Kim Benzel
Dr Kim Benzel joined The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in 1990 and since then has worked on numerous exhibitions—such as The Royal City of Susa, Jewelry: The Body Transformed, and most recently, Rayyane Tabet/Alien Property. She has co-edited and contributed to exhibition catalogues, published several articles, and co-authored a Met resource guide on the ancient Near East for K–12 teachers. Currently, Kim and her colleagues are working on a full reimagining and renovation of the permanent galleries of ancient Near Eastern art at The Met.
Sites of Enchantment: Early dynastic jewelry from the “Royal Cemetery” at Ur, Mesopotamia
This lecture will investigate one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century—the jewelry belonging to a female named Pu-abi buried in the so-called Royal Cemetery at the site of Ur in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. The mid-third millennium BCE assemblage represents one of the earliest and richest extant collections of gold and precious stones from antiquity. I believe that this jewelry might have acted as more than a marker of royalty and that the identity and status thus signaled something different than caste alone. In this lecture I will argue that the jewelry entailed what Alfred Gell called the “technology of enchantment and enchantment of technology”—resulting in ornaments that materialized from their creation as a group of magically and ritually charged objects.