الموسم الثقافي 27

2022-2023

Kim Benzel

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

 

 

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