how it was found and what is in it. Thousands of English translations are already available and many more will follow. Our work is helped enormously by the active collaboration of colleagues from the small but dedicated international community of cuneiform specialists.
In August this year, a team from CyArk scanned the British Museum’s collection of Assyrian reliefs displayed on the Ground floor, using three different techniques: LiDAR, structured-light and photogrammetry.
Detail of relief from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal, Nineveh, Iraq. The king is in his chariot shooting arrows at succession of lions (ME 124867).
The reliefs were originally commissioned by powerful Assyrian kings between the 9th and 7th centuries BC for their palaces, at a time when the small kingdom of Assyria, in what is now northern Iraq, expanded through conquest to dominate the Middle East, from the Persian Gulf to the Nile. The carved images range from symbolic scenes of royal achievements to scenes of conquest and hunting that all serve to glorify the Assyrian monarch.
Reception of Nineveh sculptures at the British Museum, The Illustrated London News 1852, p. 184. Etching and engraving.
The reliefs were acquired by the Museum in the late 1840s and 1850s as a result of the Treasury-sponsored archaeological expeditions of Sir Austen Henry Layard, who began his excavations at the North-West Palace of Ashurnasirpal at Nimrud in 1845. The first reliefs arrived in London in June 1847, followed soon by the monumental human-headed winged bulls. To accommodate them, the Assyrian galleries were created – between the Egyptian sculpture and Greek sculpture galleries – where they remain today.
As well as contributing to CyArk’s archive of cultural heritage, the scans provide a fantastic resource that we can use to help people better understand and engage with these objects. The carved panels work like modern comic books, starting the story at one end and following it along the walls to the conclusion. They were designed as a narrative, to be ‘read’ by the king, court and visitors to the royal palaces. It is incredibly difficult to get a good sense of that narrative, or their scale or presence through still images or even video.
With the help of the 3D models created from the scans, we have the potential to develop interpretative media in the galleries, online and through mobile and wearable technology. There are many potential approaches, from delineating the carved scenes where the stone has deteriorated to reconstructing the original architectural scheme, complete with colour paint, and torch-lit ambience as they might have appeared to the Assyrians in their original setting. The video above shows an early trial developed by CyArk using scans from the Siege of Lachish reliefs in Room 10b.
Imaginative reconstruction of the interior of an Assyrian palace. A H Layard, The Monuments of Nineveh, London, 1849, plate 2.
Computer 3D technology is being increasingly adopted in museums to aid with conservation, curatorial research and interpretation. When the Assyrian reliefs first arrived in the Museum almost exactly 160 years ago, the latest imaging technology of the time – photography – was in its infancy. Interestingly, it grew up closely connected with the developing discipline of archaeology. Indeed, the main players in the early histories of archaeology, photography and philology (the study of language, but particularly the decipherment of ancient languages) moved in the same social and scholarly circles in London, meeting, corresponding and collaborating.
The early pioneer of photography William Henry Fox-Talbot was also fascinated with archaeology and convinced of the usefulness of his invention to museum and archaeological practices. He had visited the British Museum Trustees in 1843 to demonstrate his invention, but failed to persuade Charles Fellows, then excavating in Lycia, in what is now southern Turkey, to take the bulky and fragile equipment on his next expedition.
But by the 1850s, the equipment and processes were simpler, and interest at the Museum had grown. Edward Hawkins, Keeper of the Department of Antiquities, responsible for the Assyrian objects, was keen for photographs to be made of the growing collection of cuneiform tablets (arriving from Assyria at the same time as the reliefs) to help allow Edward Hincks, an Irish scholar and expert in cuneiform, and others (including Fox-Talbot himself) to translate them.
Hawkins talked to Lord Rosse, scientist and President of the Royal Society, and British Museum Trustee, and soon after the Trustees instructed the Museum to employ a photographer. The advice of another scientist, Charles Wheatstone, was sought. Wheatstone had invented stereoscopy, creating the first stereoscopic viewer in 1838 which created the illusion of 3D. This early model used illustrations, but photography provided a far more suitable medium. Wheatstone had been collaborating with the photographer Roger Fenton, and recommended him for the job.
Roger Fenton, The Assyrian Gallery, British Museum. stereoscopic pair of photographs, c. 1850s.
