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Part of our Free Friday Evening Exhibition tour series. Join us in the galleries for an in-depth discussion of the exhibition A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate. In this tour, participants will engage in a guided conversation exploring the specific history, iconography, and transformative power of ancient Near Eastern craftsmanship as it relates to the creation of Babylon's Ishtar Gate and Processional Way.

Join us in the galleries for a 20-minute in-depth discussion of a single object from A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate. In this brief lunchtime talk, participants will engage in a guided conversation exploring the specific history, iconography, and manufacture of one of the objects on view in our current exhibition.

This lecture takes the form of a conversation between a conservator and curator on the technical aspects of making bricks in the form of animals for the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way. We will reconstruct the process of how the bricks were made and assembled. Close observation of the composition of the animals reveals that the craftspeople made deliberate choices about how to lay out these images across a grid of bricks. These choices were not based in a desire to streamline the working process or economize on labor and materials, but rather were motivated by a preference for symmetry and for minimizing the visual interference of the brick grid on the pictorial elements of the composition. We will end with a look at the monumental task of reconstructing the panels after the fragments arrived in Berlin.

Part of our Free Friday Evening Exhibition tour series. Join us in the galleries for an in-depth discussion of the exhibition A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate. In this tour, participants will engage in a guided conversation exploring the specific history, iconography, and transformative power of ancient Near Eastern craftsmanship as it relates to the creation of Babylon's Ishtar Gate and Processional Way.

Ancient Greek beliefs about death and afterlife held firm on the notion that the deceased must receive burial in order to be accepted into the underworld. The manner of burial or the type of grave that received the deceased, however, appear to have been immaterial with regards to religious belief. Greek burial customs showed great variation regionally, temporally, or sometimes even within a single cemetery at any given time. Was the preservation of the mortal remains of the dead completely inconsequential in Greek religion? What level of care was shown to retain a degree of the bodily cohesion, individuality, and personhood of the deceased? This paper uses two case studies—the commingled inhumations in the crowded graves of Argos and the carefully sealed monolithic sarcophagi of Corinth—to explore the attitudes towards the human body after death in Greek thought and mortuary behavior.

Join us in the galleries for a 20-minute in-depth discussion of a single object from A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate. In this brief lunchtime talk, participants will engage in a guided conversation exploring the specific history, iconography, and manufacture of one of the objects on view in our current exhibition.

Part of our Free Friday Evening Exhibition tour series. Join us in the galleries for an in-depth discussion of the exhibition A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate. In this tour, participants will engage in a guided conversation exploring the specific history, iconography, and transformative power of ancient Near Eastern craftsmanship as it relates to the creation of Babylon's Ishtar Gate and Processional Way.

Note: Registration for this lecture will open on Monday, January 13th. The Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project (PALP) is a Getty Foundation funded effort jointly undertaken by the University of Massachusetts and ISAW to create a digital tool for exploring the art of Pompeii within its architectural and urban context. The project is at its very earliest stages so that this talk will both describe its goals along with the challenges we foresee and also describe the technical architecture that we intend to implement. Most broadly conceived, that architecture is known as a "graph database." This way of modeling data can emphasize relationships between entities. That capability is useful at Pompeii because the site very frequently preserves the context of the artworks that were displayed around the city prior to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. Paintings are on walls, those walls define rooms, rooms combine together to form public and private buildings, those buildings not only have neighbors but are across streets from other buildings that in turn have rooms and walls that themselves bear art. PALP intends to make these relationships queryable and the talk will explore our progress to date.

Join us in the galleries for a 20-minute in-depth discussion of a single object from A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate. In this brief lunchtime talk, participants will engage in a guided conversation exploring the specific history, iconography, and manufacture of one of the objects on view in our current exhibition.

*Registration for this event will open on January 6th, one month before the event

Part of our Free Friday Evening Exhibition tour series. Join us in the galleries for an in-depth discussion of the exhibition A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate. In this tour, participants will engage in a guided conversation exploring the specific history, iconography, and transformative power of ancient Near Eastern craftsmanship as it relates to the creation of Babylon's Ishtar Gate and Processional Way.

Note: Registration for this lecture will open on Monday, January 13th. In this lecture I will focus on the distribution of variation in the Arabic papyri to help understand the nature of the differences between Arabic’s earliest written form and the Classical Arabic standard, which developed centuries later. The results will eventually bring into focus the landscape of written Arabic in the Islamic world before the canonization of Classical Arabic and pave the way towards understanding the evolution of Arabic as a written language.