Oriental Notes: Assyrian and Babylonian Antiquities Onstage

The ancient Orient has often been a place of historical and religious events told and set to music in theatrical works. But what was the knowledge of the ancient Orient before the actual discovery of the vestiges of ancient Near Eastern civilizations? The year 1842 actually marks the birth of near-eastern archeology with the first excavations in the Assyrian region in northern Iraq: from that moment, the Orient is no longer, or at least not only, a mythical and exotic place, but becomes a concrete and real visible place. and tangible thanks to the work of the first explorers of the ancient hills. However, although archeology has contributed to unveiling forms of the landscape and of ancient oriental cities, the collective imagination of the fiction of the Orient as an exotic place and far from the most common context of classical antiquity continues to prevail and to be used in the scenic translation. of spaces, environments, buildings and customs.