good evening and welcome to the morgen my name is Jessica Ludwig I'm the deputy delighted to be introducing you to Sydney Babcock tonight he's going to be delivering a lecture celebrating the Morgans collection of ancient near-eastern seals and tablets you are in for a treat this collection is one of the most distinguished in the United States and among the best-known in the world if you have not had the opportunity to see the permanence delation in the North Room of our historic library I urge you to do so and to that end we'll be opening that gallery after tonight's lecture so I hope you can all take some time to go have a look also following the program we invite you to join us for a reception in the guild or layman Hall lobby which is which is hosted by the Association of fellows Sydney will be there and available to answer any questions you might have in addition to the works on view in our historic library our current exhibitions are now Tennessee Williams no refuge about writing Peter who jars speed of life now and forever the art of medieval time and power and grace drawings by Rubens Van Dyck and Jordans all wonderful exhibitions and definitely worth a look we also have a number of exciting programs coming this week including a conversation with playwright John Gare and editors Peggy L Fox and Thomas Keith entitled Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin selective letters that's happening on Wednesday and on Friday we have a contemporary music concert songs from a book of days with composer Eva Gloria and her ensemble which is inspired by our exhibition now and forever and that's on Friday so please be sure to pick up a copy of our calendar and the lobby or visit our website to learn more about our programs and also if you are not already a member of the Morgan I urge you to do that so as well and to help us support our programs throughout the year Sydnee backup is Sydney Babcock is the Jeanette and Jonathan Rosen curator and department head of the ancient near-eastern seals and tablets department he's been at the Morgan delving into this incredible rich collection for over 20 years and has curated numerous exhibitions most recently Noah's beasts sculpted animals from ancient Mesopotamia so without further ado please join me in welcoming Sydney Babcock [Applause] thank you very much Jessica on the screen to start right away is the 1906 and the chem building known as the Morgan Library this considered to be the the masterpiece of the American Renaissance architectural movement the purpose of this movement was to bring the ideals of the Italian Renaissance to this country and to try and transplant those ideals onto American soil through the arts and architecture the Civil War had a profound effect on those of Morgan's generation and it was hoped that through culture and education such chaos and tragedy would never be repeated housed in this standalone building were some of Morgan's collections the sober facade gives way to the dazzling splendor of the rotunda providing a setting that visually emphasizes the importance of what is in the building and that it is worthy of pursuit Morgan the legendary financier used much of his wealth to bring the material evidence of the world's culture to America his efforts were perhaps the most significant part of a national effort to enhance the cultural life of America itself among the great works of art housed in the Morgan is one of the finest collections of ancient Near Eastern seals and tablets in the world on the screen is what appears to be a large sculpture relief car with great detail it dates to around the seventh century BC during the time of the NiO Babylonians and the legendary King and that you couldn't Ezzor the scene depicts a demonic a lion facing a winged superhuman hero the lions threatening gestures and the tension in the span of his sharp claws suggests his evil power but the hero will be the victor taller than the lion he acts with a calm and determined force and the bull the prize of the contest remains in his power despite the violence of the action the figures seem suspended in time a result of the competitions symmetry the image of an heroic being pretending domesticated animal from an attacking lion has a long tradition in Mesopotamia and is first visualized as we shall see thousands of years earlier here on the screen in all its majestic grandeur this image represents the culmination of several thousand years of Mesopotamian art however the relief on the screen and reality is only about an inch high and was made by me by rolling an engraved stone cylinder is shown on the left on to us onto a soft material it's only about an inch high in the miniature space of the seal the artist has created a contest of monumental proportions this is the magnificent monumental miniature world of ancient near-eastern cylinder seals and tonight I hope to share with you the beauty and importance of these fields why they are at the Morgan Library and also share one of the insights they offer about Mesopotamia before we go further let us orient ourselves on the left is the modern boundaries of the region in the land at the ancients called Mesopotamia or the land between two rivers the Tigris and the Euphrates you are all now familiar with this map showing the modern state of iraq from the nightly news over the last several decades but what you may or may not know is that the great ancient sites of the 4th and 3rd millennium BC are mostly concentrated in the south right about here and among these sites is the most famous of all perhaps the earliest city in the world war and in the north the great sites of Nimrod and Nineveh which we will discuss shortly up in here and on the right is a satellite view of the region Turkey is to the north way up here were the two great rivers the Tigris sentiment and the Euphrates have their sources and here is the great floodplain of southern Mesopotamia in this region from the border with Turkey sort of here all the way to the south the level of the land changes less than the 30 feet the land is awesomely flow it was the slow progression of the two mighty rivers that created that flat landscape a landscape constantly changing due to the frequent changes in the river causes themselves at the whim of rain storms and floods while the alluvial soil was extremely fertile the water had to be controlled by vast irrigation systems which emerged in the region well before 4000 BC this is no small accomplishment when one thinks of the difficulty we still have today managing the floods of our great rivers such as the Ohio and the Mississippi now the availability of raw materials as an historical fact of great importance as is the dependence on those materials that had to be imported in Mesopotamia agricultural products and those from stop breeding fisheries date palm cultivation and greed industries there's a building here made completely made out of reeds from the marshes all of these were available in plenty and could easily be produced in excess of home requirements to be exported on the other hand wood stone and metal were rare or even entirely lacking consequently Mesopotamia was destined to be a land of trade from the start remarkably the raw material that epitomizes Mesopotamian civilization is mud refined into clay and used in the almost exclusively mud brick architecture is shown here on the right in the great ziggurat of ore from 2100 BC as it dominates the unrelentingly flat landscape to this day Mesopotamia bears the stamp