The Ancient Middle East and the 21st Century Museum - Symposium
Cincinnati Art Museum - March 31- April 1, 2022

Dr. Lindsay Allen

Esteem and the City: the palaces of Darius and Xerxes in Cincinnati

Cincinnati Art Museum houses a notable selection of three fragments from the Achaemenid ruin of Persepolis, Iran. This paper explores how the interwar, international art market and trends in post-war, American civic development combined to embed the ancient city in the modern. The ancient stone carvings themselves were taken from the Palaces of Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE) and his son Xerxes I (r. 486–465 BCE) in around 1930, in the province of Fars.

Originally situated in the same area of the site, on different sides of adjacent buildings, the ancient reliefs’ past installations in Cincinnati merged interiors
and exteriors on a single elevated plane. Together, they showed a visible consistency in relief design between the reigns of the two kings. In their source structures, this feature enhanced the legitimacy of their family dynasty. Meanwhile the fragments in Ohio recalled earlier additions to collections in Boston and New York, which were made in the 1930s. The arrival of these sculptures in the Midwest in the 1940s and 50s was part of a broader, ever-expanding dispersal of Iranian artefacts across the continent.
Cincinnati’s fragments connect its museum to both an ancient empire
and a modern network of urban treasuries in North America. Clarifying this conjunction of histories helps us to perceive and question the qualities acquired by the city museum through its incorporation of this precious masonry. In both their ancient and modern locations, the sculpture’s apparent authority and durability belies actual instability and fluidity.

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