An exhibition reveals 5000 years of culture and heritage in danger

A large room devoted to works and another to documentation, in particular photographic, testifying to what Gaza was before the current conflict: the exhibition “Treasures saved from Gaza: 5000 years of history”, at the Institut du Monde Arab, in Paris, is not immense. It is nonetheless essential for those who intend to seize the extent of the destruction of the artistic heritage of this Palestinian territory bruised by the war. “The contemporary context has swept the history of Gaza, as if we were unable to hear that this land of culture has been inhabited for millennia by populations who have deployed treasures of creativity,” explains Élodie Bouffard, head of the event.

Terracotta rider’s head of the Persian era (life or 5th century BC); Lion protomed lamp (that is to say with the anterior part of the beast as a handful) of the Roman period; monumental byzantine animal mosaic; Ayyoubide funeral stele (Muslim dynasty of Kurdish origin reigning between the 12th and 13th centuries of our era) … From the Bronze Age to the Ottoman Empire, passing through the Assyrian or Hellenistic periods, the exhibition shows vestiges of very diverse influences and styles.

It also makes it possible to imagine what we will no longer see: the flourishing culture of one of the five great cities of the old Philistie. Thus is emerging in hollow, through these pieces survived by history, a rich portrait of the oasis of Gaza, crossroads of intense trade between Greece, Rome, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. The transit of incense and the production of wine – we can discover the amphorae in which it was preserved – assured him a good prosperity. The city was coveted and … proud! Resistant to the territorial expansion of Alexander the Great, it was destroyed, in retaliation, by the latter.

A crucible of cultures

The architectural elements with various ornamental forms show how successive occupants have sometimes hybridized the styles or “recycled” the vestiges of an older civilization. Here, a Byzantine marquee has been dug and transformed into a small basin for the hammam; There, a column of the same period was sculpted to become a monument in memory of a British soldier who died in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century.

Emblematic, finally, the statuette of Aphrodite or Hécate – they each had a temple in Gaza – from Hellenistic or Roman period. Always standing, in its translucent drape of a sublime finesse of execution, the divinity of love – or that of crossroads – wonderfully symbolizes this artistic beauty in exile and a whole heritage in danger.