A Mini-Exhibit at the Oriental Institute Museum, August 11-28, 2011
Commerce and Coins in the Ancient Near East, a mini-exhibit at the
Oriental Institute Museum, looks at commerce and trade from 3000 BC to
the 4th century BC. The exhibit is presented in conjunction with the
American Numismatic Association's World's Fair of Money being held in
Chicago August 16 - 20th, 2011. The exhibit will be on view from August
11 to August 28.
Commerce, trade, and early forms of currency can be documented for
thousands of years before the first coins were minted in southwestern
Turkey in the 7th century BC. Exchanges of goods and services before
that time were tracked by detailed receipts and notations that took many
forms. Among the earliest are represented in the show by clay balls
that contain small tokens that represented numbers and commodities. Once
the delivery was made, the ball was broken open to verify that the
amount of goods matched the tokens in the ball. Among the other
receipts in the show is one for salt written in ancient Egyptian on a
flake of pottery, and another for the delivery of a dead sheep written
in wedge-shaped cuneiform script on a clay tablet. A third tablet,
dating to about 2000 BC, is a request for money to purchase a female
slave.
Egyptian and Mesopotamian weights and measures document the
standardization of trade in early barter economies. In Mesopotamia, the
adoption of a silver standard that equated measures of barley with a set
amount of silver is illustrated by a rare example of a spiral coil of
silver, lengths of which were snipped off to pay debts. Among the early
coins is a silver stater probably of king Croesus (570-547 BC) of Lydia
(southwestern Turkey) that was excavated by the Oriental Institute at
Persepolis in southwest Iran. Other examples of very early coins from
Egypt include a gold stater of Ptolemy I (305 BC), and coin molds that
show how Roman coins were made — and forged.
The Oriental Institute is an interdisciplinary institute at the
University of Chicago, focused on the study of the languages, history,
archaeology and cultures of the ancient Near East. The Museum of the
Oriental Institute has galleries devoted to Mesopotamia, Assyria,
Anatolia, Palestine/Israel, Egypt, Nubia and Persia. "Before the
Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization" is on view through
December 31.
The Museum is open Tuesday, Thursday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to
6:00 p.m., Wednesday from 10:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., and Sunday from noon
to 6:00 p.m. The museum is closed on Mondays and major holidays.
Admission is free, although a donation of $7 for adults, $4 for children
is appreciated. The Oriental Institute Museum is located on the campus of the
University of Chicago, approximately 20 minutes south of the Loop at
1155 East 58th Street.
An
image taken by one of North Star's scanners of a model ancient clay
ball. The objects contain tokens, which represent items exchanged during
a transaction.
Northstar Imaging Inc.’s 3-D X-ray machines are often used to scan
medical devices and aerospace products. This week, though, the company’s
technology is helping solve an ancient mystery.
The University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute is using Rogers-based Northstar’s CT scanners to peer into “clay balls” that date back to 3,500 B.C.
The artifacts are akin to a receipt for a business transaction. They
contain tokens that represent items exchanged during a transaction.
Experts at the Oriental Institute didn’t want to break open the clay
balls to see what was inside, which is where Northstar’s imaging
technology comes in. The company’s CT scanners can see through the
balls’ outer shells and reveal the shapes of the objects inside.
The clay balls tie in with a larger special exhibit, called Visible
Language, that was held at the Oriental Institute from ran from last
fall through March 2011. (You can read a New York Times story on that exhibit here.) There’s no word yet on exactly what the imaging work uncovered. (Scans were being taken Thursday and Friday.)
Northstar’s technology has been used in other archaeological endeavors. The Science Museum of Minnesota used it to scan a 150 million-year-old fossilized crocodile skull, for instance.
Bir Umm Fawakhir is a fifth-sixth century A.D. Coptic/Byzantine gold-mining town located in the central Eastern Desert of Egypt. The Bir Umm Fawakhir Project of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago carried out four seasons of archaeological survey at the site, in 1992, 1993, 1996, and 1997; one season of excavation in 1999; and one study season in 2001. This volume is the final report on the 1996 and 1997 seasons. The goals of the 1996 and 1997 field seasons were to complete the detailed map of the main settlement, to continue the investigation of the outlying clusters of ruins or "Outliers," and to address some specific questions such as the ancient gold-extraction process. The completion of these goals makes the main settlement at Bir Umm Fawakhir one of the only completely mapped towns of the period in Egypt. Not only is the main settlement plotted room for room and door for door, but also features such as guardposts, cemeteries, paths, roads, wells, outlying clusters of ruins, and mines are known, and some of these are features not always readily detectable archaeologically. This volume presents the pre-Coptic material; a detailed discussion of the remains in the main settlement, outliers, and cemeteries; the Coptic/Byzantine pottery, small finds, and dipinti; as well as a study of ancient mining techniques.