of clay as does no other civilization and nowhere in the world but in Mesopotamia and the regions over which its influence was diffused was clay used as the vehicle for writing such phrases as kumea from civilization Jenaya from literature and Junio form law can only apply where people held the idea of using soft clay not only for bricks and jars and for the jar stoppers upon which a seal could be impressed as mark of ownership but also as the vehicle for impressed signs to which established meanings were then assigned an intellectual achievement that amounted to nothing less than the invention of writing and above all the literature of Mesopotamia is one of its finest cultural achievements just think of the epic of gilgamesh in the epic of Atrahasis the source of the Noah story and on view upstairs in the North Room on the left is one of these ancient jar ceilings dating to the Akkadian period around 2250 BC only about an inch high that this piece of unbaked clay survives is remarkable as is the quality of the seal that was used to impress it and now lost some time the remote is past you can see a hero fighting with a lion on the right is an actual some dried tablet Jenaya form tablet from the morgan library dating to the mid second millennium BC the Tabitha's less than four inches high and is impressed or signed as it were with a seal in order to authenticate the text of the tablet on the screen are a number of these cylinder seals again the largest of these is less than a half an inch and a half you can immediately see the beauty in a variety of the materials such as white and red marbles lapis lazuli rock crystal various chalcedony 'aa banded agate among others these are the smallest objects ever produced by sculptors notice the holes at the top of the seals here and here and through all of them the seals were drilled through so that they could be worn and indeed a primary function of these seals was ambulette 'ok a particular stone was thought to have a specific property that would have a beneficial effect on its wearer moreover a seal had a direct relationship to a particular individual for the seal identified what it was used to seal as the property or the responsibility of a specific person to that extent seals represent the earliest pictorial representation of a person every time a seal was used in pressed on clay the image would be repeated and thus seen by numerous people much like a postage stamp combined with a photo ID today the propaganda value of these repeated images was not lost on our ancestors the images engraved on these durable seal stones represent the largest body of pictorial information that survives from the ancient Near East and provide us today with the unique chronological and artistic sequence for well over 3,000 years as I have mentioned seals were worn here on the right as a drawing of the shell inlay showing a woman with a garment pin and there's her seal dangling down the original is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and here on the left is how Queen puabi was found in her tomb at the royal cemetery of war her elaborate headdress covering her head her shoulders were here the body has been removed and right here at her shoulder are her garment pins like this and that's one of her cylinder seals flopping up in the tomb as it was found the importance of seals to their owners has survived in a biblical text from the Song of Solomon quote well in which the brightening tells us beloved quote where me as a seal upon thine heart as a seal upon thine arm for love is as strong as death passion as cruel as the grave it blazes up like a blazing fire fiercer than any flame end of quote what that means is that since seals were so personal they were not handed down but were buried with you so if you were worn as the seal upon someone's heart and therefore buried with that person you would be together for eternity and your love would indeed transcend death here is exactly one of those seals referred to in the biblical text and from the morgan collection this middle assyrian sealer from the 13th century BC is remarkable not only for the striking image of a lion attacking mouflon but for the complexity of the stone itself a beautiful white banded agate and it's almost impossible to see the carving you can barely make out the tree here that's standing here and look how the drama of this confrontation is all done with these arcs and curves as the head of the animal is sort of in the pull of the claws of the lion and even notice there's even expression of fear in the face of the animal as it trying to bound up an escape from its attacker it's again it's less than an inch tall what our ancient near-eastern cylinder seals doing at the Morgan Library well even in the last collection guides of the library one reads quote another unconventional interest was represented by morges impressive collection of ancient near-eastern cylinder seals end of quote unconventional morgan himself would have found it odd to find that it was thought by his followers to be unconventional to collect ancient near-eastern cylinder seals for two reasons first Morgan's strengths as a collector lay more in the decorative arts than in the field of painting he had a greater appreciation of craftsmanship exquisite materials historical associations and three-dimensional objects seals fit all of these aspects of his collecting and second there is a more profound reason for these seals to be in the material Morgan's library Morgan lived into the beginning of the second decade of the 20th century but it was very much the concerns and beliefs of the 19th century that shaped his character and aroused his youthful intellectual curiosity and it is to the 19th century we must turn to find that reason in the 19th century much of Western thought was dominated by the Bible and the names of ancient Near Eastern Kings like Sanaa Karev and tiglath-pileser as well as cities such as Nineveh Babylon and or were known to all but only through the Bible indeed all that was known with the pre Persian history of ancient Mesopotamia came from the Bible and some Greek and Roman sources sources available in read by educated people and indeed the sources that were the very foundation of education at this time in the early and mid 19th century the Near East was under the control of the Ottoman Turks who are in the process of a decline England France and Russia were already in conflict over which attitude to adopt towards the tottering Empire the Russian Tsar wanted it to collapse so he could divide the remains with England the British government policy was somewhat ambiguous yet at this time tended to support the Sultan as a buffer against the Russians there was a lack of order in Mesopotamia Western propaganda claimed that the brutality of the local Pasha's was well known and that excessive taxes and torture were the norm unlike Egypt with its many monumental visible remains and relatively easy for travelers Mesopotamia was apparently fraught with danger and there was little to see if its past and Biblical remains few Europeans found a way to Mosul in northern Mesopotamia and the name Mosul of course it's a city today much in the news again when a 25 year old adventurer named Henry lair arrived there in 1842 on his way from Baghdad to Constantinople Leonardo Laird had no prospects in England and was supposed to be on his way to India but was looking for a job with the embassy in Constantinople near Mosul he saw several vast eroded mounds which