Before the alphabet

In Venice, in the rooms of Palazzo Loredan, the exhibition features more than two hundred artifacts —including seals, tablets, and objects from Mesopotamian civilizations — transporting visitors back to the third millennium BC.

An extraordinary journey to the origins of civilization, to the moment when Prehistory gives way to History thanks to one of humanity’s most remarkable inventions: writing. This revolution is illustrated through a wide range of documents from the land between the two rivers—clay tablets and precious materials alongside seals depicting stories, symbols, and gestures of everyday life, distant in time yet still deeply connected to our experience as human beings.

The exhibition is curated by Professor Frederick Mario Fales, one of the leading Assyriologists and scholars of the Ancient Near East.