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Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus

Aruz, Joan, ed., and Ronald Wallenfels, with essays by Hans J. Nissen, Donald P. Hansen, Holly Pittman, Joachim Marzahn, Karen L. Wilson, Béatrice André-Salvini, Julian Reade, Jean-Claude Margueron, Nadja Cholidis, Paolo Matthiae, Glenn M. Schwartz, Anne Porter, Thomas McClellan, Giorgio Buccellati, Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, James P. Allen, Claus Reinholdt, Eleni Drakaki, Lena Papazoglou-Manioudaki, Oscar White Muscarella, Elena Izbitser, Yuri Piotrovsky, D. T. Potts, Jean-François de Lapérouse, Paul Collins, Joan Aruz, Maurizio Tosi, C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, Elisabetta Valtz Fino, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Jean M. Evans, Béatrice André-Salvini, Piotr Michalowski, Beate Salje, and Ira Spar (2003)

This title is out of print.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2005)

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (9)
Exhibition
Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus

Art of the First Cities surveys the evolution of art and culture in the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and their impact on the emerging cities of the ancient world—from the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean across Central Asia and along the Gulf to the Indus Valley—during one of the most seminal and creative periods in history. Some fifty museums from more than a dozen countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East have participated in this ambitious exhibition, lending national treasures that had rarely, if ever, been sent outside the walls of their art institutions.

The exhibition features about four hundred rare and outstanding works of art—including sculpture, jewelry, vessels, weapons, inlays, cylinder seals, and tablets—selected to demonstrate the quality of the art of Mesopotamia, its distinctive iconography and style, and the breadth of its influence during the thousand years in which the world's earliest cities were transformed into the world's first states and empires.