were even visible from Mosul itself across the Tigris River after its violent destruction in 612 BC Nineveh center of one of the largest and most powerful empires of the ancient world vanished leaving no concrete trace nothing but myth and legend it was at the beginning of the 19th century that these eroded mounds near Mosul were tented Lee identified as nineveh about these eroded mounds Laird wrote of being deeply moved by the desolate and solitary splendor he pondered on the names of tiglath-pileser Shalmaneser sanaka ravana Shahed on the syrian kings whose names rang down through the ages with the validity of old testament scripture in the book of johna Nineveh even to God was a large city covering a distance of three day's journey and God estimated the population of this metropolis as quote more than 12 times 10,000 people who run who are unable to distinguish right from wrong and much cattle and a quote the earliest surviving account of the Assyrian ruins was by the Greek general Xenophon who led ten thousand mercenaries to Babylonia and back in the year 401 to 400 that was two hundred years after the destruction of Assyria when he passed the ruins and could not find anyone who could identify those very ruins their name had already been forgotten at mosul Laird became friends with the French consul however they became involved in their own national rivalries the British Museum and the louver in fierce competition and the rivalry in acquiring and exhibiting glorious and interesting antiquities reflected national and political interests under Napoleon the louver became a treasure house of conquered works of art to illustrate the national grandeur on the battlefield England also vested enormous prestige in its National Museum when Lord Nelson destroyed the French Navy in the Battle of the Nile in a in 1798 the many antiquity is collected by the French and Egypt were confiscated and sent to the British Museum including the rosetta stone they were already crated and on the dock waiting to go to France and the British took them with the DES final defeat of Napoleon the British returned many of the ludas objects to Italy and other European countries but at the same time in 1816 acquiring the Parthenon marble from lord elegan however in the 1840s the French began digging in Mesopotamia first in 1843 sensational Press reports began to appear of remarkable stone reliefs from what were apparently pollicis drawings preceded the reliefs to Europe and the Louvre exhibited the French finds as early as 1847 causing quite the stir Laird was anxious to provide relief for England however the reception of this material was not appreciated by two groups in England first the British intelligentsia including the art establishment did not appreciate these newly discovered reliefs as art the reliefs were thought to be inferior to the most secondary works of Greek and Roman art however they all agreed they did have great historical interest Parliament even held hearings as to where the public money should be spent in acquiring reliefs for the nation no less of a prominent artist and the sculpture of the neoclassical pediment on the facade of the British Museum felt that these reliefs did not belong under the same roof as the Parthenon sculptures furthermore artists could even be hurt in their aesthetic soul by studying these reliefs quote the less people in their capacity as artists view these objects the better and of quote forgetting forgetting that less than two generations earlier the British Museum almost turned down the parthenon marbles british taste then was still rooted in roman copies not yet aware of the beauty of the Greek originals and the second group that opposed this was the Anglican Church they were not enthusiastic the church was powerful influential and wealthy and resisted change they were suspicious of the impact of the discoveries on the infallibility of Scripture however at the same time British intellectuals were desperate for philosophic and religious reforms due to the new scientific discoveries and achievements of the century that were however shaking people to long-held beliefs at the time religion was without a doubt among the most widely and hotly debated subjects in books and magazines the debate was fierce with tensions between the new ideas and a strongly traditional clergy the clearest reign was with the matter of time and chronology in 1656 Archbishop James Ussher established a precise chronology for all events mentioned in the Bible which essentially meant for the entire history of the world from creation to the present day and it became the common understanding for all history and still maintained in England in the mid 19th century the date for creation was 6 p.m. October 22nd 4004 BC particularly in Germany and France the literalism of Scripture was affected by science not so in England indeed only conformist that the central dogmas of the Anglican Church could attend Oxford or Cambridge for the establishment Laird was not of this background he was a Unitarian so his Sybilla saw his suitability in social position were at best considered uncertain and his motives were suspicious the great threat to conservatism came from the sciences of prehistory geology biology and astronomy the church dismissed these new challenges by claiming that scientists faith was not strong enough to enable them to correctly interpret their findings in 1834 a French geologist wrote quote certain English theologians ridiculously persist in their mania of wanting to make the results of geology agree with Genesis England is so pervaded with the spirit of sect that everyone is obliged by force or by will to enroll under a religious banner in such a way that in the mud in the midst of the marvels of Industry and an advanced civilization the most elevated minds are often mired in theological disputes that recall the middle ages end of quote by mid-century an anonymous English commentator wrote geology has shown us the pre-adamite earth imagine a phrase the pre-adamite earth inhabited with some peculiar organized beings astronomy had resolved the flickering lights in the night sky into a system of Suns and galaxies and shone needs to be incomprehensibly ancient all science is thus carrying us into the past end of quote the great catastrophe to religion was that the higher criticism used on the Iliad and the Odyssey was now turned on the Bible in this climate it was greatly feared that the excavators might provide contemporary evidence that would refute the Bible as God's Word however Laird and his supporters eventually persuaded the trustees of the British Museum with three arguments for excavations first Assyria indeed had distinct relevance to the elucidation of the Old Testament this in direct opposition to the church second Assyria had up did indeed have a place in the evolution of art the so called chain of art from the most primitive to the to the culmination of art and the Parthenon Marbles not in consequently in the British Museum itself and third their national ambitions they could not allow the French of an opera by Napoli on this area and in the meantime the French efforts in Mesopotamia began to get us suffered a setback due to the Paris revolution once the Laird actually started getting results the public was riveted reliefs superior to those found by the French and a great quantity eventually some two miles of them were discovered many were sent to the British Museum these images now are from the London Illustrated