The Discovery That Never Was: Art, Politics and Time in Tello

(Please note, the door to this area will auto-lock at 6pm. If you wish to enter after this time, please speak to an organiser to access. Online attendees will receive a Zoom link by 4.30pm on the day of the event.)

Although recent work has increasingly engaged with the colonial legacies of ancient Western Asian art and universal museums, much work remains to be done in reimagining both the form and content of academic and popular narratives. In this paper, I take as an example the foundational and still resilient narrative of Mesopotamian “discovery” featuring a European archaeologist operating single-handedly in a presumed uncharted territory.

I argue that the continued enlistment of the putatively self-evident notion of “discovery” as an explanatory model in art history, archaeology, and museology has served to gloss over the millennia-long histories of local engagement with ancient Mesopotamian sites. I contend that critically engaging with narratives of “discovery” is not solely a matter of historiographical accuracy, but it both transforms our interpretation of ancient contexts and constitutes an ethical position to address burning issues in the field today, be it the role of community engagement or provenance research and the restitution and repatriation of antiquities.

Speaker information

Dr Erhan Tamur is a Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at the University of York in the UK. Between September 2022 and January 2024, he was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he took part in the reimagining of the permanent galleries of Ancient Near Eastern art. He also co-curated She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, 3400-2000 BC at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York (14 October 2022 - 19 February 2023). Erhan received his PhD in art history and archaeology from Columbia University with a dissertation titled “Site-Worlds: Art, Time, and Politics In and Beyond Tello (ancient Girsu).”