"I was told and I repeat"
From the poetry of Sumer and Babylonia. Words and clay.
3rd millennium B.C. - 3rd millennium A.D.

In the year 2000 the Redkaya kniga iz Peterburga publishing house produced a unique publication on clay: Seven incantations, prayers and ritual songs from the poetry of Sumer and Babylon. Designer V.A. Tsivin. Publisher P.G. Stupitsyn (an edition of 7 copies). This publication was made possible by superb translations into Russian from the dead Sumerian and Akkadian languages. Several generations of scholars, historians and translators worked in the Hermitage in the course of the 20th century. The publication used translations by V.K. Shileiko, I.M. Dyakonov, V.K. Afanasyeva and I.S. Klochkova that skilfully and vividly convey to the modern reader the sublime poetry of humanity's oldest literature and written language. The project is much indebted to the experience gained with V.K. Afanasyeva's anthology of Sumerian poetry entitled Ot nachala nachal - From the Beginning of Beginnings (St Petersburg, 1997).

The exhibition consists of two sections of equal size: seven ancient cuneiform documents (3rd millennium B.C. - 1st century A.D.) from the Hermitage collection are presented as a prologue to the display of seven sculptural works by the St Petersburg ceramic artist Vladimir Tsivin featuring the translated texts of Sumerian and Babylonian poetry.

The seven items from the collection assembled in the early 20th century by Nikolai Likhachev present seven stages in the evolution of the cuneiform culture and show the succession of different leading genres in the literature of Ancient Mesopotamia.

The sacral group of sculptures represents an attempt by a contemporary artist to create a sort of reminiscence of the literary monuments, to seek out a form consonant with the sources. The exhibition in the Hermitage celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Redkaya kniga iz Peterburga publishing house.

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