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British Museum Will Not Bid for Fragment of Assyrian Stele
By Martin Bailey
http://www.theartnewspaper.com
Posted 2014-03-27 18:04 GMT
The lower part of an Assyrian royal stele is due to be sold at
Bonhams in London on 3 April, with an estimate of £600,000 to
£800,000. The upper section belongs to the British Museum, but
The Art Newspaper understands that the museum is unlikely to try
to acquire the work to reassemble the monument.
The basalt stele, which dates from around 800BC, is dedicated to
King Adad-nerari III. It comes from Tell Sheikh Hamad, in eastern
Syria, near the Iraqi border, where it was installed at a shrine
commemorating a military victory. The British Museum's fragment,
depicting the head of the king, was discovered in 1879 and
accessioned two years later. The Syrian site has been excavated
since the 1970s by German archaeologists led by Hartmut Kühne.
The piece consigned to Bonhams is 1.4m tall and depicts the lower
two-thirds of the praying king. It is being sold by a private collector
in Geneva and was "given as a gift from father to son in the
1960s", according to the auction house, but no details about when
it left Syria are available. Bonhams is confident about the
provenance, although some experts are concerned that the
antiquity could have been illicitly excavated or exported.
Cuneiform curse
The Switzerland-based owner of the stele tried to sell it at
Christie's New York in 2000, with an estimate of $600,000 to
$800,000, but it failed to sell. It was only after this that Karen
Radner, an Assyriologist at University College London, linked the
piece with the fragment in the British Museum and identified the
praying figure as Adad-nerari III. A curse written in cuneiform on
the object condemns anyone who removes the stele from its
original site.
Bonhams is selling this neo-Assyrian black basalt royal stele of Adadnerari III on 3 April (est £600,000-£800,000/$1m-$1.3m).
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