Oriental Institute, Chicago

The Oriental Institute (OI), established in 1919, is the University of Chicago's archeology museum and research center for ancient Near Eastern studies.

The Institute is housed in an unusual Art-Deco/Gothic building at the corner of 58th and University, designed by the architectural firm Mayers Murray & Phillip. The Museum has artifacts from digs in Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Notable possessions are the famous Megiddo Ivories, various treasures from Persepolis, the old Persian capital, a huge 40 ton human-headed winged bull (or lamassu) from Khorsabad, the capital of Sargon II, and finally a monumental statue of King Tutankhamun.

The museum is free to enter, though visitors are encouraged to leave a donation of US $5.00 for adults and $2.00 for children.

Even given unlimited resources and comparable archeological discoveries, the Institute's treasures could not be assembled today, since Middle Eastern governments no longer allow foreign archeologists to take home half of what they find — which was the typical arrangement the 19th and early 20th centuries, when most of the holdings were excavated.

Not only a museum, the Oriental Institute is, as its name suggests, a center of active research on the ancient Near East. The building's upper floors contain classrooms and faculty offices, and its gift shop, the Suq, also sells textbooks for the University's classes on Near Eastern studies. In addition to carrying out many digs in the Fertile Crescent, OI scholars have made many contributions to our understanding of the cradle of civilization. In fact, the term "Fertile Crescent" was coined by onetime OI head James Henry Breasted, who is said to have been one of the models for Indiana Jones (another possible Indiana Jones model from the Oriental Institute was Robert Braidwood).

Among other projects, OI scholars have recently completed a 21 volume dictionary of Assyrian, and are currently working on a dictionary of Hittite, and a dictionary of Demotic.

In 2006, the Oriental Institute became the center of controversy when U.S. federal courts ruled to seize and auction its valuable collection of ancient Persian artifacts, the proceeds of which would go to compensate the victims of a 1997 bombing in Ben Yehuda Street, Jerusalem, that the United States claim was funded by Iran. The ruling threatens the university's invaluable collection of ancient clay tablets held by the Oriental Institute since the 1930s but officially owned by Iran.

ee also

*Persian cultural heritage crisis at the Oriental Institute

External links

*the [http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/default.html Oriental Institute, University of Chicago] - home page for the Oriental Institute
* [http://www.etana.org/abzu/ Abzu] - A guide to open access material of the Ancient Near East
* [http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/iraq.html A database on the Oriental Institute's website] maintained by Dr. Clemens Reichel documenting artifacts stolen from the Iraq Museum in April 2003
* [http://persepolistablets.blogspot.com/ Persepolis Fortification Archive Project]
* [http://oihistory.blogspot.com/ The Oriental Institute: Fragments for a History of an Institution. A collaborative project intended to focus ideas and thoughts on the history of the Oriental Institute of The University of Chicago]