Ann Arbor, MI, September 17, 2026—The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan (U-M) has opened its first new permanent gallery in nearly two decades. “The Byzantine and Islamic Worlds: 400–1800” brings together over 100 objects to explore 1,400 years of history across the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, and the wider networks that connected these regions to Asia, Europe, and Africa.
Made possible through generous financial support from U-M’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA), the gallery presents many objects that have never before been on permanent display. Drawing primarily on the Kelsey Museum’s collections, it also incorporates loans and materials from the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments, and the University of Michigan Library’s Special Collections.
Speaking at the gallery’s opening reception on August 27, LSA Dean Rosario Ceballo praised the scholarship and collaboration behind the project. “The research and scholarship required to prepare an exhibition of this magnitude is nothing short of extraordinary,” Ceballo said. “The faculty, staff, students, humanists, and researchers who work in the Kelsey…deserve recognition and applause for their tremendous work.”
Rather than telling this long and complex history as a succession of empires, dynasties, or religious traditions, the gallery takes a thematic approach centered on the experiences and concerns of everyday life.
“‘Byzantine’ and ‘Islamic’ are useful terms, but they can make the past seem much more neatly divided than it actually was,” explained Katherine Burge, the gallery’s curator. “The people whose lives are represented here inhabited multiple, overlapping worlds. They spoke many languages, practiced different religions, and lived under changing political systems, but they also traveled the same roads and seas, exchanged goods and ideas, and faced many of the same concerns of everyday life.”
Multiple, Interconnected Worlds
Throughout the gallery, objects reveal connections that crossed political, religious, linguistic, and geographic boundaries.
Textiles trace generations of technical knowledge as weavers adapted materials and techniques to new contexts. Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish texts evoke multilingual societies and changing traditions of education, administration, scholarship, and religious learning. Pilgrim souvenirs, coins, musical instruments, ceramics, and glass reveal other networks of travel, commerce, performance, and artistic exchange.
Some of those connections reached thousands of miles beyond the lands typically associated with the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. In one striking example, a Chinese Longquan celadon bowl with a green glaze and double-fish motif appears alongside a fragment of an Egyptian bowl that echoes both its glaze and imagery. Together, they show how Egyptian potters adapted features from prestigious Chinese imports to local materials and techniques—pointing toward the movement of objects and visual ideas across Eurasia. Nearby, block-printed cottons made in India and preserved in Egypt reveal commercial networks stretching across the Indian Ocean.
Objects and stories such as these ask visitors to consider how people lived within, across, and sometimes beyond the boundaries historians use to describe the past.
Focus on Everyday Life
Instead of attempting to recount 14 centuries of political and dynastic history, the gallery focuses on what an archaeological museum can reveal especially well: the textures of everyday life.
Across changing empires, political boundaries, and religious communities, people often inhabited shared material worlds. They cooked and ate from similar vessels, wore textiles and jewelry, used perfumes and cosmetics, sought protection through amulets, made and listened to music, recorded information, and traveled along the same roads and sea routes. The gallery brings these common experiences to the foreground, organizing objects around shared activities and questions.
The gallery also places objects in more dynamic and contextual relationships. An inscribed wooden lintel is positioned above an approximation of a doorway, calling to mind its original architectural setting and revealing its inscription as a blessing that once protected a home and those who entered it.
Many Perspectives, Diverse Media
Community collaboration shaped the gallery long before it opened. A series of listening circles brought together museum staff, faculty, students, and community participants, including members of descendant and diasporic communities with cultural and religious connections to the Middle East and North Africa. Participants responded to the gallery’s developing themes, language, and interpretive choices, while reflecting on how these histories and cultures have traditionally been represented in museums.
Their thoughtful—and sometimes challenging—critiques prompted the curatorial team to reconsider assumptions, refine language, and approach particular subjects with greater nuance and care. Some of their influence is directly visible in the finished gallery; much more is embedded in the interpretive decisions that shaped it.
“This exhibit invites people to consider disparate interpretations of events, processes, and underlines the subjectivity of interpretation,” one listening circle participant noted. “I like how it uses individual experiences of subjectivity to probe at the idea of collective and/or absolute truths.”
One of the most visible results of these partnerships is a rotating space in the gallery devoted to community-curated displays. The first installation, developed with U-M’s Arabesque Dance Troupe, highlights the experiences, perspectives, and creativity of current and former undergraduate students. A dress and tabl baladi, or drum, loaned by the group appear alongside video of the troupe’s recent dance performances, bringing clothing, music, and movement into the gallery and connecting historical collections with living traditions.
“I am particularly excited by the community section of the gallery, where visitors will draw connections to local descendants and diasporic communities right here in Michigan,” Dean Ceballo noted in her August 27 remarks. “This is the best of the humanities, and the best of the liberal arts and sciences, translating interdisciplinary research into something that can enhance our community, our state, and the wider world.”
Sound, moving images, and interactive media extend the gallery beyond the objects themselves. Touchscreens invite visitors to explore additional content, while audio and video bring sound, movement, and contemporary voices into a gallery centered largely on archaeological and historical collections.
How Did These Objects Get Here?
The gallery also asks visitors to consider another kind of movement: how objects from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean came to American museums.
Many entered collections through archaeological excavations and the international antiquities market of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Kelsey’s holdings reflect these histories; many of the Byzantine and Islamic objects were acquired through University of Michigan alumnus Peter Ruthven, whose detailed records help reconstruct the networks through which antiquities circulated.
The gallery’s chronology concludes around 1800, at a pivotal moment in the modern history of European engagement with the region. A rotating book display begins with volumes of the monumental Description de l’Égypte, produced following Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 invasion of Egypt. Created by the scholars, artists, engineers, and scientists who accompanied the French military expedition, the publication documented Egypt’s ancient monuments, landscapes, natural environment, and contemporary life on an unprecedented scale.
The Description transformed European knowledge of Egypt, but that production of knowledge was inseparable from the military and imperial project that enabled it. The volumes invite visitors to consider the intertwined histories of scholarship, colonial expansion, archaeology, collecting, and museums, as well as the lasting influence of European representations of Egypt and the broader region.
Future rotations will include works by 19th-century artist David Roberts, continuing the gallery’s exploration of how European travelers, artists, scholars, and collectors represented and shaped perceptions of the Middle East and North Africa.
A Permanent Gallery Designed to Change
“The Byzantine and Islamic Worlds: 400–1800” is a permanent gallery, but it was designed to evolve.
Books and other light-sensitive materials will rotate. The community-curated case will introduce new collaborators and perspectives. Digital content can accommodate additional voices and forms of interpretation, while visitor participation creates opportunities for audiences to respond.
The result is a permanent gallery conceived not as a final account of 1,400 years of history, but as a space for continuing interpretation and conversation.
As Burge noted, “My hope is that visitors will find connections we did not anticipate and ask questions we did not think to ask…and perhaps leave with a sense of this history as a little less distant and a little less divided than it seemed when they entered.”
“The Byzantine and Islamic Worlds: 400–1800” opened to the public on August 28 and is now on permanent view at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.
About the Kelsey Museum
The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology has explored the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East since 1928—bringing the ancient world to life for generations of Michigan students, faculty, and staff. An internationally recognized institution, the Kelsey supports active archaeological fieldwork, advancing public and scholarly access to its collections through publications in diverse media and dynamic museum exhibitions and programs. The Kelsey Museum is free and open to the public and offers a variety of tours and events throughout the year. Learn more at lsa.umich.edu/kelsey.
