History of the St. Petersburg

The collections in the department of Western European art, the oldest in the Hermitage, are notable for their exceptional richness. They include paintings, sculptures, drawings, and engravings, various items of applied art, coins and medals from different countries.

A prominent place in the exhibition is occupied by woodcuts, one of the most popular forms of Japanese art. In the second half of the seventeenth century a school known as Ukiyo-e (“Pictures of Our Transitory World”) developed in the Japanese capital Yedo, present-day Tokyo.

The first room (367) presents the celebrated group of relics, comprising clothes, fabrics and household objects, from the tumuli of Noin-Ula in the northern part of Mongolia, investigated by Kozlov.

We should note particularly some relics of Chinese writing – inscriptions dating from the fourteenth century B. C. on the bones of animals. These texts which were used for telling the future, are simple in content – isn’t it time the harvest was begun, will the hunt be sussessful – and they enable us to determine the economic structure of the very ancient inhabitants of the country.

The Hermitage has a rather small, but nevertheless interesting collection of works of both old and contemporary Indian art. The collection in the first section illustrates just one of the stages in the centuries-old history of India -the period of the feudal Mogul Empire from the sixteenth up to the nineteenth century.

The Hermitage boasts the world’s largest collection of Sassanian silver. The majority of the Sassanian silverware- jugs and cups for wine, vases and salvers for sweetmeats and fruit -were found by chance in the Urals region and near the river Kama, a tributary of the Volga, to where they had been taken by traders in return for furs.

Byzantium grew up as a result of the division of the Roman Empire during the fourth century A.D. into Western and Eastern Empires, the latter receiving the name of Byzantium. The centuries-old history of this state, which played so important a part in the shaping of European culture, came to an end in 1453 when the decaying feudal empire of the Palaeologus dynasty was conquered by the Turks.

In the very distant past, on the territory of present-day Iraq, there developed, blossomed and finally declined the ancient cultures, successively replacing each other, of states which at one time wielded considerable power – Sumer, Akkadia, Babylon and Assyria.

The relics of the ancient period of Egyptian culture in the museum include some Palaeolithic chisels of the fifth millennium B.C., and also earthenware vessels, flint tools and stone palettes for triturating paint dating back to the fourth millennium B. C.

The items displayed in room 55 confirm the fact that the tribes of Transcaucasia, whose basic occupation was cattle-breeding and to some extent farming, underwent a period (between the eleventh and seventh centuries B.C.) in which the primitive system of communal relations broke up.