List of Iranian artifacts abroad explained

List of Iranian artifacts abroad is a list of Iranian and Persian antiquities outside Iran, especially in museums.[1] [2] [3] Most of these were found outside modern Iran, in parts of the former Persian Empire, or places influenced by it.

Neighbors of Iran during the Achaemenid period

Afghanistan

  1. Tillya Tepe often known as the Bactrian gold is a collection of about 20,600 ornaments, coins and other kinds of artifacts, made of gold, silver, ivory etc., that were found in six burial mounds (five women and one man) with extremely rich jewelry, dated to around the 1st century BCE-1st century CE.[4] The ornaments include necklaces set with semi-precious stones, belts, medallions and a crown. After its discovery, the hoard went missing during the wars in Afghanistan, until it was "rediscovered" and first brought to public attention again in 2003. The heavily fortified town of Yemshi Tepe, just five kilometres to the northeast of modern Sheberghan on the road to Akcha, is only half a kilometre from the now-famous necropolis of Tillia-tepe.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYiqNjzSKeM
  2. Buddhas of Bamiyan For half a century, through war, anarchy and upheaval, Afghanistan has been stripped of tens of thousands of Buddhist and Hindu antiquities, 33 of those antiquities, were handed over to the Afghan ambassador,at a ceremony in New York.

The artifacts were part of a hoard of 2,500 objects seized in a dozen raids between 2012 and 2014 from Subhash Kapoor, a disgraced Manhattan art dealer currently jailed in India on smuggling and theft charges.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/arts/design/afghanistan-antiquities-return.html

Anatolia (Turkey)

Xerxes I inscription at Van is a trilingual cuneiform inscription of the Achaemenid King Xerxes I (486–465 BC). is located on the southern slope of a mountain adjacent to the Van Fortress, near Lake Van in present-day Turkey. When inscribed it was located in the Achaemenid province of Armenia. The inscription is inscribed on a smoothed section of the rock face near the fortress, approximately 20sigfig=1NaNsigfig=1 above the ground. The niche was originally carved out by Xerxes' father, King Darius (522–486 BC), but he left the surface blank.

Tbilisi

Atashgah’. It means ‘place of fire’ and its use is usually associated with Zoroastrian fire temples. The history of the Atashgah in the capital city of Tbilisi goes back to the 5th or 6th century, when Persia was ruled by the Sasanian dynasty, of which Georgia was a part.https://www.pejmanakbarzadeh.com/ateshgah-a-persian-fire-temple-that-became-a-mosque/?fbclid=IwAR1mhW7xnFbwmb-hqoKF8PBwoFU0ZKChl08xaKMviMbVt6rktjyANgt1vJMAlso Treasure of Persian Manuscripts at Dagestan Scientific Centre.

Europe and the United States

The Metropolitan Museum of Art displays ancient Persian artifacts. Among the oldest items on display are dozens of clay bowls, jugs and engraved coins dating back 3,500 years and formerly housed in the University of Chicago's famed Oriental Institute.[5]

  1. United Kingdom – Museums in UK have many Persian artifacts among them British Museum

The Cyrus Cylinder is an ancient clay cylinder, now broken into several pieces, on which is written a declaration in Akkadian cuneiform script in the name of Persia's Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great.[6] It dates from the 6th century BC and was discovered in the ruins of Babylon in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in 1879.[7] It was created and used as a foundation deposit following the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire was invaded by Cyrus and incorporated into his own empire. It is currently in the possession of the British Museum, which sponsored the expedition that discovered the cylinder.

  1. France :The Louvre's department of Near Eastern antiquities was established in 1881 and presents an overview of early Near Eastern civilization and "first settlements", before the arrival of Islam. The department is divided into three geographic areas: the Levant, Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Persia (Iran). The collection's development corresponds to archaeological work such as Paul-Émile Botta's 1843 expedition to Khorsabad and the discovery of Sargon II's palace.[8] [9] These finds formed the basis of the Assyrian museum, the precursor to today's department.[8]

The museum contains exhibits from Sumer and the city of Akkad, with monuments such as the Prince of Lagash's Stele of the Vultures from 2450 BC and the stele erected by Naram-Sin, King of Akkad, to celebrate a victory over barbarians in the Zagros Mountains. The 2.252NaN2 Code of Hammurabi, discovered in 1901, displays Babylonian Laws prominently, so that no man could plead their ignorance. The 18th-century BC mural of the Investiture of Zimrilim and the 25th-century BC Statue of Ebih-Il found in the ancient city-state of Mari are also on display at the museum.The Persian portion of Louvre contains work from the archaic period, like the Funerary Head and the Persian Archers of Darius I.[8] [10] The section also contains rare objects from Persepolis which were lent to the British Museum for its Ancient Persia exhibition in 2005.[3]

