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Syrian Heritage in Jeopardy: The Case of the Arslan Tash Ivories

2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.5.1.0092

2166-3556

Annie Caubet,

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

Between 2005 and 2009, the Louvre Museum cooperated with the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums on the analysis and conservation of a hoard of ancient ivories, excavated at Arslan Tash in 1928–1929 and shared between Paris and Aleppo. Since the beginning of the civil war, the fate of this hoard in Aleppo is a matter of concern. According to Dr. Maamoun Abdelkarim, Director of Antiquities and Museums of Syria, the collections in the Aleppo museum have been evacuated to a safe hiding place.In the autumn of 1928, a French archaeological expedition headed by François Thureau-Dangin began excavations at a site in northern Syria, known as Arslan Tash, the “Lion Stone,” in the local Kurdish dialect (Fig. 1). This was the period of the Mandate at the end of WWI, when France and Great Britain were entrusted by the Allies to administer areas of what were to become Syria and Iraq that were formerly part of the dismantled Ottoman empire. In Damascus, an agency for the conservation of antiquities and museums was established and archaeologists were encouraged to take part in the scientific and systematic exploration of Syria's ancient heritage. The newly established authorities for the antiquities of Syria were concerned about the preservation of a number of sites, especially in the northeastern confines, the Euphrates valley and its tributaries.François Thureau-Dangin's first visit to the site in 1927 came as a consequence of the report written by Paul Perdrizet (1870–1938), on a trip in preparation of his taking charge of the Antioch excavations. His exploration led him into inner Syria, in the company of two young members of the French School at Athens, Henri Seyrig and Daniel Schlumberger, who both were to pursue a distinguished career in Near Eastern archaeology.Based on the evidence collected by previous visitors, Arslan Tash promised to be an important site, and the choice of a famous Assyriologist to investigate it insured it would receive the scientific expertise it deserved. By that time, Thureau-Dangin (1872–1944) was an immensely respected epigrapher and philologist, author of, among many major works, a pioneer survey of the inscriptions from Sumer and Akkad (1905) and a commentary on the annals of Sargon's eighth campaign (1912), which is still a classic. Most of his career was spent in the Louvre Museum where he worked on the collection of cuneiform inscriptions. Thureau-Dangin volunteered in WWI: He suffered damage to his health from the explosion of a shell, which caused him to become progressively deaf, and was sent to Thessaloniki with the Army of the Orient as a cryptographer. In 1944, he was briefly arrested by the Vichy regime and died soon after.In 1923, he toured eastern Syria to assess its archaeological potential in the company of another distinguished philologist, Edouard Dhorme (1881–1966), who had been trained at the École Biblique in Jerusalem. They were following the example set by René Dussaud (1868–1958), curator of the Near Eastern Department of the Louvre, who had started his explorations of the archaeological sites of Syria in 1895, notably in the south, thus establishing a long tradition of the involvement of France and the Louvre Museum with the ancient heritage of Syria. When he set up his tents in Arslan Tash in 1928, Thureau-Dangin was 56 and his hearing problem was worsening. On the second campaign, the small team was enlarged by the arrival of Maurice Dunand (1898–1987), who had had previous field experience in Byblos and was expert at recording.In the 1920s, the mound was occupied by a Kurdish village of mudbrick beehive-shaped houses, surrounding a shallow depression (Fig. 2). The surface was strewn with stone sculptures. During the two excavation seasons, 1928 and 1929, the archaeologists uncovered the city wall and its monumental gates, a temple, a well preserved Assyrian palace, typical in its arrangement of official rooms around two vast courtyards. Basalt stele and statues of lion and bull guardians were inscribed with cuneiform texts dating to the reign of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III (744–727 BC) who renamed the city Hadatu and made it the seat of an Assyrian provincial outpost in Northern Syria.The first mention of the stone lion at Arslan Tash appears in the 1850 publication of the British expedition directed by F. R. Chesney, which in 1835–1837 aimed at establishing a route between the Mediterranean and India by way of steam navigation on the Euphrates River. Thereafter, a number of scholars and travellers visited the site. This included Hamdi Bey, director of the Istanbul museum, who in 1883 seized a group of basalt orthostats decorated with military scenes and sent them to Istanbul. In the following year, William Hayes Ward paid a visit to the site on behalf of the American Oriental Society and the Institute of America, sponsored by Catherine Lorillard Wolfe. Ward reports: From Jerablus we went up the river to Birejik, where we crossed the Euphrates on rude boats, and found ourselves in Upper Mesopotamia. A day's journey from Birejik, at Arslan Tâsh, we found and photographed two enormous lions in black basalt, which must have guarded the gateway of a city of Assyrian antiquity. One of them is still standing, while the other has been thrown down on its side. They are of ruder workmanship than the alabaster lions and bulls of Nineveh. The slabs on which the lions are sculptured in high relief are eleven feet ten inches long, by seven feet ten inches high; and the lions are represented, as is common in Assyrian sculpture, with five feet and legs. Near by is a prostrate bull, broken into two pieces. With the help of the people of the neighborhood we got them into position to photograph. (Ward 1886: 11–12) The most spectacular discovery came from an earlier official building, the “Bâtiment