Did you catch that? The Met calls this a sixth century Egyptian amulet and yet keeps it in the Islamic Art department. Islam did not arise until the seventh century and reach its present form until the eighth and ninth centuries. Even if the Met doesn’t know this is a tefillin, doesn’t it have a department for Egyptian pre-Islamic art, a rich artistic tradition? Or is the all-encompassing need to make Islam look good so overarching that anything and everything must be appropriated as Islamic, no matter how absurd the stretch?
https://twitter.com/met_islamicart/status/1196837164249690117
“Met Museum mislabels Jewish phylacteries as 6th-century Egyptian amulet,” by Tamar Beeri, Jerusalem Post, July 25, 2020:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) seemingly mislabeled a piece from their collection, which appears in the photograph to be Jewish phylacteries (tefillin), as a 6th-Century amulet from Egypt.
Tefillin is worn by observant Jews during their weekday morning prayers and contain scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah. The one tefillin obtained by the museum is marked to have been acquired in 1962 and is kept in the Islamic Art department.
The museum marked the prediction of the time period from which it comes as being between 500 and 100 AD….
mortimer says
A very embarrassing gaffe. It is surprising no Muslim saw it. Most would not know what a phylactery is. I suspect an observant Jew spotted it.
Islam began with the slaughter, plundering and enslavement of the Jews of Medina. Muslims entered Yathrib as refugees, change the name to Medina (‘capital city’) and within a few years, NO Jews remained in Medina.
Does anyone else see a pattern there ??
gravenimage says
Mortimer, you have *very few* Muslims who patronize museums. Even in Dar-al-Islam, this is the case. There are almost no Muslims who visit museums in places like Egypt and Iraq–not even school children. It is almost all Infidels.
Mano says
This suggests a seriously degraded level of scholarship at this august institution, possibly the result of social promotion from pre-K through post-doc. For the sake of everyone’s health and safety, I hope the engineering and medical schools are being more selective in whom they allow to graduate.
MykeJohn says
Want them to rightly label it? No way. See, whatever they desire and can’t make they steal and rebrand it as theirs – end of the matter.
abad says
PMSL
Speaking as someone who actually has a background in museum archives and being employed by the Met at one point, an item of this nature should be in Jewish Diaspora department.
PMSL
gravenimage says
Thank you, abad.
Arnold Jackson says
Another problem they have is labeling a cylinder-seal impression as a cylinder seal.
The Met is not run by scientists.
zimriel says
Still no word on that Twitter thread on a fix.
Say what you will about the Bible Museum – although it made some embarrassing mistakes, it did fix them and cop to the error.
Crusades Were Right says
Well, if a 6th century Greek cathedral can be a mosque… lol
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
This Islamic phylactery has mysterious, time-reversing properties as well: “The museum marked the prediction of the time period from which it comes as being between 500 and 100 AD.”
I wonder whether any Islamic artifacts can also be found in the
https://arkmuseum.eu/
gravenimage says
Metropolitan Museum of Art labels Jewish tefillin as Egyptian amulet, keeps it in Islamic Art department
Did you catch that? The Met calls this a sixth century Egyptian amulet and yet keeps it in the Islamic Art department. Islam did not arise until the seventh century…
……………
Now, to be fair, even the greatest museums make mistakes–sometimes some shockingly glaring ones.
That being said, even by its own standards, if this had been a “sixth century Egyptian amulet” it would have been Christian or pagan, *not* Islamic.
I have long noticed this–there is so little that can be considered Islamic art–unsurprising for a creed that rejects and destroys most art–that many books and museums appropriate all sorts of things to pad the slim pickings.
I have mentioned this before, but I had a book when I was a child that grotesquely identified Christian Cathedral Hagia Sophia as the greatest example of Islamic architecture.
That they are doing this with a Jewish artifact is especially perverse.
S says
changing history is happening everywhere…. it is a pandemic.
gravenimage says
Grimly true–attempts to rewrite history, primarily by the Left and Islam–are rife right now.