If it had been up to the Metropolitan Museum, Iraq and Syria would have been honoured lenders to a major exhibition opening this month on the culture of the first citiesand of the lands now embroiled in hostilities with the US. NEW YORK. It is a truly shocking irony that the collections in the Iraqi National Museum have been looted and smashed at the same time as a painstaking survey of the cultures once covered so magnificently by that museum has been coming together at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. "Art of the first cities: the third millennium BC from the Mediterranean to the Indus" (8 May-17 August) presents some 400 objects reflecting the creation of cities that would eventually become States in the Tigris, Euphrates and Indus Valleys, and the exchanges between those regions that led to hybrid styles. "Most of all there was a transfer of object types across broad regions, where you see elements that come from various cultures coalescing into a new cultural style that transcends all the individual regions and a distribution of objects beyond any ancient borders," said Joan Aruz, curator of Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan.The revelations for visitors new to Mesopotamian art are likely to be treasures like the Standard of Ur, on loan from the British Museum. A magnificent, newly cleaned rearing goat with a flowering plant, in gold and lapis lazuli, also from Ur (2550-2400 BC), is on loan from the University of Pennsylvania. A closer look shows the development of naturalism and the evolution of object types, Ms Aruz says, through the growing volume of tradeand travel. On view are recent finds from a hoard on the much explored island of Aigina in Greece, which include an etched carnelian bead, an artefact type that archaeologists know to have been produced in the Indus Valley. The same kind of object was imitated in Mesopotamia and never before found west of the sites of Ur and Kish. "There we find it in Greece," said Ms Aruz, who stresses the interconnections of cities, even before 2000 BC. "It's always a revelation." Reliefs from the Akkadian Empire (2350-2100 BC) glorify rulers and their brutality toward prisoners of war, a reminder that these were not exactly the good old days. In the international disunity that preceded the current war, the logistical and diplomatic challenge was huge for a show with loans from more than a dozen countries, and dozens of institutions. Over five years or so the Met has assembled its own (to borrow a Bush-ism) coalition of the willing. It has failed, however, to find a corporate sponsor for the exhibition. Initially, potential lenders even included Iraq, whose officials had been in discussions around the show's conception in January 1997. "Obviously an exhibition like this needs Iraq; you need the land between the two rivers. Things were not good with Iraq in those days, but we were talking to people there at colleague level who were supportive of the idea," said Marukh Tarapor, Associate Director of Exhibitions at the Metropolitan. Yet the US embargo precluded any Iraqi loans. The challenge therefore was to assemble an exhibition on Mesopotamia without Iraq (Iran was already out of the question for a US show). The Met ended up drawing heavily from major museums (Louvre, the British Museum, Hermitage, German institutions) and from American universities in Philadelphia and Chicago that amassed collections from excavations which were shared with the country of origin. Since those institutions tended to dig in one or two places, and since large national museums reflected colonial territories, the pool of lenders needed to be broad. "This is the hardest exhibition that I have ever organised," said Dr Tarapor. Loans of more than 100 objects from four museums in Syria (Damascus, Aleppo, Idlib, Deir-ez-Zor) were approved in Damascus as early as 1998, and with that accord and extensive photography for the catalogue came the promise of a new relationship for the Met. But in February or March, according to Marukh Tarapor, word came from Syria that "technical considerations" had resulted in the withdrawal of 90 works that the curators had chosen for the show. As a result, the exhibition's focus shifted toward southern Mesopotamia and away from the northern Mesopotamian sites of Mari and Ebla. "One of the most rewarding aspects of my job," said Dr Tarapor, "is to open a relationship with a country", she added with some regret, as she discussed how the museum's ties with Syria developed while the exhibition was being organised. "We had plans with the Syrians to bring over some of their conservators to work with our conservators here. We had planned an exchange programme. We were going to donate to the Damascus Museum cases for their permanent galleries," she said, noting that the ambassador of India in Damascus had assisted her there. For this exhibition, the Met has developed new partners in the Gulf States, especially Bahrain, and in Saudi Arabia, which is lending objects for the first time. Those contacts, Ms Tarapor says, were made thanks to the help of the al-Sabah family of Kuwait, which loaned "Treasury of the world; jewelled arts of India in the age of the Mughals" to New York in the months following the 11 September attack. Most of that exhibition consisted of objects looted by Iraq during the first Gulf war, and then returned to Kuwait as part of the negotiated cease-fire. Iraqi forces burned the Kuwaiti National Museum to the ground after they emptied it in 1991. Turkey, reluctant to join the current war coalition, was a generous lender to the Met. The Metropolitan's role as a presenter and guardian of a culture at risk has inevitably expanded while fighting frames the world's view of the lands that nourished the culture of the Third Millennium. "I can take no credit for the coincidence in time," said Philippe de Montebello, the Metropolitan's director, "The exhibition is not changed, except that it's missing a few objects, but a subject that had been conceived academically is all of a sudden becoming very pertinent." "This region has always been in a state of war. We come to expect it. That's the state of affairs in the Middle East," said Joan Aruz, who added that political tensions had shifted excavations from Iran and Iraq to Syria and Turkey. Yet even in war, the Met has managed to keep most of its coalition intact, an achievement that many diplomats might envy. As the show opens, all eyes are turned toward Iraq and to what may remain of the heritage represented to a very small extent by the objects now on display in New York.