news and they were followed breathlessly by the public as the stages of the discovery were sent to London this is the initial discovery one of these great winged Bulls here there's the removal of it and layered standing on top and these these things weigh about 15 to 20 times and Laird writes about all of a sudden it fell to the ground there's a big explosion of dirt into the air and it did not break and then they had to move them from the site to the river and some five to six hundred men would have to pull them and there's the site in the distance all the way to the river and then once they got to the river they floated them on barges there's they a thousand miles down the river to the port of Basra where they had to wait for sailing vessels that didn't often make a stop at Basra and there it is being lifted on to the vessel and then make its way back to England and then here we are it's arriving at the British Museum up the steps through the neoclassical facade and into the building where it became admired by our Victorians these winged animals made a strong impression a 19th century Europe in the first year alone some nine hundred thousand people went to see them in the British Museum this was the first blockbuster in museum history they emanated a calm and powerful majesty their subject military success and service of the gods resulting in the syrian prosperity was captivating power piety prosperity all the basic propaganda of empire then as well as now however all were not pleased Laird received a letter from one of his patrons quote they write me from England that a Syrian antiquities were exciting great interest so that the clergy had got perfectly alarmed at the idea of their being contemporary annals whereby to test the credibility of Jewish history a brother indeed of mine a fellow at Exeter College and joint editor the Oxford magazine protests most vehemently against the further prosecution of this inquiry indeed Laird with its excavations was accused of opening daily the trenches of a great religious war yet when Laird's account Nineveh its remains was published it was an instant sensation even though he still did not have the names of the Kings or any real chronology then with the final decipherment of Chania forum in the mid 1850s the public was intoxicated the Kings whose palaces were an earth were indeed the Assyrian Kings known to all through the Old Testament was this the long-sought proof of the validity of Scripture maybe for the public but now for the clergy the Word of God never needed any such validation and then with the discovery of Oscar Bono Paul's Palace library of tens of thousands of tablets this further attitude excitement previously inscriptions were only known for monuments of examples carved in stone or impressed in bricks with this library the discipline of the Seri ology was born and unlike the fire that destroyed the Library of Alexandria the fire that destroyed the palace of Ashurbanipal and 612 BC actually preserved all the clay tablets in his library it was during the height of all of this frenzy for all things Assyria that in 1854 the teenage Morgan accompanied his family to London where they maintained a residence there is no question whether or not he read Nineveh its remains indeed the main topic of conversation was what did you think of lay arts book not have you read Laird that was assumed Morgan saw the Assyrian treasures in the British Museum and the Louvre as well as the relocated Christus Crystal Palace as noted in his Diaries these were his formative years full of youthful enthusiasm for the discovery of new things unlike the well-established class the Kohler Egyptian filled the entire field of ancient Mesopotamian studies grew up with Morgan himself in 1869 prominent businessmen decided to build a major Museum in New York City known as the Metropolitan Museum Morgan became a patron in 1871 trustee in 1888 president in 1904 until his death in 1913 what did you need for the Near East you needed seals tablets and reliefs the seal collection was originally purchased the seal collection here at the library was originally purchased for the Metropolitan Museum his fellow board members were not impressed with these rather small stones so Morgan bought a number of them to his library all periods are represented here he was justly proud of his seals and he privately and lavishly published some 300 of them in 1909 it's the first publication of seals in America cylinders and other ancient oriental seals in the library J Pierpont Morgan what about reliefs and tablets there's an extraordinary series of invoices from 1911 this is page one and you can see these magnificent things what they cost and where they're supposed to wind up in the right hand corner the young London library on page two of this invoice way down at the bottom here you see a set of three were low reliefs in stone from Asher Nasser haba palace at : now called Nimrod $60,000 New York Museum that's about two million dollars in today's money however were the reliefs for the Metropolitan Museum or not there's a letter to the Metropolitan Museum director from Paris dealer in 1911 quote I beg to inform you that I have addressed to you three cases containing three stone reliefs representing Kings with Jenaya form inscriptions cases will be delivered free of charge PS very important these three stone reliefs have been sent to you at mr. JP JP Morgan's requests and then a follow-up letter from an apparently panic-stricken Met Museum director - Morgan secretary now that the seals were at the library quote I enclose a letter with Rick to the shipment of three stone reliefs which I assume underlined are acquired by mr. Morgan for his personal underlined again collection and then in the bottom right hand corner dictated by Morgan himself it says this wants to go with the collections Jenaya form of that sort PJP em and then the next invoice we now have all how many is that I can't see them to over two thousand tablets from New York but here the reliefs are still the Metropolitan Museum and then along as a tremendous rose where an Egyptian of course are Catholic is also for the Metropolitan Museum but then that invoice gets amended the tablets are now New York the reliefs are no longer the Metropolitan Museum but New York but the sarcophagus is clearly still two Metropolitan Museum the reliefs however never left the Metropolitan Museum after their arrival from Europe due to Morgan's death and were eventually given by a son to the museum and they are beautifully and majestically installed with a number of reliefs that came later to the Met and one of the most been templated spaces in the museum there's been thought that the great collection of pierpont morgan library of 1132 seals was assembled on behalf of morgan between 1885 and 1908 by williams hayes ward although it has been difficult to determine the exact date and circumstances of the purchases Ward summarized mr. Morgan's intentions as follows quote it is the chief project as I understand it of mr. Morgan in bringing to this country the written and figured monuments of the early east such as tablets seal cylinders bar reliefs for statues to put within the reach of American scholars the material necessary for adding to the knowledge adding to the knowledge of the world such a scholar was Edith Parata the Morgans first curator of seals shown here towards the end of her life about 25 years ago although the daughter of vienna america gave her refuge from the dark forces