Stone slabs carved in low relief, or orthostats, decorated the walls of Neo-Hittite palaces and temples in the first millennium B.C. These four examples are among many excavated at Tell Halaf, in present-day Syria. The reliefs featuring fantastic creatures and scenes of hunting, combat, and ceremonial banquets. They once embellished a monumental palace that may have functioned as a theater for the burial rituals of the ruling king and his dynasty.

I was confused. How did memorabilia belonging to a member of the German nobility come to be in the dining room of a relatively quiet Lebanese family, and what was my great-grandfather's connection to it?

— Rayyane Tabet

Rayyane Tabet's great-grandfather, Faik Borkhoche (1895–1981) was a Lebanese schoolteacher and translator. In 1929 he was assigned by French authorities who governed Syria and Lebanon in the wake of World War I to serve as secretary to Baron Max von Oppenheim and to gather information on the excavation von Oppenheim was conducting at Tell Halaf.

This case contains materials related to the six months Borkhoche spent at the site, including photographs, a calling card, and an employment contract, as well as a book authored by von Oppenheim on the excavation—Der Tell Halaf (1931)—and given to Borkhoche as a present in 1932. A postcard sent from the Tell Halaf Museum in Berlin to Beirut in 1937 suggests that the two men stayed in touch long after the expedition had ended.

The artist tells the story here.

In 1929, authorities under the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon began to divide and allocate archaeological artifacts that had been discovered at Tell Halaf. The German excavation director, Baron Max von Oppenheim, received the lion's share of the finds. Among these were about eighty of the orthostats from the palace frieze.

In 1930, von Oppenheim founded the Tell Halaf Museum in Berlin with his share of finds from the site. He traveled to the United States the following year with the intention of selling eight of the reliefs. Unsuccessful, he left them in storage in New York. On this trip he visited The Met, dedicating a copy of his recently published account of the excavations to the director.

In 1941, shortly after the United States entered World War II, the United States government reactivated the Office of Alien Property Custodian (APC)—a wartime agency first established during World War I under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Its stated mandate was to "assume control and dispose of enemy-owned property in the United States."

By early 1943, the agency's research into the property of German nationals had led to the storage facility in New York that housed von Oppenheim's reliefs. On April 27 of that year, the APC issued an order that called for his property to be "held, used, administered, liquidated, sold, or otherwise dealt with in the interest of and for the benefit of the United States."

When the U.S. Office of Alien Property Custodian seized the Tell Halaf reliefs and put them up for auction, notices appeared in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. The Met was the highest bidder, and the reliefs soon entered The Met collection. Through an arrangement worked out in advance of the sale, the Museum immediately sold four of the eight reliefs to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

All objects from the Archives of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art and General Archives, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

When Rayyane Tabet's great-grandfather died in 1981, he left behind a goat-hair rug given to him by the Bedouin of Tell Halaf in 1929. It was his wish that the sixty-five-foot-long rug be divided equally among his five children, with the request that they in turn divide it among their children, and so on, until the rug eventually disappeared. As of today, the rug has been divided into twenty-three pieces across five generations. In Genealogy, Tabet has borrowed five segments of the heirloom from family members and arranged them in the form of a genealogical table, with the oldest generation at the top.

In 2017 Rayyane Tabet began making rubbings of the existing orthostats. So far, he has created rubbings of thirty-two basalt reliefs in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin; the Louvre Museum, Paris; the Walters Museum, Baltimore; and The Met.

The installation of the rubbings at The Met mirrors the placement of the original stones and the niched walls of the palace. Above them is a complete list of the original orthostats, citing the current location, medium, and motif of each. 

View the rubbings and listen as the artist recites a list of the original orthostats:

Undamaged when discovered in 1912, this sculpture is one of the most iconic artifacts unearthed at Tell Halaf. It was a favorite of excavation director Baron Max von Oppenheim, who called it "my beautiful Venus." The figure likely represents a mortal whose high status is indicated by the stool with footrest. The detailed head and face contrast with a minimalist body that follows the blocky shape of the original stone.

Found on a grave site, the sculpture was likely meant to mediate between the living and the dead. Its present appearance—reconstructed from the rubble left after the Allies bombed the Tell Halaf Museum in Berlin during World War II—serves as a lasting record of the violence that war inflicts on people, places, and things.