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
felt that they were fine but Idrimi knew that he wasn't being treated in the manner that he really should be.
So he left Imar and he left as a political refugee and fled further south.
Now we don't know exactly where he went but written on the arm, his right arm
is the phrase 'ma-at ki-in-a-nim'
and that's one of the earliest phrases we have in any written source for the land of Canaan.
A phrase that is much more familiar from the biblical texts
over 1,000 years later.
Somewhere in the 'ma-at ki-in-a-nim' somewhere in perhaps southern Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan area
Idrimi fell in with a group of other refugees from Aleppo and its neighbouring lands
and they recognised Idrimi, he says, as their leader and so he became
the leader of this band of outcasts.
But he wants to go back and take his birthright, take control of the city from where he came.
So what do you do? You of course need the favour of the gods
and so Idrimi did what most people did...
How do you speak with the gods?
You have to talk to them in various ways.
So Idrimi would let birds go free, cages of pigeons,
and he would watch the way they would fly as an augury.
He also sacrificed lambs and took the liver from the carcass and look at the shape of the liver
as a way of trying determine the gods' favour.
Well for six years the storm god Teshub wasn't giving Idrimi his favour but on the seventh year
he said 'sure, now is the time'.
So Idrimi with his band of outcasts created a fleet
and they sailed up the coast of the eastern Mediterranean and attacked a city called Alalakh
which is in modern day southern Turkey.
And there he became the king.
and from there as the king of Alalakh
he actually went and campaigned into Turkey and into ancient Anatolia against the Hittites
and captured seven Hittite cities as well.
And with all that booty he brought it and created a large temple and a large palace.
and within that temple he erected this statue of himself here and wrote down in 104 lines of cuneiform text
his life story.
What's really cool about this statue, the best thing about it
or at least the second best thing about it
is that the very last two lines of this text are a curse
and they curse anyone who would defile the statue
or anyone who, and this is probably more important, who would actually change the text
because it was very common in the ancient world for people to take the name of someone out and then put their own name in its place.
So the curse itself makes it kind of unusual
but that's not the best thing.
The best thing about this is that written down the side all the way down his right cheek here
almost like it's coming out of his mouth
think like a speech bubble in a cartoon.
That's not a curse, that's a blessing
and it's a blessing on Idrimi himself and what it's saying is that
anyone who reads this statue and learns of the life of Idrimi is blessing Idrimi and is blessing him for perpetuity.
I think that by taking him out of the case,
sitting him here on the gallery floor and doing this very high precision scan
we're increasing the number of people who can learn from Idrimi's life by a factor of millions and millions
that Idrimi could never have even thought about.
And that, I think, is really what he was hoping for with this blessing all along.