that overtook europe in the 30's she came from the background of tremendous privilege and wealth this is her maternal grandmother who was a notice stage actress who married into a prominent Berlin banking family here is her father in Vienna in his World War one uniform as children Edith is on the left her sister on the right the father in the middle they were raised by a governess in a home of extraordinary splendour this is the entrance way in the staircase it was across the street from their good friends the Rothschilds and the Rothschilds had a lien on the Perata house that they could not build an extra floor on top to block the view of the Rothschilds home Perata tried to keep it a secret that she was studying in the university from her more from her society friends but the Rothschilds and the paratha cooks knew each other gospel among each other and word got out that Edith was becoming a scholar and again the last photograph of this extraordinary home in Vienna now what are her mother the mother from a fabulous fabulous Berlin family was not happy in Vienna and early on left the family to pursue her own interests mostly with the poets and painters of the day like Godfrey been in here and and most noted also of max beckmann this is a portrait of the mother by Max Beckman and the mother is on the left and here again is a photo of Edith on the left and a sister on the right she was among the first women to get a degree in Vienna however after the Anschluss she was forbidden entry into the museum into the university and she was even arrested for 24 hours and never really spoke about what happened to her during those 24 hours as I said she was raised by a governess who joined the Nazi Party as a cover for the household and her - darling wards and it was because that she was a party member she was able to get the girls on to a train when they fled Vienna shortly after that the father was walking down the street after his children had left and a friend of his warned him not to go home he did not go home and all like you saw was abandoned after Edith wrought his death sorting through her papers I came across two documents both deeply moving in their own very different way first is her passport that got her out of occupied Austria and you can see on the next page she is a doctor of philosophy they gave her that still and it's dated 14 September 1938 she was 26 years old but on the next page the German authorities permit her to travel to Turkey France England America etc for a year from 38 to 39 the ruse was that she would return and then on the next page she's in Berlin in 38 getting a permit to visit France from the French Embassy in Berlin it's valid for two months from September 27th and November 27th in 1938 there you see she leaves October 9 1938 and that on the next page she's in Paris she obtains a quote immigration visa from the American Consul in Paris and finally on November 9th she embarks on a boat at kind tremendous events are happening around her as this is this is going on on November 7th a German diplomat in Paris is assassinated and this becomes the excuse to unleash unprecedented anti-semitic violence throughout Germany and Austria which became known as crystal nacht November 9th and November 10th and here is Edith Parata on the boat in the night of Kristallnacht leaving the chaos of Europe and her home behind her the other document that moves me deeply is this humble and much frayed volume of illustrations for her patience the text volume survives in Vienna one can imagine as she was leaving Vienna and not knowing what the future would bring and officially as far as the authorities were concerned she was returning she was restricted on what she could take with her either parada chose the volume of illustrations she knew the text she needed the images this was filled with pasted in line drawings of the seal designs all drawn by Edith Parata herself as well as a catalogue of all the visual elements on the seals again all drawn by her this was groundbreaking work of great detail and which would eventually serve as the foundation upon which he built her entire field of research and teaching method here in America the Morgan Library was Edith's Piratas first scholarly home in and here in America and as I have mentioned she was the first carry of the Morgan Library seals her landmark publication of the Morgan's collection in 1948 70 years later remains today a standard reference on seals and presented seals for the first time as art in themselves and in an art book format beautif Prada became honorary curator of seals and tablets in 1957 and remained at the library until her death in 1994 a few of you here this evening were part of her weekly seminars given for Columbia University at the Morgan here she is one of her students in Istanbul the students would gather in the rather grand marble hall outside and then descend by a back staircase or rather rickety elevator to a cramped underground under heated and under furnace room languish shelves piled with 8 by 10 photograph paper boxes and a gray and green steel utility lockers but then out of the boxes would come impression she had made of steel collections from around the world and finally out of her purse came a small change purse from which was produced to key to the grey Locker on the Shelf of the gray Locker was a small sucrets tomb that held another key and with this key the Green Locker was opened and this dude would gasp - behold the Morgans collection of cylinder seals we would be privileged to handle and examine the very seals themselves under the watchful eyes of Edith Parata what a difference from those hours of studying the photos of impressions in books here were those magical objects in our very hands she would encourage us to use magnification and to draw what we saw draw for generations of students in discussing the art of the ancient Near East Edith Parata always strove to present the objects not as old isolated or little immediate relevance but as a vitally connected to a long tradition of visual expression by recreating their context and restoring their cultural significance Edith Parata was able to establish a continuity between the past and the present and thus enrich and inform our own times as well this sealed a beautiful milky chalcedony shows a stag leaping in a landscape was the seal most closely associated with Edith Parata and perhaps reminded her of the hunting lodge of her family before the war in Austria near Salzburg the significance of the scene remains unknown today however an echo of its meaning is surely to be found in the biblical texts from the Song of Solomon in which the bride speaks of the bridegroom's love quote the voice of my beloved behold he cometh leaping upon the mountains skipping upon the hills my beloved is like a row or a young heart Colin Carter art critic of the New York Times has described the image on the seal in particular quote a leaping stag from a middle Assyrian Seal carved around 1300 BC is a masterpiece of sculptural relief the animal startled eyes and taut muscles are caught with exquisite not a stroke wasted naturalism two trees that flank him our near abstract bursts of lying midair explosions talk about elegance end of quote the picture of youth product yen at the end of her life with her sisters is on the left and their Austrian estate in the mountains that they're able to get back in the 1950s near the parada once wrote quote as I prepared the case for the 1991 exhibition of masterpieces in