Stereoscopy became a huge craze in the late 1850s and 1860s, and persisted well into the 20th century. Today’s virtual reality wearable technology, such as Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard echo their forerunners in intention (an immersive experience) and appearance.
First in the series of Roger Fenton’s photographs of the Kuyunjik Collection of cuneiform tablets. Albumen prints on card. Archives of the Middle East Department at the British Museum
As well as experimenting with this new 3D technology in the galleries, Fenton also made photographs of the objects, as was his brief. Between 1853 and 1854 he systematically photographed the series of cuneiform tablets known as the Kuyunkjik Collection. One of Fenton’s greatest challenges was lighting. He had a glass studio built on the roof of the Museum, based on his own studio in his home in North London. Portable objects such as the cuneiform tablets were brought there to be photographed. By May 1856, Fenton and his assistants had made more than 8,000 prints in the galleries and his rooftop studio.
Standing in the gallery watching CyArk’s scanners spinning and collecting millions of points of data, I reflected on how the British Museum and the Assyrian objects that so fascinated scholars and public alike in the late 19th century were once again the site of a new technology in its early years. Museum technologists have to make difficult decisions on what to adopt and when. Soon after the period discussed above, the British Museum’s early interest in photography waned, likely mainly due to the high cost of the equipment and materials. Fenton’s employment was ended in 1859, and many of his negatives were transferred to the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they form part of the UK’s national collection of the art of photography. But still, of course, that doesn’t mean it never happened: 160 years on, and the British Museum now has over 1.2 million images of objects in the collection online.
CyArk have enabled us to investigate the possibilities of 3D with a significant group of objects from the collection, and I am optimistic that this is just the beginning. It doesn’t take much to imagine a time when 3D scans become the de facto method of recording objects in the collection. I believe that this project – and once again the Assyrian reliefs – are remembered as a key moment in that change.
The current temporary display in the John Addis Gallery: Islamic World, Poetry and exile: works by Abdallah Benanteur, Ipek Duben, Mireille Kassar, Mona Saudi and Canan Tolon, curated by Venetia Porter, brings together the recently acquired work of six artists all exploring the phenomenon of exile. In a gallery predominantly populated with Islamic art and objects dating as early as the 7th century, it could be said that this display of contemporary art is incongruous. So why is it here?
I first became interested in the modern and contemporary collections of the Middle East department in 2012, while visiting Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam. The work of Ahmed Mater immediately stood out to me, as it added an unexpected emotional interpretation of the pilgrimage to Mecca which was unique and surprising to me as a visitor. I would later go on to study the collection of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art in greater detail for my MA, still barely scraping the surface; as it continues to grow and to be used in increasingly imaginative and diverse ways.
In this display the concept of exile is approached through the personal experiences of each artist and their political and humanitarian views. Each work directs the viewer to the incidents that have inspired them and it is these references which place the art within a broader context. Not only do the works inspire an emotional response but they also ignite curiosity as to what inspired those artists. It is this emotional engagement and varied approach which makes the pieces so important and interesting to me, and hopefully to the visitors who will see the display.
The works in the display were not created in isolation; their influences overlap whether it be on specific political or personal events or the work of poets such as Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) and Farid al-Din Attar (c. 1145–c.1221). The works are all united by difficulty, whether that of the artist or the experiences of others. Ipek Duben formulates this difficulty in her book Refugee by overlaying images of suffering with delicate gauze and simple embroidered text and in doing so she starkly contrasts the hardship shown in the images. The simplicity of the technique employed gives the work a scrapbook feel, rendered incredibly moving as it highlights the experiences of refugees from Kosovo, Pakistan, Liberia and elsewhere.
Mona Saudi’s work Homage to Mahmoud Darwish, one of three displayed on the opposite wall, is inscribed with the poetry of the renowned and revered Palestinian poet (1941–2008). The one illustrated here is The Poem of the Land. For me, an interesting element of this work is that the style of Saudi’s drawings echo posters which she created for the Plastic Arts Section of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, some of which are displayed alongside Homage and are part of a group that have been donated by the Palestinian Poster archive. This is a unique quality of the British Museum’s collection of Middle Eastern art, in that the works often contain references that extend beyond the collection itself and in doing so give even small displays the ability to explore more widespread elements of history and human experience.
