Idrimi: a 3,500-year-old refugee from Aleppo | Curator's Corner S2 Ep5 #CuratorsCorner

This is the story of a 3,500-year-old refugee from Aleppo.

Hi, my name is Jamie Fraser and I'm the curator for the Levant here at the British Museum

and welcome to my corner.

I'm standing in the gallery for the Ancient Levant at the British Museum

and I'm standing next to this astonishing statue of an ancient Syrian called Idrimi.

This statue is, I think, one of the most interesting things in the entire British Museum's collection.

What it is is a statue of an ancient Syrian from Aleppo called Idrimi

but it's more than that.

It's a statue of a refugee from Aleppo that's 3,500 years old.

And we know this because on the front of the statue

literally from his head all the way to Idrimi's feet

is an autobiography of his life.

And it's a political autobiography, but not like the turgid political biographies

that every politician gets their ghost writer to pump out at the end of their term.

This is written with dynamism and with considerable elan

about the life and times of this mysterious guy Idrimi.

If you've ever come in to the Levant gallery in the British Museum before you would have

seen this statue of Idrimi.

But you wouldn't have seen him standing in the gallery like this

because he normally has to be behind a glass case.

The surface of the statue's quite fragile so it has to be protected.

But you're looking at him at the moment out of that glass case.

It's one of the few times he's ever been outside of the case before.

And the reason why is, we've taken him out for just two days, to give us a chance to

do some laser scanning or digital scanning of the statue.

A company called Factum Arte, or more specifically their branch Factum Foundation, are doing

this for us and they're coming in and using photogrammetry and a couple of other digital

techniques that have a submillimetric precision.

So by scanning the statue what we're able to do is to generate a 3D model of the statue

that we can put online so that anyone can read Idrimi's text and learn more about his life

regardless of where they are in the world as long as they have an internet connection.

So this is his life story:

He used to live in Aleppo, the city of his father, but something happened

we don't know exactly what

it translates as a 'hostile incident' and Idrimi leaves with his family

and they flee to the homeland of his mother

a place called Imar in northern Iraq on the Euphrates river.

There, Idrimi tells us, his six older brothers

and remember that