Oxus treasure

The Oxus treasure (Persian: گنجینه آمودریا) is a collection of about 180 surviving pieces of metalwork in gold and silver, the majority rather small, plus perhaps about 200 coins, all from the Achaemenid Persian period. The collection was found by the Oxus River sometime between 1877 and 1880.[11] The exact place of the find remains unclear but is often proposed as being near Kobadiyan, Tajikistan.[12] It is likely that many other pieces from the hoard were melted down for bullion; early reports suggest there were originally some 1500 coins and mention types of metalwork that are not among the surviving pieces. The metalwork is believed to date from the sixth to fourth centuries BC, but the coins show a greater range, with some of those believed to belong to the treasure coming from around 200 BC.[13] The most likely origin for the treasure is that it belonged to a temple, where votive offerings were deposited over a long period. How it came to be deposited is unknown.[14]

The British Museum now has nearly all the surviving metalwork, with one of the pair of griffin-headed bracelets on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and displays them in Room 52. The group arrived at the museum by different routes, with many items bequeathed to the nation by Augustus Wollaston Franks. The coins are more widely dispersed, and more difficult to firmly connect with the treasure. A group believed to come from it is in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and other collections have examples.[15]

Japan

The Miho Museum houses Mihoko Koyama's private collection of Asian Achaemenid, Sassanid and Western antiques bought on the world market by the Shumei organization in the years before the museum was opened in 1997. There are over two thousand pieces in the permanent collection, of which approximately 250 are displayed at any one time.[16] Among the objects in the collection are more than 1,200 objects that appear to have been produced in Achaemenid Central Asia.[17] Some scholars have claimed these objects are part of the Oxus Treasure, lost shortly after its discovery in 1877 and rediscovered in Afghanistan in 1993.[18] The presence of a unique findspot for both the Miho acquisitions and the British Museum's material, however, has been challenged.[19]

The Tokyo National Museum preserves a variety of Iranian antiquities and works of art, including pottery, paintings, calligraphy, metalwork, sculpture, inlaid pottery and textiles.https://www.tnm.jp/modules/r_free_page/index.php?id=2109 https://parssea.blogsky.com/1400/08/11/post-38/پیشروی-فرهنگ-کهن-ایرانی-به-شرق-تا-ژاپن.

See also

References

Bibliography

Notes and References

  1. News: Persian-antiquities-found-in-almost-all-museums-worldwide. Tehran times. 2014. 20 November 2020 .
  2. News: [http:/parssea.org/?p=8974 Iranian artifacts Abroad ]. parssea.org. 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180831174107/http:/parssea.org/?p=8974 . 2018-08-31 . 12 November 2020 .
  3. News: Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia. University of California Press. 2006. 12 November 2007. 9 November 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20111109165244/http://arthistory.about.com/library/weekly/sp/bl_forgottenempcat_rev.htm. dead.
  4. Book: Srinivasan . Doris . On the Cusp of an Era: Art in the Pre-Kuṣāṇa World . 2007 . BRILL . 9789004154513 . 16 . en.
  5. https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/2686174 Persian art in the collection of the Museum of Oriental Art
  6. [#Kuhrt-2007a|Kuhrt (2007)]
  7. [#Dandamayev-Cylinder|Dandamayev, (2010-01-26)]
  8. Nave, pp. 42–43
  9. Mignot, pp. 119–21
  10. Web site: Decorative Arts . Musée du Louvre . 20 May 2008 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20071020071258/http://louvre.fr/llv/oeuvres/presentation_departement.jsp?CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673211730&CURRENT_LLV_FICHE%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673211730&CURRENT_LLV_DEP%3C%3Efolder_id=1408474395181111&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=9852723696500768&bmLocale=en . 20 October 2007 .
  11. Curtis, 5
  12. "East of Termez, on the Kafirnigan River, on the territory of Tajikistan, lies the small town of Kobadiyan, near which was found in the late 1870s one of the most famous treasures of all time, the so-called treasure of Oxus." in Book: Knobloch . Edgar . Monuments of Central Asia: A Guide to the Archaeology, Art and Architecture of Turkestan . 2001 . Bloomsbury Academic . 978-1-86064-590-7 . 150 . en.
  13. Curtis, 48, 57-58
  14. Curtis, 58-61
  15. Curtis, 48
  16. News: Reif. Rita. ARTS/ARTIFACTS; A Japanese Vision of the Ancient World. 13 August 2010. The New York Times. 16 August 1998.
  17. Curtis. John. The Oxus Treasure in the British Museum. Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia. 1 September 2004. 10. 3. 334. 10.1163/1570057042596397.
  18. Southampton. Kathy Judelson. Pichikyan. I.R.. Rebirth of the Oxus Treasure: Second Part of the Oxus Treasure From the Miho Museum Collection. Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia. 1 January 1998. 4. 4. 306–383 [308–309]. 10.1163/157005797X00126.
  19. Muscarella. Oscar White. Museum Constructions of the Oxus Treasures: Forgeries of Provenience and Ancient Culture. Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia. 1 November 2003. 9. 3. 259–275. 10.1163/157005703770961778.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "List of Iranian artifacts abroad".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2024, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.