24.09.2009
Two spectacular archaeological exhibitions in Stuttgart
Part of the exhibition "Treasure from Ancient Syria" (© Hendrik Zwietasch/Peter Frankenstein, Landesmuseum Württemberg)
A major exhibition “Ice Age – Art and Culture” opened last week in Stuttgart with a display of what are thought to be the world’s oldest known artworks. A second exceptional exhibition is also due to open in mid-October in Baden-Württemberg’s capital city and will show sensational artefacts found in the approximately 3,500-year old “Qatna royal burial chamber” in Syria which was first discovered in 2002. Archaeologists from the University of Tübingen have made decisive contributions to both exhibitions as they have played an outstandingly important role in the excavations in Syria and in the discovery of art from the Lower Palaeolithic age.
The exhibition “Treasure from Ancient Syria – The Discovery of the Kingdom of Qatna” will present weapons, jewellery made from gold and precious stones, receptacles made of diverse materials, furniture embellishments, with crimson decorated materials, cylinder seals and other precious objects. Thus, it sheds light on the ancient Syrian Kingdom of Qatna, which dominated the crossroads of the Middle East’s most important trade routes in the period 1800 to 1340 BC and about which very little was known until recently.
The excavation team working under Tübingen-based archaeologist Peter Pfälzner has just discovered a new burial chamber containing spectacular new artefacts in Qatna. For insurance reasons – and because they have not yet all been catalogued – the findings cannot be shown in the Qatna Exhibition in Stuttgart's Old Castle which will run from 17 October 2009 through to 14 March 2010.
The exhibition about the Ice Age in the neighbouring Stuttgart Art Museum on the city’s Schlossplatz is showing 1,000 objects from 14 countries. It contains numerous carvings dating back 35,000 to 40,000 years taken from caves on the Swabian Alb (a low mountain range in Baden-Württemberg), including the “Venus of Schelklingen”, the oldest known example of figurative art in the world which was discovered last year, and the almost equally old and fully-preserved figurine of a mammoth. The oldest musical instruments in the world – wing-bone flutes found in the caves of the Swabian Jura – are also on show in Stuttgart. Alongside the oldest works of art in the history of mankind, the exhibition is also displaying famous findings of human bones, such as the 600,000-year-old lower jaw bone of Homo Heidelbergensis, the around 300,000-year-old skull from Steinheim an der Murr and the oldest skull of modern man (31,000-years old) which was first found in the Czech Republic. The exhibition is open to the public in Stuttgart until 10 January 2010.
