A collection of relics borrowed from the Louvre Museum is to go on show at the National Museum of Iran for three months at an exhibition named ‘Louvre in Tehran’.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian will be in Tehran to inaugurate the event at a ceremony slated for March 5. The event will also be attended by art historian Jean-Luc Martinez who is the president of Louvre Museum, Mehr News Agency reported.
As an outstanding cultural and diplomatic feat for both nations, the exhibition is the result of a memorandum of understanding signed between Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization, and Louvre officials in 2016. Its purpose is to introduce the history and culture of different countries to the people of Iran and marks the first collaboration in the history of the two museums.
As explained by the head of Iran’s National Museum, Jebraeil Nokandeh, 56 relics will be on show. The collection mostly includes objects belonging to Sumer, Assyria, Hitti, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome civilizations as well as a collection of paintings, designs and lithography among which are the works of great European artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
In an earlier interview Nokandeh said that the borrowed items have been mainly selected from non-Iranian works because “people here are quite familiar with similar antiquities seen in many domestic museums”.
Reportedly, only two objects among the selected antiques are Iranian: an axe discovered in Choghazanbil complex in Khuzestan Province and a metal item related to the Iron Age found in Lorestan Province, midwest Iran. The latter dates back to the Achaemenid dynasty (550-330 BC).
The current logo of Tehran Stock Exchange is inspired by this artifact, as it features four men, hand in hand (indicating unity and cooperation) standing inside a circle on the back of two cows. Some ancient Persians believed earth is based on the back of two cows.
Of the distinguished relics on display will be the ‘Royal Sphinx’ taken from the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the Louvre. The basalt Royal Sphinx bears the name of the Pharaoh Hachoris (393–380 BC), of the 29th dynasty.
