New insights into the world’s oldest town map

On Thursday (25 June) at 6 pm, the exhibition »Unearthed, Collected, Exhibited: How the World’s Oldest City Map Came to Jena«. Two hours earlier, at 4 pm, following the opening remarks, Enrique Jiménez will open the conference »A Hundred Years of the Hilprecht Collection« with the lecture »From Nippur to Jena. The Origins of Hilprecht’s Cuneiform Collection«. The lecture will be delivered in English in Lecture Theatre 24 in the University Main Building (Fürstengraben 1). Both the lecture and the exhibition opening are public; guests are welcome and admission is free.

Hilprecht’s first wife gave her name to the collection

The exhibition tells the story of how one of Germany’s most significant cuneiform collections came to the University of Jena. This professional exhibition was conceived and realised as part of a two-semester project seminar on curatorial practice at the Department of Cultural Anthropology/Cultural History. Featuring selected exhibits from the Hilprecht Collection, interactive media stations, documents and films, it invites visitors on a varied tour.

»We are displaying the world’s oldest city map, a text on medicine and a house-purchase contract that is 4,500 years old«, says Jonas Klöker, research associate at the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Studies. The collection also features a prism and a votive tablet. The prism is a rectangular block inscribed with characters, which was probably used for teaching purposes. The votive plaque depicts a deity and was presumably a votive offering to a temple.

Jonas Klöker points out that, in addition to around 2,700 clay tablets, the Hilprecht Collection also houses other artefacts. It was largely assembled by the German-American Hermann Volrath Hilprecht (1859–1925), who named it after his first wife, Ida (née Haufe): the Mrs Professor Hilprecht Collection of Babylonian Antiquities. The exhibition and the two-day conference will focus on the history of the collection and current academic research questions relating to it.

The second-largest collection of its kind in Germany

The collection has been owned by the University of Jena since 1926. This is ultimately a stroke of luck, as it is the second-largest collection of its kind in Germany. The two-day conference will address, amongst other things, the condition of the artefacts and their conservation; the Berlin-based conservator Carmen Gütschow will speak on this topic. Andreas Schropp from Hamburg will present the mobile high-resolution X-ray tomograph »ENCI«, which enables a glimpse into the interior of the clay tablets. Susanne Paulus (Chicago) will speak about her current excavations in Nippur in present-day Iraq, whilst Johannes Hackl (Jena), together with Joachim Oelsner (Leipzig), will offer a »new perspective on the city plan of Nippur«.

The exhibition »Excavated, Collected, Exhibited: How the World’s Oldest City Map Came to Jena« is on display in the main exhibition hall of the ThULB until 18 October. The conference »‘A Hundred Years of the Hilprecht Collection’« will take place from 26 to 27 June in the Astoria Lecture Theatre at the university (Unterm Markt 8). The talks are public; some can be followed via Zoom. A number of presentations will be in English.

The programme is available online: here de.