the pierpont morgan library a few years ago i gratefully thought of miss green the library's legendary first director who entrusted to a young unknown foreigner the works the work on the then greatest and finest collection of cylinder seals paralleled only by the british museum and the Louvre I was quite conscious than of the fact that such generous faith in an untried young scholar was possible only in the United States and this I still believe and of quote at this point I must acknowledge the generosity of Jeanette and Jonathan Rosen Jonathan Rosen attended more of those legendary seminars here at the Morgan than anybody else and was a close personal friend of Edith Parata three days before she died Edith Parata had a conference called place from Hawaii where she was being cared for by her dear sister - Jonathan Rosen and to me here in New York she was frail yet lucid and in a weak yet firm but slightly agitated voice expressing concern she asked about the future of the seals at the Morgan Jonathan made a promise to her that he would take care of things at the library and as she expressed her gratitude her voice grew calm with acceptance and Jonathan and Jeanette have just have done just that they have met all the expense of the department of seals and tablets for over twenty years endowed the position of curator itself and funded the installation of the morgan seals in the north room this is the first permanent installation of seals in the history of the institution the seals have now become the heart of the morgan and a popular stop in our dosing tours and a future part of the education program let us briefly turn to a few seals from the late 4th and Thurman n-b-c caught some 5000 years ago to follow the theme of animals and lines that we started with some of the earliest seals show animals representing the controlled herds upon which the economy was dependent this precious seal only about a half an inch high is a remarkable conception there are no gods and goddesses shown in these earlier seals but their presence has felt you see this here is a bunch of marsh reeds lashed together in two places and we know that this represents the Great Goddess enon of the goddess of love and fertility because the way you write her name in cuneiform is based on this symbol so what's happening here this is a sanctuary defined by these symbols sacred to the goddess inanna and what's happening inside the sanctuary there are two animals but are they any two animals no they are the male and the female this is the whole her this is the cycles of life and creation and what's happening to these animals inside the sanctuary banana they are being nourished this could be the visualization of a hymn - Inanna herself and of course we're had to read about a sacred garden where all is at peace and there's an abundance of everything this foreshadows the biblical Eden and then this magnificent seal of a humble piece of serpentine dating to about 3100 BC with three majestically horn stags and here we have an artist really making a conscious effort to stylize a design these magnificent horns across the surface of the seal this indeed could even be at home at the turn in turn-of-the-century Vienna as a wood cut from the Vino vachetta and then here and is still slightly later serpent and seal about 2900 BC the helping to BC the entire scene of animals bounding across the field the entire herd is expressed just through these arcs and curves alone you see the animal with its horn another one and another one and I think one thing so the vitality and exuberance of Matisse cutouts Matisse's cutouts look at this now the emerging urban communities characteristic of this era slowly over a period of so five hundred years grew into powerful sumerian tempest dates competing with each other for dominance over southern mesopotamia this phase of Mesopotamian history is called the early dynastic period this and so called for the dynasties of Sumerian rulers established in these now great cities such as a lavish Kish and or by the later phases of this period beginning around 2600 BC writing had been in use in Mesopotamia for some five or six hundred years and by this time southern Mesopotamia was dotted with twenty to thirty temple states each dominated by a temple to a specific God one of their preferred subjects one of the preferred subjects for seals on this later phase of the early dynastic period again we were around 2600 to 2300 BC is a so-called contest scene where domesticated animals are no longer grazing peacefully but are involved in a conflict with wild animals often with a hero coming to the aid of the domesticated animals this rich lapis lazuli seal inscribed for a prince shows a contest scene and with interconnected figures creating a frieze across the surface there's a hero attacking a feline attacking a stag protected by a hero embracing another stag attacked by a lion coming in from the right and this further lapis lazuli example is another very dynamic scene and you can see the lion coming in from the right biting the neck of the bull and swapping it with its paws which is what Lions do in nature they jump from the back bite and swap and notice how the lion's head is shown from above so you can see the act of biting and his very strong neck muscles are hidden by these wonderful Tufts of flame like Tufts of the mane now the subject of the seal figures fighting animals specifically lions was already ancient the time the seal was carved the same subject meant different things in successive periods what is the original meaning of this scene well around 8000 BC you have the final domestication of cattle and when you have domesticated cattle you have an animal strong enough for pulling a plow which leads to wide scale agriculture when you progress to the stage you start encroaching in the natural territory of wild animals such as lions and as we know from Africa today lions are basically lazy animals that prefer to attack domesticated animals old people or children because it is easier among the earliest images we have from Mesopotamia is such a scene on the screen is a modern drawing of an ancient painting dating to around 7,000 BC it is painted on the inside here whoops it is painted on the inside of a vessel so if you look into the vessel you see this entire scene so this part would join here and just ignore this part and so this would join up here and it represents a real threat to the community you have a hero here with the quiver shooting a bow and arrow at a lion who has a calf in its claws to see there's the head of the calf and that's what he does and then the community is represented by these obviously female figures with long flowing hair holding up a garment between them perhaps they represent weavers and the domesticated cow on the right the hero is protecting the community this is perhaps the earlier surviving narrative scene in Mesopotamian art its subjects shows a real threat to the daily existence of the community some 4000 years later by the time of the early dynastic Sumerian temple States the representation has evolved into a frieze of interconnected figures that we can see on the seal however now the threat of an attacking lion is no longer a specific reality the same basic subject matter of the earlier vessel painting has evolved into something more conceptual it now represents one of the great cultic mythical dramas of the sumerians that is the eternal struggle between the forces of order and chaos the lions representing the chaos