Primeval Waters - Lessons from Mesopotamia

Mesopotamian irrigation read as the first large remaking of a landscape: canals, aqueducts, pipe systems and artificial lakes, and what followed for the land and the people on it. Richelieu room 230.

The show is built in two parts. About a hundred Mesopotamian works are gathered in Room 230 of the Richelieu wing, and a further twenty-seven are placed out among the permanent galleries of the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities, across both the Richelieu and Sully wings, to be met in the course of an ordinary visit.

That structure is worth knowing before you go, because a visitor who sees only Room 230 has seen roughly four-fifths of the exhibition and will not know the rest exists. It is also a deliberate argument: water in Mesopotamia is not a special topic that can be quarantined in one room, and putting a quarter of the show out among the standing collection forces the point that almost everything in those galleries was made by a society organised around controlling a river.

The exhibition is organised under three headings: water at the heart of the divine, water at the heart of the Mesopotamian landscape, and water at the heart of power. Taken together they make a single argument in three registers - that in southern Mesopotamia the same substance was simultaneously a god, a piece of infrastructure, and an instrument of rule, and that these were not three separate facts about water but one fact seen from three sides.

The landscape section is where the archive's own interest sits. Mesopotamian irrigation - canals, aqueducts, piped systems, artificial lakes - constitutes one of the earliest large-scale remakings of a landscape by human decision anywhere, and it came with consequences that are legible in the record: salinisation, silting, the abandonment of fields, and the political consequences of controlling an upstream channel. An exhibition that treats this as the subject rather than as background to the objects is unusual.

The power section makes the connection explicit. Among the works is a relief of the naval expedition of Sargon II from Khorsabad: the state projecting itself by water. Against it, the divine section carries the Stele of Baal with Lightning from Ugarit, the storm god as the source of the water rather than its manager.

Everything on show comes from the Louvre's own Department of Near Eastern Antiquities; this is a collection exhibition rather than a loan show, which is why it can run for ten months. The anchor object is the Gudea statue with the gushing vase, from Tello, of the Neo-Sumerian period - a ruler holding a vessel from which water flows in two streams, which is as direct a statement of the exhibition's thesis as any object could be: the man who governs is shown as the man from whom the water comes.

Also present is a statue in human form from Ain Ghazal in Jordan, one of the earliest large human figures made anywhere, which reaches back well before Mesopotamian state formation and widens the frame beyond the river valleys.

The exhibition was assembled by Ariane Thomas, director of the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities, with Barbara Couturaud and Gregoire Nicolet, the department's Mesopotamian collection managers. The catalogue, co-published by the Louvre and Lienart and directed by Thomas with both co-curators, runs to 240 pages with 150 illustrations at EUR 35 in the French edition.

Coverage has been descriptive rather than evaluative, treating the exhibition as a well-made use of the Louvre's own Mesopotamian holdings and picking up its environmental argument about irrigation as an early large-scale remaking of a landscape.