Ligabue Magazine 69
Second semester 2016
Year XXXV
Western culture is deeply rooted in the Mesopotamian world. It’s where you encounter the first serious forerunner further developed, explored and organised by the Greek thinkers of what was to become the scientific spirit of which we are still greatly in awe today. This view expressed by the French historian Jean Bottaro in his essay The Birth of the West is in some ways illustrated in Before the Alphabet, an exhibition organised by the Ligabue Foundation. Due to be staged in the Palazzo Loredan, the headquarters of the Veneto Institute of Science, Letters and Arts in Campo Santo Stefano, Venice,
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* Digital versions from no. 1 to 57 are obtained from a scan of the Magazine. They may therefore have imperfections in the display of texts and images.
from 20 January to 25 April 2017, the exhibition, curated by Frederick Mario Fales and Roswitha Del Fabbro, narrates three millennia of history through 200 items on display from the Ligabue Collection. The exhibition comes 150 years after the birth of the discipline of Assyriology in London, marked by a kind of contest between four scholars to translate a previously undeciphered Assyrian text. The Venetian exhibition provides a very rare opportunity in Italy to explore the world of Mesopotamia. Except for some loans from the Museo Archeologico, Venice, and the Reali Musei, Turin, none of the objects has ever been shown to the public. Although today we are physically far from Mesopotamia, the Land of Two Rivers explains Frederick Mario Fales, a lecturer at the University of Udine the exhibition manages to bring it back to life thanks to the uniqueness, variety and beauty of the Ligabue Foundation antique collection. “What I wanted to do, adds Inti Ligabue, president of the Foundation bearing his father’s name was to display the Mesopotamian collection, the result of gathering objects over decades, because those voices belonged, or rather still belong to peoples close to us. Each of the objects reproduces signs and actions of an everyday way of life that we still practice and elaborate today.”
The story of one particular tablet concealed in an envelope for over forty centuries (only opened a few years ago live on Superquark, a programme broadcast by the RAI flagship channel RAI1, which I took part in from the Palazzo Erizzo in Venice) begins in the city-state of Assur, situated on the Tigris in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). Around 2000 BC, a series of trading posts several hundred kilometres from Assur were established in foreign lands by groups of large families, organised in many, varied import-export firms, basically run privately. Studied and presented by Mario Fales, the text incised on a clay tablet with an envelope is a debtor’s note, agreed between two private individuals. The text reveals that one lend the other 30 minas of refined copper. The debtor was required to pay back the sum with the addition of 1.5 minas of silver as interest; the names of two witnesses are also mentioned.
But how many of these Mesopotamian seals can we read and study today? Roswitha Del Fabbro, an archaeologist from Udine, has surveyed the principal collections of seals in libraries and on the web worldwide. She reminds us how major European museums, such the Louvre and the British Museum began to build up collections of seals from the Ancient East in the 19th century, thanks to travellers who brought them back from the Near East, and items acquired on the antiques market. They total around 25,000 inventoried items, held in public and private Western collections but also in the East, although this may be a rather conservative estimate. After the initial, only vague descriptions of the seals, more detailed critical analyses began appear in the 1950s with the publication of a series of catalogues of the larger collections. It is estimated that in Paris the Louvre has around 5,000 seals and the Bibliothèque Nationale around 2,000. The British Museum also has about 2,000 as does the recently digitalised holding of the Vorderasiatische Museum, Berlin. This still far from definitive long list also includes museums in the United States:
from Chicago to the Yale Babylonian Collection, the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (1,157 seals), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which boasts a collection of 1,000 cylinder and stamp seals, including many that can be viewed in its rich online database.
In the next article the Ligabue Foundation returns to South America, and this time in the company of James Doyle, assistant curator of the Art of the Ancient Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He takes us to the Guatemalan jungle and the Usumacinta River to explore the ruins of the ancient Maya city of Yokib, now known as Piedras Negras, where one of the most important dynastic royal courts flourished from the 5th to the 9th centuries, during the Classic Period (c. AD 250-900). James Doyle describes the conservation efforts and excavation operations being carried out under the auspices of the Guatemala Ministry of Culture and Sport and the Institute of Anthropology and History. Piedras Negras is threatened by many environmental factors and also illegal excavations. Doyle has worked with other archaeologists on a pilot project to photograph the monuments in three-dimensions and to create preliminary models that can be scaled and reproduced: 3-D print replicas can then be installed in museums, or on special sites in the Lacandon Forest. The earliest report on the custom of drinking coffee in Constantinople first reached Europe in the dispatch of a Venetian ambassador (or bailo to use the local term) in 1573.
There were almost immediately also warnings of the dangerous effects of overdependence on this strange beverage described as acqua negra (black water). Twelve years later another bailo, Gianfrancesco Morosini, copied and first used the term caveè, destined to become an international household word. This marked the beginning of a kind of globalisation of coffee beyond all borders. Although the initial diffidence was characteristically quickly overcome in Venice, Alessandro Marzo Magno explains that by 1582 the dark beverage was still only considered a medicine in Germany and many other parts of Europe. As such, coffee was administered in massive quantities to the front-line infantry in the First World War to keep them awake when on guard. It thus became a popular breakfast drink adopted by all Italian social classes. Venice can also boast another culinary record: the fork was first used in Europe by Teodora Anna Ducas, daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine X. She brought one with her, almost as minor dowry, when she came to Venice to marry Doge Domenico Selvo in 1071. She was even viewed suspiciously for using such a superfluous utensil. But then a few centuries later the fork became indispensable when eating foods such as lasagne.
Although this Venetian fashion aroused considerable interest, the rest of Europe was a little reluctant to adopt it and indeed in 1752 only 19 percent of German families used forks. And even in the early 20th century in some poor rural Italian areas women were still not keen on it. A thin thread links the skills of Venetian master glassmakers to the craftsmen of Odumase, a town in eastern Ghana with a reputation for the production of excellent glass beads. For the Krobo, the largest of the Ga-Dangme ethno-linguistic groups, glass beads have the same value as gold has for the neighbouring Akan and play a fundamental role in the ancient rite of female coming of age called the Dipo. Irene Fornasiero visited Odumase, the chief town of the district of Manya-Krobo, where in April-May, dozens of girls and their families gather in the Dipo-House to participate in the five days of initiation. The Dipo has gradually changed over time. In the past the Krobo girls used to bear signs on their skin testifying to having taken part in the ancient rite of passage to adulthood. Now this scarification has been replaced by photos taken by relatives, while some of the local craftsmen who make glass beads have even trained in Venetian workshops harking back to the Serenissima’s trade with Africa.
Bon Voyage!

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