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The Ancient Middle East and the 21st Century Museum - Symposium
Cincinnati Art Museum - March 31- April 1, 2022

Dr. Björn Anderson

Setting Sail with Khirbet et-Tannur

The sculptural fragments from Khirbet et-Tannur have anchored the Cincinnati Art Museum’s ancient Middle East collection since their purchase in 1939. These sculptures, which once adorned a hilltop sanctuary north of the Nabataean capital Petra, represent a range of deities, some easily recognizable and others more enigmatic. Throughout the 20th century, most studies of these sculptures centered on addressing three main issues: a) identification of the figures, b) assessment of formal elements (or artistic ‘style’), and c) the chronology of Nabataean sculpture. These studies have demonstrated the centrality of the Tannur sculptures to our understanding of Nabataean art and religion. This is good and important work. It is also problematic.

As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, the essentializing narrative has been rightly and repeatedly challenged as misleading, generalizing, and even harmful. Defining Nabataean art has lost its relevance and appeal because doing so largely reinforces notions of bounded entities (or, as Versluys terms them, ‘cultural containers’) which anthropologists are so eager to discard. Identities are fluid, fragmentary, and plural, they are dependent on the individual’s lived experience as well as collective memories.

These welcome conceptual shifts invite us to re-imagine the very core of how we understand objects and challenge us to do so without many of our fixed points of reference. We must weigh anchor before we can set sail, but the ship has been moored for a long time and the seas may be rough as we continue to figure out how to proceed.