In Canan Tolon’s series, Futur Imparfait, her exile is more singular and personal. Inspired by her experience of illness as a child, the series acts as a memory of her protracted stay in a French hospital when she was separated from her home. The thirty delicate drawings on Mylar add a voice from another perspective. It is a series executed in ethereally light washes of ink and graphite, reflecting the removed reality she experienced while in a strange country and environment. Tolon’s own words are relevant regarding not only her own work but of the artists in the exhibition as a whole:
… it is not the misfortune of others which fascinates and astonishes but the extraordinary will of a child to live…
This sentiment is characteristic of the message and draw of the works in this display; there are painful and violent stories here, but predominantly it is the human reaction to these events and not the suffering in itself which is explored. The aftermath of war, illness and displacement is discussed through delicate drawings and through poetry. This alone is reason enough for these pieces to be here.
This space within the gallery of Islamic art is used for rotations of works on paper from across the collection that we are not able to put on permanent display. These include Persian or Mughal paintings, even shadow puppets as were featured in a previous display. With the ever-expanding collection of Middle Eastern art, this small area will continue to host increasingly diverse and exciting exhibitions, so watch this space! Further information on this collection and the Middle East department as a whole can also be found on the Museum’s collection online.
Before joining the Museum as an administrator in the Middle East Department in 2013, Holly Wright studied for the MA in Museum and Artefact Studies at Durham University. Her dissertation was ‘Collecting the contemporary: modern and contemporary art in the Middle East Department of the British Museum’.
A major new book, illustrated in full colour, has just been published on a group of these famous objects which had been stolen from the National Museum of Afghanistan during the 1990s but were recovered, then conserved and exhibited at the British Museum in 2011 before being returned to Kabul in 2012.
Carved from bone as well as ivory, but popularly known as the ‘Begram ivories’, they were one of the many memorable highlights of the British Museum’s 2011 exhibition Afghanistan: crossroads of the ancient world. Over a thousand of these exquisite Indian miniature carvings, originally attached to wooden pieces of furniture, long since decomposed, were recovered by French archaeologists excavating the ancient site of Begram in 1937 and 1939. The main pieces were published but the collection was divided almost equally between the National Museum in Kabul and the Musée Guimet, the French national museum of Asian art in Paris. During the 1990s, disaster struck the Kabul collection during the civil war and hundreds were stolen from their galleries and storerooms, and remain scattered in many different collections around the world.
Composite bone plaque showing a bird
In 2010 a private philanthropist very generously stepped in and acquired this particular collection on behalf of the National Museum in Kabul. They were in a poor state and required a huge amount of conservation. This work was done within a very short space of time at the British Museum with the support of Bank of America Merrill Lynch through their global Art Conservation Project. The bank also sponsored the Afghanistan exhibition.
This was also a golden opportunity to conduct scientific analyses on these pieces in order to understand how they were made, and the nature of previous conservation treatments. This work therefore involved a number of scientists, conservators and curators, who collaborated closely on this new publication. The results reveal important new evidence for the extent of ancient pigments on some of these beautiful objects, including black (lamp black), red (hematite and vermilion), blue (indigo) and possibly other colours using organic pigments. This is the first time any of the ivory and bone furniture ornaments from Begram have been scientifically analysed and the results show the huge potential in this approach.
The book also includes many previously unpublished photographs of these objects when they were exhibited in Kabul during the 1960s and 1970s. They show how, in some cases, private photographs taken of museum displays offer useful evidence for the appearance of objects in the event of disaster.
