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Saudi Arabia artefacts on show at the Louvre for first time

The ancient past of Saudi Arabia is at the heart of an exhibition at the Louvre museum in Paris

  • AFP
  • Published: 15:07 July 13, 2010

Saudi Louvre
  • Image Credit: AFP
  • The exhibition, which opens on Wednesday, comprises articles that "have never been seen not just in the West, but for the most part not in Saudi Arabia," Beatrice Andre-Salvani, Director of the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities at the Louvre said.
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Paris: The ancient past of Saudi Arabia is at the heart of an exhibition at the Louvre museum in Paris, which is showing a number of works that have never left the country before.

The exhibition, which opens on Wednesday, comprises articles that "have never been seen not just in the West, but for the most part not in Saudi Arabia," Beatrice Andre-Salvani, Director of the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities at the Louvre said.

The show is the outcome of a 2004 collaboration between the Louvre and the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities. It will feature around 320 pieces, of which two-thirds predate the birth of Islam in the early seventh century.

Called ‘Roads of Arabia: Archaeology and History of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’, the exhibition was supposed to have been inaugurated on Monday by Saudi Arabia's 86-year-old King Abdallah, but his visit to Paris was postponed. Though no reason was given, the Saudi state news agency SPA announced on Saturday that the visit would be rescheduled.

The first result of the collaboration agreement between the two countries, an exhibition in 2006 of masterpieces of Islamic art from the Louvre presented at the National Museum in Riyadh, was opened by King Abdallah and the then French President Jacques Chirac.

For several years, the Saudi royal family has shown a sustained interest in the prestigious Paris museum. The building of new halls devoted to Islamic arts was partly financed by a €17 million (Dh78.53 million) donation by Saudi Prince Al Walid Ben Talal.

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The works, which will be shown until September 27, come mainly from the collections of the National Museum in Riyadh, the Archaeological Museum at the University of King Saud and regional museums.

"They reveal in particular the little-known past of a dazzling, prosperous Arabic world now being gradually discovered by archaeologists," the Louvre website says.

One of these is a small man-shaped statue in sandstone dating from the fourth millennium before Christ that’s on show for the first time. The head is leaning slightly to one side, expressing pain or sadness. "I call him '’the suffering man,'” said Andre-Salvini, one of the curators of the exhibition. This funeral statue and similar works could have been interpreted as "pagan idols, those that the Prophet destroyed," she explained.
 

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