Facetime: Fragile Heritage Comes to Light

Blair Fowlkes-Childs ’94 co-curated a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art introducing peoples of the ancient Middle East through their art and religion

Michael Matros

Blair Fowlkes-Childs ’94 is a visiting fellow at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music. Photo | Rebecca Schear, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last spring, the Met presented “The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East,” an international loan exhibition. Co-curated by Blair Fowlkes-Childs ’94 and her Met colleague Michael Seymour, the exhibition examined the lives of people in ancient Arabia, Nabataea, Judaea, Syria, and Mesopotamia through their art and religion. Fowlkes-Childs is a Princeton graduate, with a Ph.D. in classical art and archaeology from NYU. This year as a visiting scholar at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, she is finishing her book, The Cults of Syrian and Phoenician Gods in Rome and Religious Connections across the Empire. She sat down with Alumni Horae contributor Michael Matros to discuss her work.

Textile with geometric pattern, from Dura-Europos, Syria, silk, ca. 200-256. Yale University Art Gallery

You and your colleague saw an opportunity to explore the art along the trade routes linking the ancient Roman and Parthian empires to each other and a wider world.
The subject matter we covered in “The World between Empires” had not really received the attention we felt it deserved, in part because of divisions in academia. And so Michael and I feel that the exhibition bridged a disciplinary divide. I specialize in the art and religions of the Roman world, and his specialty is ancient Mesopotamia.

What was the research process like to prepare for such a major exhibition?
Michael and I went on research trips to the Middle East, Europe, and museums in the U.S. Throughout the curatorial process, we had the major challenge of addressing the contemporary destruction of cultural sites and monuments within the context of an exhibition focused on ancient art. The humanitarian crises in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen unfortunately made the project very timely.

Shield (scutum), from Dura-Europos, Syria, painted wood and rawhide, mid-third century. Yale University Art Gallery

The list of lenders to the exhibition suggests intense preparation and collaboration. Your colleagues at the Met must have given you great support.
We were incredibly fortunate to work with a highly experienced and dedicated team of people from multiple Met departments. Another St. Paul’s alumna, Quincy Houghton ’80, deputy director of exhibitions, really wanted this project to go forward. She gave it amazingly strong support and had a keen understanding of the story we were telling.

Much of the show speaks to the co-existence of different religions in the sites you studied.
In studying ancient religion, we have to put aside our own ideas about relationships between people and divinities and think more in their shoes. It’s difficult, for example, to have a sense of a given person’s beliefs when you’re looking only at a dedication or inscription among ruins. Dura-Europos on the Euphrates River in eastern Syria gives us an exceptional glimpse of religious life in an ancient town. On the same street in Dura, there was a third-century synagogue, one of the earliest known Christian house-churches, and a shrine of Mithra, with approximately 16 other temples nearby. It’s particularly poignant that they’re so physically close together. It’s not to say there weren’t other examples of such co-existence in the region, but they don’t survive archaeologically the way they did at Dura.

Your catalogue concludes with a powerful essay about the effects of destruction and looting. The book closes with: “People are more important than things, and insofar as heritage deserves protection in times of crisis, it is as a human phenomenon.”
What we really hoped to demonstrate in the exhibition and catalogue essay is how intertwined the current humani- tarian and cultural-heritage crises are. For example, the inhabitants of the village of Tadmor, the modern town next to the ancient site of Palmyra, have been displaced and their village to my knowledge is still not habitable. Their lives were closely linked to the archaeological site, not only in terms of proximity and tourism, but very much through a strong sense of their own identities, as connected to their history and cultural heritage.

Banquet Relief of Zabdibol and Family, from Palmyra, Syria, limestone, second half of second century (after 148). ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Is there a similar focus in your current research?
Yes. My book is on Syrian and Phoenician gods and goddesses in Rome during the imperial period. I’m looking at several sanctuaries, sculptures, inscriptions, and the buildings themselves, trying to reconstruct the kinds of alternative religions that tell us a great deal about the people from Syria and Phoenicia who came to Rome, whether as part of the Roman army, as merchants, or as immigrants from places including Palmyra and Baalbek. Fundamentally, that’s why I love my research. It’s getting a lens into people’s daily lives and their communities – their sense of themselves in a larger world through their art and religion.