Two researchers from UFRJ and UERJ deciphered an inscription in the Municipal Theater of Rio that had remained untranslated for 117 years in a location with a high influx of tourists (approximately 30 visitors per month). The translated phrase was originally written in Persian cuneiform and is located on the central panel of the Assyrian Hall of the Municipal Theater, a splendid space inaugurated on July 14, 1909, whose construction and scenic design were the responsibility of the French company La Grande Tuilerie d'Ivry (also known as Grès Muller). This group was founded in Paris by the engineer Émile Muller in 1854, and was the one that built the ceramic balustrades of the Eiffel Tower. Muller died in 1889, but his family business continued producing works under the direction of his son, Louis Muller, and one of the company's last projects before closing its doors in 1908 was the decoration of the Assyrian Hall of the Municipal Theater in Rio de Janeiro, between 1905 and 1909.
Completely clad in glazed ceramic tiles with mosaic panels, the Assyrian Hall once housed a restaurant and a cabaret, as well as being the stage for sumptuous masked balls at the Theatre. The iconography (works and models) that the Grès Muller company — the same one that bequeathed the Eiffel Tower to France — incorporated into the decoration, as researchers explain, is linked to the collections of Iranian (or Persian) artifacts from the Louvre Museum that arrived in Paris during the legendary Universal Exposition of 1889.
In January 2025, during a visit to the Assyrian Hall of the Municipal Theater, Professor Alex Mazzanti Júnior, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), a specialist in classical studies and Indo-European linguistics, identified that the inscription on the main panel of the hall appeared to be in Old Persian. Mazzanti sought to understand its meaning and made an initial reading of the Persian text, which was unknown to the theater's curators. He then shared images of the cuneiform text with an expert, Matheus Treuk, a professor of archaeology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), a specialist in Achaemenid Persia. It was unequivocally Persian, but it would be prudent to analyze the subject more thoroughly, and the authors decided to seek further information from the Theater.
Museum curator Raquel Villagrán Seoane, coordinator of the Documentation Center of the Municipal Theater, joined the search and began collaborating on the effort to translate the text and contextualize the environment, providing high-resolution images of the inscription and historical documents about the hall. Thanks to this collective work, the authors were finally able to critically analyze the entire scenographic environment of the Assyrian Hall and translate the mysterious inscription contextually. Among their conclusions is that the decorative ensemble of the hall has an eclectic composition, inspired by findings from various sources and with a modern and unique composition. The elucidation of the historical context (and the circumstances of the manufacture of the decoration) ended up generating a new demand for guided tours of the Theater's hall.
There are numerous connections between the Assyrian Salon in Rio de Janeiro and the archaeological artifacts preserved in Paris, especially in the Louvre. The Rio de Janeiro salon stems from a growing movement of Orientalist fascination and imagination sparked by the (re)discovery of the Susa artifacts in the 19th century. The cuneiform inscription, whose meaning was unknown until now, reiterates this fascination. The term cuneiform means "wedge-shaped," and it designates one of the oldest writing systems of humanity, created by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) around 3200 BC.
The original cuneiform text (converted to the Unicode standard) is this:
𐎠𐎱𐎭𐎠𐎴𐏃𐎹𐎠𐏐𐎠𐎼𐎫𐎧𐏁𐏂𐎠𐏃𐎹𐎠𐏐 𐏋𐏐𐎺𐏀𐎼𐎣𐏐𐏋𐏐𐏋𐎹𐎠𐎴𐎠𐎶𐏐𐎭𐎠𐎼
𐎹𐎺𐎢𐏁𐏃𐎹𐎠𐏐𐏋𐏃𐎹𐎠𐏐𐎱𐎢𐏂𐏐
The translation into English is as follows:
"From the Apadana of Artaxerxes, great king, king of kings, son of King Darius."
Apadana is a term originating from Old Persian that designates a sumptuous hall for solemn receptions or palace of the ancient kings of Persia. Artaxerxes (497 BC–427 BC) was an Achaemenid sovereign, son of Darius. The inscription of the hall is above the figure of a fire altar; to the right is the image of a guardian with a spear that frames the beginning of the text. On the right is the figure of the king, who performs an act of offering or consecration.
Even at the time of the theater's inauguration, chroniclers of the period debated whether the so-called "Assyrian restaurant" should not be considered "Persian," since it was composed of images of artifacts found by the French in ancient Susa (one of the oldest cities in the Near East, in southwestern Iran, where Shush is currently located) in the late 1800s. The Apadana they made in the Assyrian Hall is based on the one in Susa. The chronicler João do Rio (1881-1921), honored by the 2024 Paraty Literary Festival and one of the originators of the modern literary chronicle in Brazil, even wrote about the Assyrian Hall when it was built in 1913. João do Rio signed the chronicle with one of his pseudonyms, Paulo Barreto.
"The seemingly crushing ceiling, the evocations of great historical cycles in which Greece felt the colossal Asia, the evocation of these periods through the reproduction of the friezes—all this is further enhanced by the multiplied extension, reflected in the mirrors set in antique bronze, by the murmur of the water fountains swirling over slender pools, by the milky illumination of the lamps with their highly original shapes."
“The creation of something entirely new from the combination of themes present in various archaeological sites and originating from different historical periods is a testament to the high expertise and erudition of Grès Muller,” state the researchers in an extensive article produced for SciELO, the Brazilian academic “Google,” an ecosystem of information on scientific research.
In Rio de Janeiro, the study's authors write, the artist, by replacing the Assyrian king and his servants with the Persian king and his guards, created something entirely new. He drew inspiration from parallels in Persepolis and Naqsh-i Rostam, and not just Susa, adapting the theme of the Assyrian libation to the Achaemenid reality. The attendants on the king's flanks, for example, hold in their right hand a "fly whisk" whose prototype appears in the reliefs of the Throne Room of Persepolis, while, eclectically, they hold in their left hand an Assyrian-type "cloth," instead of the expected Persian cloth with a knot at the end or fold marks. The fire altar of the Rio version, which replaces, in the original theme, the Assyrian offering table and an incense burner, evokes, in turn, the altars of the Achaemenid funerary reliefs of Naqsh-i Rostam.
At the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, Persian civilization was featured in several pavilions and exhibitions open to the public, such as the Pavillon des Travaux-publics, the Palais des Arts-Libéraux, and the Histoire de l'habitation humaine. Beyond its instructive purpose, this effort also had a propagandistic aspect, symbolizing the French state's knowledge and control over these cultures from the rest of the world, and highlighting colonialist parameters of superiority and inferiority. According to the researchers who undertook the study, "the Assyrian Hall undoubtedly constitutes one of the most fascinating and exceptional works in the history of Orientalism and the reception of Persian Antiquity, and should hold a prominent place in studies on the subject in the country."
Very good text. Congratulations!