The culture of the ancient Near East is represented in the Hermitage by texts and works of fine art produced by the peoples who inhabited the territory of Mesopotamia (the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates), Iran, Asia Minor, Armenia, Syria and the Levant between the fourth millennium BC and the first centuries AD – the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Elamites, Persians, Hittites, Hurrians, Urartians, Phoenicians and others.
The main body of the collection consists of over 2,800 cuneiform texts of various periods and genres, as well as a dozen reliefs and around 300 carved seals from Mesopotamia. They all came to the museum either from antiquaries or from private collections. The first items to end up in Russia were several bricks with stamped inscriptions from the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II in Babylon (6th century BC), which were brought to St. Petersburg in 1821 by Robert Ker Porter, an artist of English extraction living in Russia, who in 1817–20 took part in an expedition to Iran organized by the Russian Academy of Sciences. The bricks were presented to Emperor Alexander I, who in turn gave them to the Asiatic Museum (now the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Manuscripts), from where they were subsequently transferred to the Hermitage. In the early 1860s, on the imperial command of Alexander III, eight stone reliefs that had once adorned the palaces of the Assyrian kings Ashurnasirpal II (9th century BC) and Tiglath-Pileser III (mid-8th century BC) in Kalhu, and that of Sargon II (late 8th century BC) in Dur-Sharrukin were purchased for the imperial museum from antiquaries in London and Paris; later two fragments of the reliefs from the palace of Sennacherib (7th century BC) in Nineveh were added to the collection. In the late 19th and early 20th century the Imperial Hermitage purchased “Babylonian antiquities” (over 100 cuneiform tablets and seals) from the well-known French antiquaries Mihran Sivadjian and Elias Géjou. However, the greater part of the cuneiform collection came into the Hermitage in the 1930s from the collection of the eminent Russian collector and historian Nikolay Likhachev (via the State Academy of the History of Material Culture and the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of History).
The Hermitage cuneiform collection is not large, but contains texts from all the main periods in the history of Mesopotamia, primarily in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. One of the earliest pieces is a bulla tablet with a pictographic inscription from the Sumerian city of Uruk dating from the late fourth millennium BC. The collection is dominated by administrative documents: receipts for various goods and foodstuffs, lists of workers and the rations issued to them, records of commercial transactions, promissory notes, business letters and legal documents. More than half of all the Hermitage tablets (about 1,600) date from the period of the 3rd Dynasty of Ur (21st century BC) – the period when bureaucracy and record keeping flourished in Mesopotamia; they come from the major administrative centres of the time – Umma, Lagash, Puzrish-Dagan and Nippur. There are also documents from both earlier and later periods: around 350 texts from the mid-third millennium BC from the archive of the temple of the Sumerian goddess Bau in the city of Lagash; about twenty texts from the period of the Akkad dynasty (24th-23rd century BC); more than 250 documents and letters from the early second millennium BC from various Babylonian cities and from Kanish, an Assyrian trading centre in Asia Minor; around 120 texts from the mid-second millennium BC from the city of Nuzi in the north-east of Mesopotamia; over 150 documents from Babylonia in the 6th century BC, and so on. The Hermitage has more than ten fragments of texts in the Hittite language; of particular interest is the fragment of a treaty between the Hittites and the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II in the Akkadian language. The collection also includes several dozen royal dedicatory inscriptions from various periods on bricks, clay nails, cones and “barrels”, clay and stone tablets, vessels and other objects, as well as a few texts connected with study at a school for scribes and extracts from literary compositions (for example, the Instructions of Shuruppak).
The Hermitage collection also includes archaeological artefacts and textual materials from the neighbouring countries of Elam and Urartu. Unlike the items from Mesopotamia, which were acquired by the Hermitage from private collectors and dealers in antiquities, a significant part of the Elamite and Urartian artefacts came from systematic archaeological excavations. For example, over fifty Elamite painted ceramic vessels from the turn of the fourth and third millennia BC were discovered by a French expedition in the early 20th century during excavations of a necropolis in the south-west of modern Iran.
The main part of the Urartian collection, which includes more than a thousand artefacts, consists of materials from excavations of the ancient fortress of Teishebaini (the hill of Karmir Blur on the western borders of Erevan) between 1939 and 1971. The excavations were led by Boris Piotrovsky, the outstanding orientalist, archaeologist and founder of the study of Urartu in Russia who was Director of the Hermitage from 1964 to 1990. The masterpieces in the collection include bronze armour, weapons and utensils with cuneiform inscriptions referring to Urartian kings. In 2010 the Hermitage collection was enriched by 150 Urartian antiquities presented to the museum by the American collector Torkom Demirjian. The most interesting exhibits among them are bronze artefacts: military equipment and harness, belts and jewellery.
The Hermitage collection also includes small groups of artefacts from the Achaemenid period in Iran, the Hittite state in Asia Minor and the Phoenician state in the Mediterranean. Ancient Palmyra, a major trade centre in the Syrian desert in the early centuries AD, is represented by portrait reliefs from burials that reflect the original style of Palmyrene art, a blend of Oriental and Graeco-Roman features. The most valuable source of information about the life of the city is a Palmyrene customs tariff – a marble tile with the text of the customs law in Greek and Aramaic (137 AD).
Natalya V. Kozlova
