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    Published: 2023-12-221
    Vol. 65 No. 2 (2023)

    140th anniversary of the Department of Middle Eastern Antiquities of the Louvre Museum

    Dariusz Długosz

    https://orcid.org/0009-0001-9114-6448
    https://doi.org/10.36124/rt.2023.17

    Abstract

    The exhibition „1881-2021. Le département des Antiquités orientales a 140 ans” at the Louvre Museum from July 2021 to February 2022 illustrated almost a century and a half of the history of research and discovery of the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East and the directions of archaeology excavations conducted by one of the world’s oldest research center of Assyriology and Biblical Archaeology – Department of Middle Eastern Antiquities (DAO) of the Louvre Museum. The creation of the first ‘Assyrian Museum’ in Europe is closely related to the discoveries of French Assyriologists in the mid-nineteenth century, firstly by Paul Emil Botta in 1847 in Dur Sharrukin (Khorsabad). Officially, the Department was established in August 1881 for the study and exposition of ‘Chaldean, Assyrian, Persian, Phoenician, Jewish and Punic art’, and his collection was enriched with monuments of Sumerian art, discovered at Tello (Girsu) in the south of Mesopotamia. At that time, the Department was headed by eminent Assyriologists: Léon Heuzey and François Thureau-Dangin. One of the largest and richest collections of Middle Eastern art and archaeology is the result of great discoveries by outstanding collaborators of the Department, including Felix de Saulcy (Palestine, 1850), Ernest de Sarzec (Sumerians 1877), Marcel Dieulafoy (Suze, 1884), Claude Schäffer and Réné Dussaud (Ras Shamra/Ugarit 1929) and André Parrot (Mari, 1933). Today, the Department has 137,628 objects presented in three sections: Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Levant. The world’s first modern and interdisciplinary collection was created in September 2012 l’Orient méditerranéen dans l’Empire romain (OMER) showing the crossroads of Eastern Mediterranean cultures and religions during the Roman Empire.

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    Długosz, D. (2023). 140th anniversary of the Department of Middle Eastern Antiquities of the Louvre Museum. Theological Yearbook, 65(2), 431–456. https://doi.org/10.36124/rt.2023.17

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