UNCOVERING ANCIENT ART FROM SYRIA

Ogling the centuries-old Syrian artworks and artifacts ensconced in glass cases, archeologist Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati exclaimed: “We saw some of these things come out of the ground--it was so exciting!”

Of course, not many viewers will have the same intimate relationship with the Near Eastern objects on display at the Natural History Museum through June 1. But the treasures in “Ebla to Damascus: Art and Archaeology of Ancient Syria” are still likely to draw close inspection.

Spanning 10,000 years--from 8,000 BC to AD 1,600--the 281 objects on display include fertility figures, life-size statues, inscribed clay tablets, filigree gold jewelry, faded frescoes, old and precious works of silver and finely sculpted ivory and metal.

The important collection paints a heretofore neglected picture of the prehistoric, ancient and medieval cultures of Syria. The Mediterranean land centuries ago occupied the corridor between ancient Egypt, Anatolia and Mesopotamia. It was a center for international trade, the site of numerous struggles, and helped to forge Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

“The main significance of this exhibition is that we have recovered a portion of human history which had not extensively been known or sufficiently appreciated,” said archeologist Giorgio Buccellati, Kelly-Buccellati’s husband.

The professor of history and the Ancient Near East at UCLA and Kelly-Buccellati, professor of art history and archeology at Cal State Los Angeles, are a husband-and-wife team who have spent each spring for the last 20 years leading archeological studies in the Near East.

They acted as two of 37 scholarly consultants from around the world to “Ebla to Damascus.”

Ancient Syria, Buccellati continued, has always been described only as a “bridge leading from ancient Egypt to Sumer,” its ancient East and West borders about which much is known. Now, however, Syria will emerge as highly significant and unique, historically and culturally.

“To begin with, we find that Syria was the first major Semitic urban civilization. And Syrian art has a flair of its own,” Buccellati said.

“These pieces, for instance, are the first examples of sophisticated, representational sculpture in the Near East,” he said, citing a group of early animal figurines. “They have a continuity of accuracy--you can tell what they are--yet they are also stylized.

“And the artists were not just copying, but trying to project their own vision of the world,” a vision, he said, from a people who for millennia had been living in the open country and who sought to recapture nature with their art as they settled in crowded cities.

Other pieces in the exhibition represent an evolved and advanced ancient Syrian urban civilization, Buccellati said.

Several clay tablets with complex written symbols are one demonstration of the development of “an enormous bureaucratic apparatus.” The language system enabled a range of accounting systems, and the sophisticated writing code was soon performed only by skilled technicians--evidence of job stratification.

Similarly, chunks of unrefined lapis lazuli, brought to Syrian palaces such as Elba from Afghanistan--2,000 miles away--evidence “long-term, overland” trade and commercial enterprise.

And a stone sculpture from around 2,500 BC, probably depicting a high-placed official, attests to social class demarcations. It also represents the increase in renderings of human figures which came as Syrian artists rebelled against the anonymity of densely populated city life and sought to surround themselves with their neighbors.

“So Syrian art was also a way to overcome the crowding” and an emerging impersonality of 4,000-5,000 years ago, Buccellati said.

“Ebla to Damascus,” mounted by the Syrian directorate general of antiquities in collaboration with German scholars, has never been seen in the New World before, Buccellati noted.

And the works in the exhibit, loaned by the National Museums of Syria on a six-city American tour sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition service, are “exceptional,” he said.