'Influential Neighbors' in the Wall Street Journal

By diane.bennett@nyu.edu
05/01/2012

Melik Kaylan writes in the Wall Street Journal for 1 May 2012 concerning ISAW's Nomads and Networks exhibition, as follows:

As the world shrinks, one is increasingly grateful for glimpses of cultures, farflung in time or place, that stir up one's inner Tintin or Conan Doyle with a sense of irreducible mystery. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) seems dedicated to bringing us just such glimpses—in the most scholarly way, of course, it being a branch of New York University. The Institute's whimsically old-world setting accentuates the feeling of discovery.

You walk into a repurposed townhouse—externally discreet, internally grand—just off upper Fifth Avenue and find a wholly unimaginable experience, an encounter, say, with 3000 B.C. Nubia or with Danube Valley relics from 5000 B.C. (two shows from recent years). The current show, "Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan," couldn't be more splendidly esoteric, focusing as it does on that most perennially opaque of the earth's remote regions, the vast steppe-lands of Eurasia...

Read the entire article online at wsj.com.