J Ambers, C R Cartwright, C Higgitt, D Hook, E Passmore, St J Simpson, G Verri, C Ward and B. Wills, Looted, Recovered, Returned: Antiquities from Afghanistan is published by Archaeopress and available both in printed and e-versions. The publication was supported by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Birger Helgestad, Project Curator, Ur Project, British Museum
An almost 4,000-year-old fired clay relief depicting a nude hero. One of a pair of reliefs made from the same mould (British Museum 1924.0920,74)
I am responsible for managing the digitisation of objects and archives for the Ur Project, a dynamic new collaboration between the British Museum and Penn Museum made possible with the lead support of the Leon Levy Foundation. The project takes the successful cooperation of the two organisations of the 1920s and 1930s at Ur into the 21st century, digitally reunifying the remarkable finds from that site in a state-of-the-art website. We are photographing and documenting all the finds from Ur in our collections, from small pieces of broken pots to ancient cuneiform texts and exquisite gold jewellery. We are also digitising the original excavation photographs, archives, plans and other documents. Our resource will bring together these varied sources of information for the first time and make them available in an online database that will preserve the complete finds and records in digital formats for posterity.
Leonard Woolley excavating an almost 4,000-year-old votive figurine in the shrine of Hendursag (1930–31)
Katharine Woolley and Sheikh Hamoudi Ibn Ibrahim, the excavation’s foreman, sorting finds (1928–29 season).
Ur was an important city throughout Mesopotamian history. The excavations, led by Sir Leonard Woolley and jointly sponsored by the British Museum and the Penn Museum, uncovered its famous ziggurat complex, areas of densely packed private houses, and the spectacular Royal Graves with rich inventories of gold and evidence of human sacrifice. These unique finds provide crucial information about third-millennium society, as well as the warfare, music, food, drink, and customs of the period. We can also learn much about the people that lived and died in this city through the study of the cuneiform tablets excavated at the site. There are about 10,000 of these ancient texts from Ur in the partner museums’ collections.
A page from an excavation notebook describing ‘Private Grave 91’. We are digitising tens of thousands of pages such as the one depicted here.
By 1922–34 Woolley had developed his methods with an increased emphasis on recording. Thus, the vast scale of the finds he recovered – numbering into the tens of thousands – are contextualised by an abundance of documentation. The British Museum houses the core part of this documentation, such as the original glass-plate negative photographs, and the excavation diaries. We are digitising, indexing, and cross-referencing these indispensable resources.
The most exiting aspect of the project is the rare opportunity it provides to reunify dispersed information. Not only will the collections from the three museums (the British Museum, Penn Museum and the Iraq Museum) be integrated, but also the different categories of object brought together in one virtual space, and, crucially, barriers between object data and archives will be broken down.
A Sumerian schoolboy’s practice tablet with proverbs on one side and rough workings from a maths lesson on the back (multiple views). On study loan to the British Museum from the Iraq Museum.
Our website will present for the first time an authoritative set of high resolution images of the entirety of the finds, integrated with all field notes, catalogue records, photos, reports, maps, letters and publications. Importantly, data are recorded in a format that allows them to be fully indexable and extractable, enabling people to create their own datasets and make comparisons with their own research. This approach will also allow us to re-establish lost object identifications and crucial findspot information. We will relate internal references between notes, letters, publications and catalogues, connect artefacts to their findspots on maps, and link wherever possible to other resources with the goal of enabling researchers to analyse the site in exciting new ways. All data are thoroughly cross-referenced, facilitating the study of artefacts all the way from excavation context to current display.
Activity is currently underway at the British Museum and at Penn Museum. We hope soon to be joined by our colleagues at the Iraq Museum. Our work feeds into the shared project website, as well as each museum’s own collection database. Our web resource will eliminate traditional barriers between institutions, enabling people to focus on the material from Ur as a single corpus, disregarding the objects’ current locations. We hope that our approach will inspire the digitisation of other similarly dispersed collections.
The project staff bring expertise in archives, photography, programming, conservation, Assyriology and archaeology. This range of skills reflects the diversity of information being collated, and indicates the great potential for research our resource provides. I look forward to bringing you future updates about the project as it progresses.
Dr Gareth Brereton investigating a terracotta relief from Ur
I’ve just come from the press conference launching my new book, The Ark Before Noah. As I told the journalists, it all started with a fairly normal event for a museum curator: a member of the public bringing in an object that had long been in their family to have it identified. As often happens in my case, it was a cuneiform tablet. The visitor, Douglas Simmonds, had been given it by his father for passing his exams. It was part of a modest collection: a few tablets, some cylinder seals, a lamp or two and some pieces from China and Egypt. His father, an inveterate curio hunter, had picked them up after the War in the late 1940s.
