Mantua: Art Flash 2023, stories from the new museum, the Sissa collection

Mantua: Art Flash 2023, stories from the new museum, the Sissa collection.

La urbanized civilization which developed into the “land between the two rivers" Tigris and Euphrates, Mesopotamia, has its roots in the prehistory of the 6th millennium BC to end with the Islamic age in the 7th century AD. In this vast area, today partly abandoned to the desert and steppe, flourished cultures of exceptional importance, which gave rise to fundamental innovations for human life: agriculture, the wheel, writing, urbanism, mathematical astronomy.

I historical texts written on clay, found in excavations in an exceptionally high number and in very different typologies, reveal that since 26th to 5th century BC. periods of local political division they took turns far-reaching unitary empires (Akkad, Ur, Babylon, Assyria, Persia) giving rise to a complex history of alliances, conflicts, ephemeral peaces, and trade.

Un equally high number di testi It allows reconstruct a complex and flourishing poetic, mythical, religious, philosophical and scientific literature. Huge monumental buildings of a religious, civil, military, hydraulic nature found by archaeologists starting from the mid-19th century attest to an energy and an unusual organization, whose summit is well represented by the immense stepped towers, the ziggurats, which entered the narrative of the Bible with the "Babel tower"destroyed by God. Countless objects of the most varied sizes, precious and user daily life, illustrate divine worship, the ceremonial life of the court, the management of public and private administration, and the daily life of individuals.

La Sissa collection kept at the “Mantova Collezioni Antiche” Civic Museum (Maca) represents a lucky selection of objects small indeed, but well representative of the overall repertoire extracted from the earth in the numerous excavations conducted in the area.