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The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York displays 200 works from ancient and medieval times – including mosaics, murals, jewelry and manuscripts – that reflect a thousand years of influence of the Byzantine Empire on Christian communities in Egypt, Tunisia and Ethiopia.
The museum collects precious stones from collections from Africa, Asia, and Europe for the “Africa and Byzantium” exhibition, which opened yesterday, Sunday, and continues until next March 3.
The museum organized a preview this week for the press in the presence of its partners, which are the Egyptian and Tunisian governments and the oldest Coptic Orthodox monastery in the world, St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai in Egypt.
The “Africa and Byzantium” exhibition – which brings together artistic, religious, literary and archaeological treasures – highlights the influence of the Byzantine Empire, which extended to the Arab East and North Africa, on Christianity, which spread in the Horn of Africa from the fourth century to the seventh century.
Ancient Byzantine art
According to Metropolitan Museum of Art CEO Max Hollein, the goal of this exhibition is “to deepen our knowledge of Byzantine and early Christian art within the framework of a broader worldview.”
The curator of the “Africa and Byzantium” exhibition, Andrea Ashe, considered that the exhibition demonstrates how “the various societies associated with Byzantium flourished within African empires and kingdoms over a period of more than a thousand years,” especially in “the first African Christian civilizations.”
Visitors will be able to see painted manuscripts, textiles, carved marble and ivory mosaics from Nubia, gold jewelry from Egypt, and wall paintings, many of which are on display for the first time in the United States.
The museum noted that the pieces included in the exhibition explore the links between cultural and multi-religious communities from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and blend Greek, Roman, and Byzantine traditions.
Tunisian Minister of Cultural Affairs Hayat Qatat Al-Qarmazi told Agence France-Presse that these pieces show the world “the rich cultural heritage of her country, which is the result of a mixture of different civilizations that occupied the Mediterranean,” along with a “local African background.”
The exhibition received a personal blessing from Orthodox Bishop Damianos of St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, who said, “It (the exhibition) provides us with an opportunity to remember the universality of Byzantium, which provided freedom, unity, reconciliation, respect, and peace…the peace that we desperately need in our world today.”
Other exceptionally preserved exhibits dating back to the period extending from the eighth to the 15th centuries attest to the influence of Byzantium on the arts of the ancient Christian communities in Tunisia, Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan. This influence did not stop after the conquest of Byzantine Constantinople in 1453 and its transformation into Ottoman Istanbul, as the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed was keen to The Conqueror wanted his capital to reflect the enormous ethnic and cultural diversity of his expanding empire.
Although there was no Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople in 1453 when the city was conquered, the Sultan could have left the position vacant, but the conqueror was the most open king of his time, and he sought to revive the ecumenical patriarchate that had presided over the Orthodox Church in Constantinople since the fourth century, according to the expression British historian Philip Mansell is an author book “Constantinople…the city that the world desired, 1453-1924.”