William M. Sumner, a leading figure in the study of ancient Iran and director of the Oriental Institute from 1989 to 1997, died July 7 in Columbus, Ohio. Sumner, who oversaw a major expansion of the institute’s building, was 82.
Sumner, a resident of Columbus, was a 1952 graduate of the United
States Naval Academy. He served in the Navy until 1964, rising to the
rank of lieutenant commander.
He developed his interest in
archaeology during naval service in the Mediterranean. Visits to ancient
sites in Italy and Greece inspired him to pursue a graduate education.
While serving in Iran, he developed a keen interest in the country’s
ancient civilization, and he pursued that interest by taking a class
taught at Tehran University by Prof. Ezat Ngahban, a graduate of the
University of Chicago.
He resigned from the Navy to pursue
graduate work in anthropology. He received his PhD from the University
of Pennsylvania in 1972 and was a member of the anthropology faculty at
Ohio State University from 1971 until 1989, when he joined the UChicago
faculty as professor in the Oriental Institute and Near Eastern
Languages & Civilizations.
“Bill Sumner was an outstanding archaeologist and a transformational leader at the Oriental Institute,” said Gil Stein,
director of the Oriental Institute. “His survey and excavations at the
urban center of Malyan in the highlands of Iran made a lasting
contribution to our understanding of the Elamite civilization and the
deep roots of the Persian empire. He trained an entire generation of
archaeologists who went on to become major scholars in their own right
in the study of ancient Iran and Anatolia.
“As director of the
Oriental Institute, Bill Sumner had the vision, the drive and the
organizational skills to conceptualize and carry out the building of our
new wing, and the complete reinstallation of our permanent museum
galleries. Most of all, Bill was a man with tremendous personal
integrity, who led by example. His death is a sad loss for our field,
and we will miss him very deeply,” Stein added.
At the Oriental
Institute, Sumner encouraged the use of new technologies to expand the
work of archaeologists in the field and in the laboratory.
“He
saw the value, and sensed the impending importance of digital
communication and publication, and laid the foundations for the next
decade of development along these lines in the OI,” said Gene Gragg,
professor emeritus at the Oriental Institute, who succeeded Sumner as
director.
Sumner recognized the value to archaeology and history
of the use of computational technologies and scientific instrumentation.
“Bill was a visionary, one of the first who understood the ways that
digitalization and computational tools could transform the humanistic
and social science disciplines,” said Martha T. Roth,
the Chauncey S. Boucher Distinguished Service Professor of Assyriology
in the Oriental Institute and dean of the Humanities Division. “And he
was a scholar and person of deep personal and professional integrity.”
He also oversaw the initiation of the largest expansion of the Oriental
Institute building since it was constructed in 1931. With the help of a
federal grant and a $10.1 million campaign, the institute built anew
wing to provide space for climate-control equipment, as well as provide
space for proper and climate-controlled artifact and archival storage.
The new wing also houses a modern artifact conservation laboratory.
The Oriental Institute’s museum also underwent a massive redesign
that began under his leadership. That led to a rearrangement of the
galleries and an updated presentation of the museum’s art and artifacts
from throughout the ancient Middle East.
Sumner’s own academic
specialty was ancient Iran. From 1972 to 1978 he directed the University
of Pennsylvania’s excavations at the site of Tal-i Malyan, ancient
Anshan, in the Fars province in western Iran. Sumner oversaw the
publication of a series of monographs based on five seasons of fieldwork
there.
The Malyan archaeological project was seminal, not only
in discovering the highland Elamite city of Anshan, known locally as
Malyan, but also in the cycles of nomadism and sedentism in the region
of Fars, that operated in the region from at least the fifth-millennium
B.C., said Abbas Alizadeh, an Oriental Institute archaeologist who
specializes on Iran.
In addition to his work on the Malyan
monograph series, Sumner wrote many articles on the development of
civilization in ancient Iran.
He is survived by wife, Kathleen
Sumner; children, William (Kristin) Sumner, Jane Sumner; step-children,
Douglas (Jamie) MacLean and Megan (Savady) Yem; sister, Ida VSW Red;
grandchildren, Katrina MacFarland, Eirian Yem, Dylan Yem, Shane Yem,
Devon Yem, Lachlan MacLean and Emma MacLean; and great-grandchildren,
Nolan and Adeline MacFarland, Anthony Sumner, and Ashley and Colin
Sizemore.
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