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Kingdom of Gods and Demons Mesopotamia 1000–500 BCE Museum of Fine Arts – 5 October 2024 – 2 February 2025

The exhibition to open in the Museum of Fine Arts in early October presents the heritage of ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation. Through more than 150 loaned artworks, Mesopotamia. Kingdom of Gods and Demons offers an insight into this long-lost world, from which sprouted the roots of the Bible and indirectly of European culture. The large-scale show is the first temporary exhibition in Hungary to offer a comprehensive picture of the material and spiritual culture of ancient Mesopotamia.

The objects forming the core of the temporary exhibition organised by the Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences–Eötvös Loránd University’s Momentum Assyrian and Babylonian Divine World Research Group, originate from the cities of Aššur, Babylon, Dūr-Šarrukīn and Kalḫu, explored during excavations in Mesopotamia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Several pieces are works of symbolic significance to ancient Mesopotamia or key features in albums on art, while some had previously never been loaned by their institutions. The 150 displayed works brought together for the Budapest exhibition, open until the beginning of February 2025, have been loaned by twelve Hungarian and foreign collections, including prominent European collections, such as the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, the Musée du Louvre and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the National Museum of Denmark and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, and the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

The Budapest exhibition takes visitors on a journey through Mesopotamia in the first half of the first millennium BC, the time of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. Walking through the nine sections, you can admire aesthetically compelling reliefs from Assyrian palaces, as well as the snake-dragon of the vibrant blue Ishtar Gate, discovered in Babylon, and the glazed brick decorations of lions that paved its processional way. The world of Mesopotamian gods is evoked by the miniature depictions of the cylinder seals, the most typical objects of the period, made of stones. Also displayed are small statues and amulets representing emblematic figures of demons, such as Pazuzu and Lamaštu as well as works featuring Assyrian and Babylonian kings. Besides the objects and pictorial material, visitors can study sources with Akkadian cuneiform script, including Tablet I of the Babylonian Epic of Creation along with historical texts of Assyrian and Babylonian kings, also familiar from the Bible.

The closing chapter of the exhibition presents the motif and history of the well-known biblical story of the Tower of Babel, linked to the ancient city of Babylon, through paintings from the Low Countries and works of twentieth-century Hungarian art from our collections. The inclusion of paintings and graphic art besides ancient artefacts further broadens the horizon of the exhibition, which ends with the most recent and diverse selection of pop cultural adaptations of Mesopotamian demons.

A large-scale presentation of ancient Mesopotamia comparable to that of the Museum of Fine Arts’ current exhibition was last organised in our wider region more than 25 years ago, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

The Budapest exhibition is accompanied by an impressive and scientifically comprehensive catalogue authored by the most outstanding Hungarian and international experts on the subject.

The curators of the exhibition: Dr. Zoltán Niederreiter, head of the MTA–ELTE Momentum Assyrian and Babylonian Divine World Research Group, and Dr. Erika Roboz of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Main sponsor: Szerencsejáték Zrt.

Corporate partners: Hotel Oktogon, Volkswagen, Airfrance

In collaboration with MTA–ELTE Momentum Assyrian and Babylonian Divine World Research Group.

Exposition realized with the exceptional collaboration of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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