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needs repeating...
Posted by panch (Guest) - Saturday, January 17 2004, 13:02:16 (EST)
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the following article discusses the new refurbished and expanded Oriental Art Museum in Chicago. Aboiut five years ago the new director, Dr. Karen Young, asked me to make a reproduction of their giant one-of-a-kind Winged Bull...Lamasu. I think they're selling them at the gift shop still...I don't know, I gave Walter Ebrahimzadehjoneswilsonsmith the rights to the piece. But since 1979 they were selling a smaller version I made, till I got tired of making it.

Just keep in mind that we had our Shumirum Monument accep[ted by the city of Chicago and it would have been installed right around the block from the Oriental Institute a few years ago if not for Assyrian National Nonsense. There would have been an inbdication of recent life among Assyrians and accomplishments right next to the rare and beautiful objects from our ancient past...but it was not to be...our leadershit isn't really proud of our ancient past and our achievements AS ASSYRIANS...pissant and whining Christian victims and martyrs is how they choose to present us...makes it easier for them.

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Iraq's ancient art has home at Oriental Institute

January 16, 2004

BY MARGARET HAWKINS/Chicago Sun-Times

MESOPOTAMIAN GALLERY

*Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, 1155 E. 58th
*10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, noon-4 p.m. Sunday
*Free
*(773) 702-9520

Two opposite events happened last year that will permanently influence how the world accesses ancient history and art. The first was the United States' invasion of Iraq and the subsequent destruction in the ancient city of Baghdad. The second event, which was as quiet as the international spectacle of exploding shells was loud, was the University of Chicago's opening of the Mesopotamian Gallery at the Oriental Institute.

If the first event destroyed countless artifacts and archeological sites, not to mention lives, the second preserved and presented to the public one of the world's great small collections of antiquities.

The material on view in the new gallery, which opened last October, was gathered by University of Chicago archeologists in Iraq before World War II and has been in the collection of the Oriental Institute ever since. What's different now is that a new space has been built to feature these holdings all together in a cohesive exhibit that also contains historical material about the region, maps and background on the digs that yielded the artifacts.

As meaningful as it is to see all this material together, the highlight of the exhibit is what has always been the museum's main attraction: the famed Assyrian Winged Bull, or Lamassus as it is properly called, which dates from about 700 B.C.

This stone relief sculpture stands at the end of the gallery, towering over everything around it in perfect dynamic poise, as if ready for all these 2,700 years to spring into action to defend its king.

Excavated in Khorsabad in 1929 in what is now northern Iraq, the 16-foot-tall sculpture, estimated to weigh about 40 tons, was a section of a wall protecting the temple of King Sargon II. Even this fragment, exhibited with other sections of the once-massive facade, overwhelms the viewer. Not only does it dwarf the onlooker with its sheer size, but the subtlety and elegance of how it is rendered casts a spell that conveys not only power but a kind of benign solemnity.

As a guardian figure, the bull combines divine, animal and human qualities. What is most striking is that despite its massive presence, it does not appear fierce or warlike.

Ancient yet completely accessible to the modern public, the Assyrian bull alone is worth a trip to Hyde Park any day. But this figure takes on new and even deeper meaning in the context of the other objects it now shares gallery space with, and together they shed invaluable light on the multiple civilizations that formed the ancestry of modern day Iraqis.

Many objects here are religious. Perhaps the best known after the Assyrian bull are the Sumerian prayer figures, dating from about 2500 B.C. These clusters of small gypsum sculptures intended as praying votive figures were placed in temples to serve in the stead of their devoted donors. Wide-eyed with religious awe and clasping their hands in prayer, these stand-in supplicants are a testament to a culture founded on religion.

If religion was the foundation of early life in Mesopotamia, commerce was its backbone. Many of the artifacts on display are engraved stone slabs bearing cuneiform documents that record financial transactions. The so-called "Chicago Stone" is a small neatly carved piece of basalt from 2600 B.C. on which is recorded the sale of a plot of land.

The gallery is full of all kinds of fascinating objects that span almost 5,000 years of history. There are early pot handles primitively carved as fertility figures, with mere blobs of clay to designate female parts, and then there is an elegant bronze relief of men and animals and a flowering fig tree that rivals Renaissance technique.

One of the most interesting objects here is not even an original but a plaster cast of the famous stone bearing Hammurabi's Code, made after the original in the Louvre Museum in Paris. This 7-foot-tall engraved stone slab, which contains a collection of the 282 legal verdicts made by a Babylonian king during his 40-year reign nearly 4,000 years ago, is the earliest evidence of an organized, if harsh, justice system.

There's no rush to see this exhibit. It is a permanent installation, and luckily these objects, unlike others like them in their native land, seem in no particular danger of being lost, stolen or blown up. But some sleepy Sunday afternoon, when the urge to travel in time beckons, do check it out.

Margaret Hawkins is a local free-lance writer.



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