Page 366 - The Secret Museum

eventually be realized.

Throughout the Cold War, the pieces of sculpture were stored in the vaults of the

Pergamon Museum in East Berlin. Lutz Martin, who is now the curator of the Near
East collection at the Pergamon, visited as a student and thought there was no way to
reconstruct them. Little did he know he would one day become their curator and
spend nine years proving his student self wrong.

I met him at the Pergamon Museum. We jumped on a train out to the warehouse in
Friedrichshagen where the fragments of rock were laid out on the floor and the
sculptures were slowly rebuilt. Here they remain, in storage.

We hopped off the train half an hour later and walked along a peaceful suburban
street to the warehouse. Lutz bumped into a friend who was cycling along the road.
He knows a lot of people around here, as he has been coming for nearly a decade,

checking up on the progress of his sculptures. We came to the warehouse. It was just
off the street, surrounded by trees. The air was filled with birdsong. There was
nobody inside, so we let ourselves in.

Dappled sunlight streamed through the tall windows of the warehouse, bathing the
majestic gods and mythical creatures. I spotted the ‘enthroned goddess’, the love of
Oppenheim’s life. She looks like a work of ancient Cubism, sitting upon her throne.
Once, she would have held an offering bowl in her hand, in which the Aramaean
people put gifts for the dead. Beside the goddess is the weather god, Teshub. He was

head of the pantheon of gods in Tell Halaf.

The Aramaean gods lived in families, like humans. In the palace, Teshub would
have stood upon a bull, with his wife, the sun goddess, and their son beside him,
standing on lions. One of these lions was the first piece to be reconstructed, as it had
the largest fragments of all the exploded sculptures. Beside the lions stands a
wonderful, big-beaked griffin, made up of 2,600 fragments of broken basalt, and two
scorpion-men who once guarded the gateway to the palace.

Teshub looks a little forlorn these days. He is stored in two halves. His head and
chest are one half, his body and legs the other. The halves are next to each other,

placed on wooden platforms and secured in place by blue straps. It’s the best way to
store him for now. It’s as if he is resting. After all those years of being worshipped
each day, in the language that Christ spoke, being asked to bring good weather, he
spent millennia in the ground. Then, he was dug up, brought to Germany, bombed,
reduced to rubble and, at last, restored. These statues are real survivors.

Lutz Martin told me the restorers began by sorting the pieces into piles: corner and
edge pieces; carved surfaces; pieces with relief decoration and, finally, those from
the interior of the sculpture. As a reference guide to what went where, all they had

were Oppenheim’s photographs of the Tell Halaf museum that was bombed and the
excavation site in Syria. At first they thought they’d use a computer, but human brains
turned out to be more efficient.