of the natural world with the domesticated animals and man representing the forces of order and the struggle to impose order on the world around them in the scenes on the seals the battle has never clearly resolved the Sumerians knew already then that this very struggle is constant and how fitting to card this image on a cylindrical surface with the seeing endlessly repeating and repeating itself order and chaos and here is another example on this beautiful marble seal we see the Lions Mane's and here they are and it's also linear and graphic and this figure here could be right out of Picasso ceramics southern Mesopotamia was not unified until about 20 450 BC when the Sumerian temple states were conquered and brought into the so-called Akkadian Empire the Akkadian period takes its name from Agra day the royal city built by Sargon the first king of a Semitic dynasty who overthrew the early dynastic Sumerian princes of southern Mesopotamia and set up his rule over the entire country before the Acadians achieve this political ascendancy they had been living side by side in southern Mesopotamia with the Sumerians therefore no sudden break occurred in the cultural development of the country nevertheless in the years ascribed to Sargon's reign a fundamental change took place in Mesopotamian art the dreamlike interconnected designs of the Sumerians were succeeded by dynamic realistic works a different treatment of space develops since more room was needed for the often violent action of the muscular figures of the Cayden designs this is the art of empire what is clearly stressed is power through strength among the more elegant seals with this subject is Magna an example from the Morgan Library and look what's happened to our poor lion no longer biting the neck from above and grasping with its plot with his paws its head is thrown back roaring in rage and impotence as his teeth are bared his claws are being grasped useless and what I find extraordinary about this cylinder seal is it's an inch high and yet look at the understanding of our selves our Acadian artists for anatomy look at the muscle structure underneath the hide of the water buffalo or the bull mane of the arms of the hero or the lion each one is as unique and different as it is in nature and the other remarkable aspect of this is that combination of our naturalistic detail with these rather not naturalistic gestures that actually emphasize the act of suppression and dominance we will control the world around us and then there's the stylized tree on a mountain this has a very long life you can see it here in these Assyrian reliefs some 2,000 years later the way these mountains are done and it's perfectly beautiful stylized tree and this even continues because when gustav klimt saw these Assyrian reliefs he added this detail to his painting of Judith with the head of Holofernes to give it an authentic background however the Akkadian Empire in spite of its art was fraught with assassination and internal strife and after the death of Sargon's grandson Dharam Singh there was an arc in the land and the Great King lists record quote who was king and who was not king end of quote several more Akkadian Kings spell out the dynasty however ruling over smaller and smaller territories until an invasion from the north ends the 190 year lar Acadians the Acadians abused power and religion to secure their empire and this abuse and eventual collapse of control is the lesson of history that has yet to be learned one empire to the next to the present moment in time after the collapse of the Kaden Empire a Dark Age descended upon Mesopotamia however a few centers of Mesopotamian culture preserved their independence during the domination of the in dating foreigners one of these with the city of Lagos in extreme south he arraigned a priest prince named Gudea the seals made at la gosh show a continuation of the high standard of the Akkadian art and on this magnificent stair tight sealer from about 2150 BC a lion headed eagle has to nearly mu flung goats in its grasp and in heraldic composition of great symmetry the beautifully cut inscription incorporated into design identifies the sea alone and his occupation the design has delicately worked especially in the wings of the lion headed eagle indeed one gets the feeling of the wings of the majestic creature spreading open before your very eyes now after a less than less than a century the domination of the foreigners was broken and the region of their conquest came once again under the rule of the Mesopotamian dynasties the so called third dynasty of or the period is referred to as a Sumerian renaissance since the text at the time were again written in Sumerian rather than Akkadian and the country especially a southern part Sumer enjoyed a spectacular revival king or nama was the founding king of the third dynasty of war he was responsible for the restoration of the old temples and oversaw the extensive construction of new temples here is king or nama himself on display as the centerpiece of the north room upstairs on his skirt is an inscription that reads were nama king of Sumer and Akkad the one who built the temple of Enlil this is extremely important because the temple of Engel was damaged by the predecessor produced preceding akkadians and he wants to be known as a restorer and on his head he's carrying a basket of mud to make the first bricks for the new temple the most menial and list of tasks and indeed when this object came to the Morgan Library in 1909 it was described as female offering bearer and the reason for that is they did not know but this is the first time in Mesopotamian art that a ruler image is not shown as a man of strength and military might everything has been softened now military might has become secondary to piety this is what's important this is the message of this sculpture and then if you look at a detail of the face you see the deep piety and expression the eyes the mouth and if you look at it from the side which I don't have the photo reference is a slightly receding chin this is real portraiture and then look at the negative spaces created by the upraised arms that emphasize the face and the piety of the act itself the sculpture gives us a rare glimpse of royal portraiture as conceived by first-rate Metropolitan craftsmen of the 21st century BC when this sculpture was first purchased by Morgan as I said in nineteen in the 1919 oh nine its function was not known the University of Chicago excavated this Ted this building we're in the late 1950s early 60s that's the temple of n little on the left this is a magnificent reconstruction of what it must have been these great cigarettes are actually the design of or Namas architects and down here under the door the Gateway the Chicago excavators found this pile of baked bricks sealed with tar or bitumen and there's the removal of the first brick well there's two more well we'll proceed and then of course this is out of focus because they're much too excited there is the head of one of these sculptures coming out of the ground and here it is standing outside here is our very happy workmen with our high-tech dig excluding equipment and there's the sculpture here and this is the one that was found dripping with the in crustacean of and what is remarkable about this sculpture the Morgan sculpture was well-known but this inscription is exactly the same as the one here at the Morgan Library so now we know that the Morgan Library sculpture which I show here on the right