‘Carthage’ Exhibit Traces Tunisian Roots of Western Art : Art: Greek and Roman myths come alive at Natural History Museum show of ancient mosaics.

Talk about the piece de resistance .

The artworks are mammoth, some as large as 15 by 12 feet, and they depict intricate scenes such as a great hunt involving the capture of a lion, wild boar, leopard and other animals; the mythical musician Orpheus charming a bevy of wild animals with his lyre; and the Greek myth of the Rape of Ganymede, in which Zeus disguises himself as an eagle to snatch the handsome Trojan prince Ganymede and put him into service as his cupbearer.

These are some of Tunisia’s famed ancient mosaics--made through an undoubtedly painstaking process of laying bits of uniformly cut colored stones such as limestone and marble in a bed of mortar in detailed designs that form the cornerstone of the exhibit “Carthage: A Mosaic of Ancient Tunisia” at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles through Jan. 7.

“We’re trying to stress the importance for Western culture of the art of this country,” said David Soren, guest curator for New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which organized and sponsored the traveling exhibition. Soren said he spent seven years putting together the show with his Tunisian counterpart, Aicha Ben Abed Ben Khader. “We wanted to show something of the different cultures that were in Tunisia. . . . We were concerned not just with getting the objects out (of Tunisia to exhibit them here), but to choose objects that would tell a story.”

The exhibition--which includes almost as much written text as artifacts and is considered the largest exhibition of Tunisian objects ever shown in the United States--is divided into four sections, detailing life in Carthage from 800 BC to AD 700.

The most extensive portion of the show is “The Coming of the Romans and Romanization,” which details the city’s rebirth after its destruction by the Romans at the end of the Punic Wars in 146 BC.

Here are the majority of the exhibition’s 16 mosaics, as well as a 20-inch tall cast-bronze sculpture of a drunken Hercules urinating, a similarly sized black marble sculpture of a wide-eyed African child holding a dove to his breast, and a life-size white marble statue of Lucilla, wife of the Roman emperor Lucius Verus.

According to Soren, many of the mosaics--most of which actually came from the floors of great buildings and weigh as much as a ton--have never before been seen in the United States. In fact, one of the most impressive mosaics, “The Dermech Hunting Mosaic,” a nearly 28-by-23-foot work that consists of several panels (a few of the panels were not brought with the exhibition) depicting different aspects of the hunt, was restored at the expense of New York’s Museum of Natural History specifically so it could be brought for the exhibition.

Other visiting mosaics--most of which were made in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD--include the 7 1/2-by-5-foot “Lions Devouring a Wild Boar”; the 3-by-3-foot “Head of Medusa,” with her hair of snakes; the 4-by-4-foot “Facing Cocks Mosaic,” in which two cocks stand face to face, presumably ready to fight, with a pot of gold between them; and the 7-by-5-foot “Tragic Poet and Actor Mosaic,” which shows a very serious-looking poet, with his pen in hand, and an equally serious actor, holding a mask in his hand and standing next to a basket of scrolls that are presumably plays.

But the Roman era is not the only time covered by the Carthage exhibition. The show begins with “Dawn of Carthage,” which tells of the Berbers, the nomadic Libyan tribes that were the region’s earliest settlers. Included in this section are two of what Soren called the exhibition’s rarest pieces, a 3rd-Century AD death mask mold of a Berber man, and a relief from the same period showing seven seated Berber gods.

A section called “Punic Carthage: The Golden Age” contains maps, details about the Phoenicians’ battles with the Romans in the three Punic wars from 264-146 BC, and biographical information on legendary figures such as the warrior-king Hannibal and the city’s legendary founder, Queen Dido. Included here are several coins and pieces of jewelry, makeup boxes containing powder and rouge of cinnabar, decorated vessels that were used as babies’ bottles, lamps and other vessels in various shapes, urns that contained sacrificial ashes and were found in the Tophet of Carthage (the area in which Carthaginians are believed to have sacrificed their children to appease the gods during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC), and 20 amulets, or charms, representing various Punic gods.

“Carthaginian Twilight,” the final section, explores the rise of Christianity, the decline of Rome’s power, and successive invasions by the Vandals, Byzantines and Muslims. Included here are several pieces of gold jewelry, plaques depicting Christian stories such as Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, and a cache of 268 gold coins buried in the 7th Century AD by Byzantine citizens dreading the Arab invasion that ended Tunisia’s ancient classical world. This portion also contains photographs, to give a view of modern Carthage.