In a current discuss on the British Museum (BM), sitting between the 2 nice Assyrian lamassu from Khorsabad, the Turkish author Elif Shafak spoke in regards to the function fiction can play in shedding gentle on in any other case forgotten moments of non-public and historic trauma. Shafak’s current novel There Are Rivers within the Sky explores questions of museum gathering by the story of the acquisition, by the BM, of stays from Nineveh, and the invention of Assyrian tradition because of George Smith (“King Arthur of the Slums and Sewers” in Shafak’s story), who decoded the cuneiform held on the museum, and found and translated into English The Epic of Gilgamesh. Shafak intertwines this story with that of two up to date ladies, one among whom is a younger Yazidi who experiences the genocide by Islamic State (Isis) of the Yazidi folks on Mount Sinjar in 2014.
The Assyrian assortment on the BM is basically the results of excavations by the Nineteenth-century archaeologist Austen Henry Layard (whose 1849 e book, Nineveh and its Stays: With an Account of a Go to to the Chaldaean Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Satan-Worshippers; and an Enquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Historical Assyrians, performs a central half in Shafak’s novel). It’s justly well-known, heralded by the nice lamassu from Khorsabad, regardless of being crammed into claustrophobic galleries in between Historical Egypt and the Parthenon sculptures.
A poignant absence
Proof of the opposite cultures talked about within the title of Layard’s e book, the Chaldaeans and the Yezidis (an alternate spelling of Yazidi), is way tougher to search out. The Yazidi folks, particularly, are nearly invisible in museums within the West, an absence all of the extra poignant in gentle of their current historical past.
Following the bloodbath of 2014, some 200,000 Yazidis nonetheless dwell in refugee camps in Kurdistan, unable to return to their destroyed houses. Lots of of the ladies and kids who had been kidnapped and enslaved by Isis are nonetheless lacking. Though lots of the Yazidi shrines have been reconstructed, residing Yazidi tradition stays in a fragile state.
Museums in Iraqi Kurdistan are reported to be gathering Yazidi artefacts, notably the Slemani Museum in Sulaymaniyah, in addition to the Ethnographic Museum on the Erbil Citadel, in accordance with Sébastien Rey, the BM’s curator for Historical Mesopotamia.
Outdoors of the Kurdish area it’s a completely different story. A search on the BM database brings up a sole merchandise, {a photograph} of a Yazidi man standing in entrance of the shrine of Shaikh ‘Adi ibn Mosāfer. It comes from the web page of an album donated to the museum in 2012.
Noorah Al-Gailani, the curator of Islamic Collections on the BM, additionally factors to 2 18th-century drawings of Yazidis, and a Safavid metalwork peacock, that will properly have been utilized by the Yazidi to characterize Melek Taûs, the “Peacock Angel”. The dearth of Yazidi materials, Al-Gailani says, can partly be defined by the closed nature of the Yazidi group. When Layard wrote of his time with the Yazidis, he discovered them “naturally suspicious of strangers, and afraid of betraying the secrets and techniques of their religion”, an comprehensible attribute within the face of an extended historical past of persecution.
Traditionally, museum collections of artefacts from the Close to East haven’t been acquired with the intention of representing minority teams, however relatively acquired piecemeal and on the idea of particular person curiosity—and naturally the spectacular nature of the finds from Nineveh, Nimrud and Khorsabad drew the eye greater than artefacts from the Yazidi, or different ethnic-religious teams such because the Mandeans or the Arab Jews.
Any undertaking gathering proof of Yazidi materials tradition ought to start with how the Yazidi characterize themselves, suggests Paul Collins, the assistant keeper within the division of Center East on the BM. The primary reply to this query from the Yazidi is in fact unlikely to be “by artefacts on show within the British Museum”—shows that only a few Yazidis would have the chance to see for themselves. A richer type of identification could be given by intangible heritage—music, meals, storytelling, the kind of factor that can not be collected and preserved by museums and may for these 1000’s of Yazidis nonetheless residing in refugee camps and away from their nonetheless ruined homeland of Sinjar be essentially the most significant provider of their custom and tradition.
In contrast with the pressing ongoing want for humanitarian support and political illustration, museum gathering may appear a trivial concern. The BM particularly has little moral credibility left within the gentle of its renewed sponsorship take care of the oil firm BP, which just lately introduced the event of latest oil and fuel fields in Kirkuk, Iraq. And but with their highly effective cultural and political attain, museums have an ethical obligation for such illustration.
• John-Paul Stonard is an artwork historian and creator