aux ivoires,” in which hundreds of ivory plaques were found, as well as the frame of an ivory bed (Fig. 3). The plaques were probably originally applied to thrones and other pieces of wooden furniture. They are decorated in ajour or relief technique, with motifs such as the lady in the window, the suckling cow (Fig. 4), the birth of the infant Horus in the papyrus grove (Fig. 5), and various cultic scenes, most of them repeated on several plaques, with a few stylistic variants. At the time of the Arslan Tash discovery, only a few similar ivory pieces were known from the 19th century excavations at Nimrud. Later excavations at Nimrud and Samaria were to unearth more of such artistic pieces, thus broadening our understanding of the ivory craft in the Phoenician and Aramaean states of the early first millennium BC. One of the Arslan Tash plaques bore an Aramaic inscription mentioning “our Lord Hazael,” who Thureau-Dangin suggested was the historical Hazael (ca. 843–806), head of a Levantine coalition against Shalmaneser III (858–824). He proposed that the Arslan Tash hoard had been looted during the conquest of Damascus and brought there for storage. Recent stratigraphic and philological analyses have confirmed Thureau-Dangin's attribution and dating. Thureau-Dangin promptly published the excavation, with due attention to the architectural remains and an extensive discussion of the ivories (Thureau-Dangin et al. 1931). According to the antiquities law passed by the authorities of the Mandate, the hoard of ivory plaques was shared between France and Syria: Approximately 60 pieces and fragments, including the Hazael inscription, were taken to the Louvre, 75 remained in Aleppo, and four in the École Biblique in Jerusalem. It is not clear why Thureau-Dangin abandoned the exploration of Arslan Tash to immediately embark upon another dig: the nearby site of Til Barsip, also an Assyrian outpost, where the French team, with the increasing role of Maurice Dunand, excavated a palace of the early eighth century BC.Diniacopoulos was expert at performing restoration work on the pieces that came into his hands. In Basel, he worked on a hoard of ivories rumored to come from Arslan Tash, which eventually were acquired by Elie Borowski (Warsaw 1913–Jerusalem 2003). Trained as a research assistant at the University of Geneva, then at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Borowski established himself as an antique dealer in Basel. An astute collector, he loaned part of his collection for a tour of Canada and the USA, with an accompanying catalogue, Ladders to Heaven, edited by O.W. Muscarella in Toronto in 1979. Borowski founded the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem in 1992. Some of the Arslan Tash ivories were incorporated into the collections there, others he sold to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the following years. The bulk of these ivories is now in the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe, Germany, and one in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg.The Department of Near Eastern Antiquities in the Louvre Museum has a long history of cooperation with the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums. In 2005, the Louvre, having completed a campaign of conservation on its own collection of Arslan Tash ivories, proposed to help take care of those kept in Aleppo. An agreement was signed with the general director Dr. Bassam Jamous. According to the plan, work was to start in Aleppo. The ivories had to be consolidated first in order to make safe travel to Paris possible, where they were to be submitted to laboratory investigation. In a second step, it was envisioned to upgrade the showcases and the museography of the gallery to enhance presentation. A final publication project was to involve the participation of the Syro-Italian team who had resumed archaeological work at the site of Arslan Tash, under the direction of Serena Maria Cecchini and Fabrizio Venturi (Fontan and Reiche 2011).The first part of the program was successfully implemented for several weeks each year from 2005 through 2009. In addition to the present author (then head curator of the Louvre ANE department), the team included the curator in charge of Assyrian collections in the Louvre, Elisabeth Fontan; two conservators, Juliette Lévy and Marie-Emmanuelle Meyohas (Fig. 6); a palaeo-anatomist from the Natural History Museum in Paris, Dr. François Poplin (Fig. 7); and a doctoral student of the University of Bologna, Giorgio Affanni who was writing his PhD dissertation on the Arslan Tash ivories. The team in the Aleppo Museum was headed by Nadim Fakesh, director of the museum, Sheraf Nasser, curator, Ahmed Othman, assistant, and Chirin Nassaan, conservator, who could not have been more supportive.The second part of the project, transporting the pieces from Aleppo to France to complete the conservation process and the laboratory analyses has been foiled by the civil war. At the time of the writing of this paper (July 2016), there is only scant information available on the condition of the Aleppo Museum. We do know that the staff has heroically maintained its presence in the museum to prevent looting. But even if no other hazards occur, the climatic conditions which are so detrimental to the conservation of the ivories certainly have remained the same.The plan to combine pieces from official and non-official excavations in a comprehensive publication confronted the authors with a dilemma. At the time the Diniacopoulos and Borowski collections were assembled, pieces on the market were often considered “orphan antiquities” (to quote a favorite expression of Pierre Amiet, head of the ANE department in the Louvre until 1988), in need of being recorded and attended to with scholarly expertise. Considering that all the pieces concerned are now housed in museums or permanent public institutions, it was hoped that an assessment of the Arslan Tash ivory hoard would be a useful tool for understanding the history of Assyrian expansion in the West and a testimony to the importance of the Syrian heritage.