The Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art covers both a lengthy chronological span and a vast geographical area. The collection of more than seven thousand works of art ranges in date from 8000 B.C. (the Neolithic period) to the Arab conquest and rise of Islam beginning in A.D. 651. The works come from ancient Mesopotamia, Iran, Syria, Anatolia, and other lands in the region that extends from the Black and Caspian Seas in the north to the southwestern Arabian peninsula, and from western Turkey on the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River Valley in modern-day Pakistan and India. Societies throughout the ancient Near East maintained commercial and cultural contacts across great distances, although the routes, trade goods, and artistic styles and motifs that were exchanged varied in different periods.
Strengths of the department's collection, in formation for more than a century, include Sumerian sculptures; Anatolian ivories; Iranian bronzes; metalwork from Bronze Age Bactria in modern-day Afghanistan and Turkmenistan; and magnificent silver and gold vessels from the Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian eras in Iran. These objects are joined by an extraordinary group of Assyrian stone reliefs depicting scenes of warfare and ritual and by enormous guardian figures, all from the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.) at Nimrud, as well as by fine ivory carvings, many of which originally served as furniture ornaments at that site. There is also a large collection of stamp and cylinder seals representative of the various cultures of the ancient Near East.
Highlights from the department are presented online in roughly chronological order.
More about the Department and Its Collection
The first objects from the ancient Near East to enter the Metropolitan's collection—cuneiform tablets and stamp and cylinder seals—were acquired in the late nineteenth century. These and other works of art from the region were overseen by the Department of Decorative Arts until 1932, when a separate Department of Near Eastern Art, comprising both the pre-Islamic and Islamic eras, was established. Finally, in 1956, the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art was formally established under its current mandate—to collect, research, and exhibit works of art created before the Sasanian Empire fell to Arab armies in A.D. 651.
The department's collection has been acquired by gift, by purchase, and by participation in archaeological excavations at, for example, Nippur, Nimrud, and Ctesiphon in Iraq and at Hasanlu, Yarim Tepe, and Qasr-i Abu Nasr in Iran. It has also been enriched by long-term loans from other museum collections. Foreign lenders include the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin; the British Museum, London; the Israel Antiquities Authority; and the Institute of History, Archaeology, and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences, Tajikistan.
Among the most famous pieces in the collection are a gold, lapis lazuli, and carnelian headdress discovered on a young female attendant who had been sacrificed in the royal cemetery at Ur in Mesopotamia (ca. 2600-2500 B.C.); the head of a ruler with curled beard, made of arsenical copper and presumably from western Iran (ca. 2200 B.C.); the only complete statue in the United States of the Neo-Sumerian ruler Gudea, who united a large area in southern Mesopotamia around 2100 B.C.; an axe head of silver and gold foil from ancient Bactria, decorated with fantastic creatures (ca. 2000 B.C.); a Hittite silver drinking vessel in the form of a stag from central Anatolia, dating to the Empire period (ca. fifteenth to thirteenth century B.C.); the imposing glazed brick lions created to decorate the walls of the street between the Ishtar Gate and the Festival House in Babylon during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century B.C.; a masterfully crafted silver head of a Sasanian king of the fourth century A.D.; and a remarkable and extensive collection of Sasanian silver-gilt vessels.
In October 1999, the Galleries for Ancient Near Eastern Art were reopened to the public after an eighteen-month-long renovation and reinstallation, for which support was provided by The Hagop Kevorkian Fund. The galleries are arranged chronologically and by geographical region, with objects placed in contexts that illuminate their significance in antiquity as well as their connections to the art of neighboring cultures. A focus of the new construction was the central part of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gallery for Assyrian Art, which recreates an audience hall in the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 B.C.) at Nimrud in present-day Iraq. The colossal lamassu, or guardian figures, and monumental stone reliefs in this space—among the most prized objects in the collection—were opened to daylight from above and ceiling beams were set at the approximate height of the palace rooms.
