Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks (with some help from Chelsea Graham @ IPCH)

April 5, 2019

The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History celebrated the opening of the new exibit “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” with a reception on April 4th, 2019.  Chelsea Graham, Head of the Digitization Lab, had an opportunity to preview the gallery, which included the fruits of her work, before the reception. As a member of the exhibition planning committee, she has seen it evolve from its conception in 2017 through its opening to the public. Chelsea’s imaging techniques helped improve the legibility of cuneiform tablets with ancient culinary recipes so that they could be translated, re-intrepreted, and prepared by a Yale-Harvard team in 2018. A discovery table in the gallery contains interactive elements. Touchscreens include an interface where visitors may inspect 3D models of artifacts, virtually roll cylinder seals out in clay, listen to transliterations of recipes and move light across the surfaces of Babylonian tablets. Scaled and colored 3D prints of some of the exhibited objects are also available for visitors to handle.

The exhibition opened to the public on April 6, 2019 and will be on view through June 30, 2020. You may interact with, download and even 3D print some of the objects in the exhibit on the IPCH Digitization Lab’s Sketchfab page here.