again and where it came from on the left comes from the temple of Enlil and that it's functioned as a foundation figure to attest for eternity the piety of king or nama himself this is a rare moment of calm in the turbulent history of the land between the two rivers still to come our two millennia of the emergence of new political entities their rise in their Falls such as Hammurabi and the Babylonians of the second millennium BC the Assyrians of the late second millennium BC and the vast empires of the neo-assyrian and neo Babylonians of the first millennium BC throughout these epochs seals continued their valuable and various functions in the mid six centuries BC the Persian king Cyrus the Great defeated the last rule of the neo-babylonian empire Babylon along with the entire ancient empire that spread throughout Mesopotamia became a province of Persia in general the Persians used seals only for official purposes for private use they employed stamp seals mounted and rings a practice still in use today even though cylinder seals had been carved in Mesopotamia for over 3,000 years the form was by no means exhausted some of the most exquisite cylinders were produced at the end of the tradition and the Persian workshops on this banded agate seal it is no longer the nude bearded hero of the Sumerians and the Acadians dominating animals but the Persian king himself in a beautifully balanced yet artificial composition where all the elements are subservient to and a reflection of the majesty of the king through the king himself order is imposed on the chaos of the natural world and finally this remarkable honey colored chalcedony seal showing simply as true riding bull hopefully at peace what I find so compelling about this sealer that the Mesopotamians have been carving these animals for thousands of years and are still able to create a thing of originality simplicity and great beauty cylinder seals were used until the defeat of the last Persian king by Alexander the Great in 330 BC they no longer had a function as parchment and papyrus replaced clay tablets and the Western centres of empire moved from Western Asia to Greece in Rome nevertheless not only do they remain a valuable record of Mesopotamian artistic practices they also reveal a great deal about the political social religious and cultural developments of the ancient Near East many of these images served as symbols of human qualities and intellectual concepts in the religious and poetic literature of the ancient Near East including the Old Testament and it's through the Old Testament as the medium of verbal tradition much of the symbolism continued into the imagery of the Middle Ages Europe and beyond now on the screen is a mosaic depicting one of the earliest surviving or presentations of the Last Supper it is in Ravenna in style pulling out in the oval and dates to about 530 ad about 800 years after Alexander notice they are all on Roman couches sitting around dinner the story is told vividly and directly with Christ on one side and Judas on the other and the heads of the Apostles when Christ mentions betrayal gradually turn and face Judas who then looks back at Christ and here is the same subject as painted by Tintoretto finished months before his death and in san giorgio maggiore and Venice 1000 years separated these two images the doctrine of transubstantiation the mystery of the Rite of communion had been debated from the 13th century to the 15th Dream was finally incorporated into the document of the Council of Trent in the middle of the 16th century the mystery of this right is what is the subject of Tintoretto's picture with his corporeal apparitions of angelic creatures and a mysterious light source with Christ bending over giving the glass of wine to his disciples the narrative of the mosaic which gives way to the doctrine of the painting represents a tremendous evolution of human experience thought and belief over a period of a thousand years the same evolution of human experience thought and belief must also be applied to the over 4,000 years that separate this narrative image at the top representing the immediate concerns of our beginnings in agricultural communities from the image below representing the idea of eternal struggle between order and chaos a scene as Donald Hansen so eloquently wrote quote reflects the eternal and cyclical battle against chaos itself between civilized and uncivilized men between domestic animals and beasts of the wild between periods of peaceful fecundity and the vagaries of nature between the known and the unknown end of quote we must also apply that concept of intellectual evolution as well to the approximately 1800 years that separate the seal at the top from the example below with which we began where the subject has been entirely removed from the natural world expressing the broader concerns of a theoretical threat to the Empire of the Assyrians and I hope you will go upstairs and look at the seals in the North room but before you go into the North room you have to go through the Rotunda that we looked at at the beginning and do take a chance to look at the ceiling of the rotunda it is a direct citation from Raphael's famous vault decorations but the stanza delia saying your torah in the vatican and in these roundels are the four branches of learning and in the rectangles are further manifestation of those four branches of learning and detail here of one of those branches of course is religion and noticed how she has her cross placed open over the broken cult statue of diana of ephesus and here the other is philosophy where she has her open books and here we have science with the globe and the lamp of knowledge and the arts the sculpture and there's the palette for the painter and then the rectangles between the roundels are really very moving this is how knowledge is transferred through religion the divine inspiration or revelation here is through creativity as in passing sculpture this is Apollo as a master sculptor being crowned for his great accomplishments and then the transmission of knowledge through learning and this is the school of Plato and this the most important of all is the value of knowledge which is force being enchained by wisdom or more poetically light overcoming darkness and this reminds us of our Sumerians and how they the idea of order and chaos that they first so profoundly and so pointedly visualized on their cylinder seals and then you go into the North Room there's our great statue of our namah right in the center standing guard and surrounding the room are the cylinder seals and the cabinet's but again look up at the ceiling there you will see the personification of truth being revealed by the personification of time truth being revealed by time a fitting decoration for a room filled with the antiquities of Mesopotamia that made such a profound effect on Pierpont Morgan himself and so sparked his youthful intellectual curiosity of the past and I will leave you with this there's a remarkable passage in the Old Testament where the actual rolling of a cylinder seal on clay is used to describe the landscape emerging from the darkness at dawn it is among the Lord's admonitions to job quote in all your life have you ever called up the dawn or shown in the morning its place have you taught it to grasp the fringes of the earth and shake the dog star from its place to bring up the horizon in relief as clay under a seal until all things stand out like the folds of a cloak thank you [Applause]
