Plate of Al-Yaqoussah

This shallow, painted plate was discovered, along with a statuette of the Roman goddess Venus, during clandestine excavations in a grave at al-Yaqoussah in southern Syria in 1943, during World War II, and passed into the hands of the Damascus dealer A. Dahdad. Dahdad tried to sell the two objects to the National Museum of Damascus, who refused to pay the requested amount due to the poor condition of the plate (Dahdad had attempted to clean it with acid, further damaging the surface). Dahdad sold it to M.E. Boutros, a dealer in Beirut, who subsequently sold the plate to the American collector Ray Winfield Smith in 1951 or shortly before for a price eight times higher than the one at which the Damascus museum deemed it overpriced. After being displayed at the Louvre and other European museums, the plate came to be known as the “Paris Plate” after its scene depicting the ancient myth of the “Judgement of Paris.” It arrived in Corning in 1955 and was acquired by the museum. In 1964, Selim Abdul-Hak (1913-1992), who was the Director General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria, gave a lecture to an international group of glass scholars in Damascus in which he recounted the modern history as he knew it. (The text of the lecture was published in 1966.) However, Abdul-Hak was not certain what had become of the plate after it was sold to the American collector, only had access to a poor-quality photograph, and was unaware of the identification of the scene as the Judgement of Paris. In his talk and the subsequent publication of the paper in 1966, Abdul-Hak poignantly asked for information on the current whereabouts of the plate – which was of course in Corning, as would have been well known to the assembled group of experts – and expressed his infinite regret that the plate had left his country. In 1972, the delicate painting on the surface of the plate was further damaged in the Corning flood caused by the aftereffects of Hurricane Agnes. Acknowledging that names matter and yet are only a small redress of past inequities, the Corning Museum of Glass is now calling this object the Plate of Al-Yaqoussah in recognition of its Syrian patrimony and the location where the plate was buried by its ancient owner and found almost 2,000 years later, rather than the prior name of the Paris Plate after its iconography which suggests a specious connection to the French city.

Roman Empire; Eastern Mediterranean; probably Syria

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