With kind permission of Douglas Simmonds
This tablet, however, turned out to be one in a million. The cuneiform was a sixty-line passage from the ancient Babylonian Story of the Flood. This story had been well known since the 1870s, when George Smith, a brilliant decipherer who worked at the British Museum, first identified the story known from the Book of Genesis in a seventh-century cuneiform tablet from Nineveh. The two accounts – Babylonian and biblical – were closely related. The new tablet, however, written in about 1750 BC, has startling new contents.
When the gods decided to wipe out mankind with a flood, the god Enki, who had a sense of humour, leaked the news to a man called Atra-hasis, the ‘Babylonian Noah,’ who was to build the Ark. Atra-hasis’s Ark, however was round. To my knowledge, no one has ever thought of that possibility. The new tablet also describes the materials and the measurements to build it: quantities of palm-fibre rope, wooden ribs and bathfuls of hot bitumen to waterproof the finished vessel. The result was a traditional coracle, but the largest the world had ever dreamed of, with an area of 3,600 sq. metres (equivalent to two-thirds the area of a football pitch), and six-metre high walls. The amount of rope prescribed, stretched out in a line, would reach from London to Edinburgh!
To anyone who has the typical image learnt from children’s toys and book illustrations in mind, a round Ark is bizarre at first, but, on reflection, the idea makes sense. A waterproofed coracle would never sink and being round isn’t a problem – it never had to go anywhere: all it had to do was float and keep the contents safe: a cosmic lifeboat. Palm-and-pitch coracles had been seen on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers since time immemorial: they were still a common sight on Iraq’s great waterways in the 1950s.
Deciphering the tablet was a great adventure, but one development soon led to another: a documentary film in which the Ark is being built according to these 3700-year-old instructions (although not quite full size), and the commissioning of a book.
Map of the World (ME 92687)
Writing it led to some demanding questions: what was the origin of the Flood Story? How did it pass from Babylonian cuneiform to Biblical Hebrew? Then I discovered that a line from the new tablet was quoted on our famous Map of the World tablet, showing where the Babylonian believed that Ark had landed. I also got to address other questions I have been asking myself for years: how does cuneiform writing really work? What were the ancient Babylonians really like?
As the weather turns colder and the days shorter the Museum has been loaned a reminder of warmer, sunnier climes, which is helping to beat the mid-winter chill. The Department of the Middle East is preparing to display a panel of glazed bricks that has been generously loaned to us by the Vorderasiatisches Museum, part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin group.
The panel shows a pacing, roaring lion and once was part of King Nebuchadnezzar II’s throne room in his palace in the ancient city of Babylon, Iraq. Nebuchadnezzar II reigned from 605-562 BC, and supposedly had the hanging gardens of Babylon built for his queen. Although there is little evidence to confirm his passion for gardening, it is certain that Nebuchadnezzar commissioned other major building projects in Babylon, to glorify the capital of his empire. Inscriptions stamped on bricks reveal the extent of these works. In the city of Babylon, glazed bricks in bright shades of blue, yellow and white were used to create public monuments that emphasised the power of the king and the gods. In Nebuchadnezzar’s throne room the roaring lions emphasized the power and might of the Babylonian king, whose empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and from the Caucasus to northern Arabia.
Finds excavated by Robert Koldewey at Babylon between 1902 and 1914 came to Berlin packed in crates. Staff spent years painstakingly joining fragments of glazed brick together to recreate Nebuchadnezzar’s Ishtar Gate and Processional Way, in Berlin. The panel loaned to the British Museum has been similarly pieced together from bricks the Vorderasiatisches Museum has in store and so is being seen complete for the very first time in London.
Just send us a postcard! This short catchphrase is poised to enter history across the world; today, mobile phones, text messages, emails, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are the media used to help connect people and share images and experiences.
The postcard is not quite dead but it is certainly endangered and it’s for that reason that we have decided to formally add them to the list of objects that we collect, register, acknowledge donor details, scan and upload onto the British Museum collection online.
Postcard with a view of a camel train, Aden. This vignette of a caravan connecting Aden with its Yemeni hinterland illustrates how valuable postcards are as illustrations of everyday events as well as places. This card dates from the period when Aden was a British colony.
