Page 365 - The Secret Museum

THEY TOOK AN ENORMOUS PILE of rubble made up of fragments of 3,000-year-old

sculptures and laid it out on a warehouse floor. Nine years later, they had completed
the puzzle and 30 magical sculptures of scorpion-men, griffins, gods and goddesses
which once adorned a great palace were brought back to life.

The sculptures were built in what is now Syria at the beginning of the first
millennium BC. They stood inside and guarded the gates of the palace, which was
built by Kapara, an Aramaean ruler in an area now known as Guzana.

In 1899, Max von Oppenheim, a banker’s son from Cologne (1860— 1946), was
working as a diplomat in Cairo. He was taken by a Bedouin guide to a mound the
locals called Tell Halaf. He started to excavate the site and immediately found a wall

with relief slabs and the remains of great sculptures. He had stumbled across the
ancient palace, covered over by the sands of time.

In 1910, he left his job and started excavating the site in earnest. Over the years –
interrupted by the First World War – sculptures, pottery, inscriptions and colourful
reliefs appeared out of the earth.

Uncovering the treasure cost Oppenheim a fortune. He gave some of the sculptures
and other finds to a museum he set up in Aleppo, and brought the rest to Berlin. The
Pergamon Museum could not afford the price he was asking, so he opened his own
Tell Halaf museum in Charlottenburg, Berlin, on 15 July 1930, his birthday.

Samuel Beckett visited, as did Agatha Christie. Oppenheim showed her and her
archaeologist husband around. She wrote in her diary that he stopped during the tour

to stroke his enthroned goddess’ sculpture, cooing, Ah, my beautiful Venus.’ He was
so fond of this sculpture the excavation team nicknamed her his ‘bride’. Agatha got
museum legs during the trip: ‘there was nowhere to sit down. My interest, at first
acute, flagged, and finally died down completely.’ She was there for five hours.

When the Second World War broke out, museums in Berlin generally moved their
collections to safe storage vaults. The Tell Halaf sculptures were too big to move
and they had to take their chances with the civilian population. In November 1943,
the museum suffered a direct hit. Everything made from limestone, including reliefs

that showed the colours of the Tell Halaf palace, was utterly destroyed. The
sculptures were made of basalt. They broke apart, and when fire hoses sprayed water
on to the baking, damaged statues, they shattered into thousands of pieces, seemingly
beyond repair.

‘Chin up! Bon courage! And don’t lose your sense of humour!’ This was the motto
of Max von Oppenheim. He hoped the fragments could be gathered up and taken to
the National Museum of Berlin and there, eventually, reassembled. ‘But what a
horrendous task that would be,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘given that this collection has

been smashed to smithereens. What I want most of all, of course, is to save the great
enthroned goddess.’ That was the one he had stroked when showing Agatha Christie
around. He died three years later, in 1946, never knowing that his dream would