Moreover, postcards are very evocative objects. The images are loaded with significance and capture moments in time, and this applies equally to cards showing places, landscapes and people. Indeed, the more postcards one has of a particular place, the more powerful they become in charting its history and exploring the practical issues of how the view was arrived at and what subliminal messages may have been intended by the choice of view or subject-matter.
Postcards enter into two quite different patterns of circulation. One is from sender to recipient, and the message is often either banal or stereotyped (“wish you were here … the weather’s great”), or deeply personalised, but in both cases the postcard is often treasured by the recipient.
Summer holiday in Turkey. Postcard messages are often banal and stereotyped and holiday cards are a particularly good example of this. This particular card refers to “It’s very hot but I like that” but hints at the richness of Turkey’s culture by stating that “This is our third visit to Turkey and we are still completely fascinated”. Used cards like this are sometimes more poignant than unused ones as they capture personal messages as well as styles of handwriting and snapshots of postal history.
In the second case, the postcard is collected as a tangible memento of a visit and is never intended to be sent. Whereas the first category eventually enter into secondary circulation as people move house, relationships end or they pass away – often for the stamps to be soaked off – the second, almost mint, category of cards become collectibles. Used cards are postmarked and therefore offer absolute dates on a timeline but unused cards can, with patience, be dated through their internal content and series number. They are therefore just like many other objects we have in the museum, and subject to classification, typology and anthropological analysis.
Postcard showing the Bayader mosque, Aleppo. This postcard is a rather attractive early twentieth century visual record of the old minaret of the Bayader mosque in Aleppo. It was later replaced by another which was demolished during heavy fighting on 17 April 2012.
However, it is fundamentally the top-level information they provide on the changing Middle East that led us to start collecting them. Places, people and cultural heritage are fragile commodities and easily affected by periods of conflict, social change and economic development. It is therefore crucial we start archiving these memories before it really is too late.
The ceramics made in Ottoman Turkey at Iznik, south-east of Istanbul, are among the highest achievements not only of Turkish potters but of ceramicists anywhere. Decorated with highly elaborate and colourful floral designs they were made for the Ottoman court. A taste for them developed in Elizabethan England, and they later inspired the English nineteenth century potter William de Morgan.
Iznik pottery basin
At Iznik, established as a major centre in the late fifteenth century, the potters were able to achieve great technical innovations, producing an enormous range of pottery with richly-painted designs that combined motifs such as arabesques, found in the arts of earlier periods in Turkey and elsewhere, with those inspired by imports of Chinese porcelain – the glorious blue and white vessels associated with the Yuan dynasty specially made for Middle eastern patrons. The Iznik designs evolved, new colours were introduced, delicate blues and greens, and finally red.
The design of this magnificent bowl is made up of an undulating pattern of flowers that may once have been lotuses or peonies but are now hybrids unknown to nature. They are intersected with a serrated edge leaf known as the saz. Inside, is a symmetrical arrangement of lozenges framed by pairs of delicate hyacinths, within which is another Chinese inspired design, known as a cloud band. The exuberant cocktail of designs found on Iznik pottery becomes the hallmark of Ottoman art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were artists and designers at court supplying the patterns and these bold and beautiful designs appear on the kaftans of the sultans, on metalwork and on delicate book bindings.
Much of the impetus for this can be attributed to Sultan Suleyman, the Magnificent, (ruled 1520-1566) known as Kanuni or lawgiver on account of the beneficial changes he brought in relation to education and taxation. During his reign the Ottoman Empire reached its greatest extent covering the Middle East and North Africa and into Europe as far as Hungary until checked at the siege of Vienna in 1529. As patron of the arts, he initiated bold architectural projects that changed the character of Istanbul and other major cities of the Ottoman Empire and that were realised by the great architect Sinan (d. 1588). It was also during his reign, from about 1550, that the potteries began to produce the glorious tiles that were to adorn the facades and interiors of Ottoman buildings.
An inventory of the Ottoman treasury mentions ‘foot basins’; could this mean that the sultan and his family washed their feet in bowls such as these? It is not difficult to imagine when strolling through the exquisite gardens of Topkapi palace, entering that gilded world, and glimpsing the opulent objects with which the sultans clearly surrounded themselves.
