Working alongside curators, collections and learning teams, and exhibition designers HSD, to transform an extraordinary and academically complex collection into an experience that connects ancient history to the fundamental questions of what it means to live together in societies.

Masterplanning | Interpretation Planning | Core Narrative Development | Content Development

The challenge was to develop a narrative that would connect the cities of five thousand years ago to the lives and experiences of visitors today.

TGA made multiple research trips to Philadelphia, workshopping extensively with Penn's curatorial, collections and education teams. We immersed ourselves in the collections that range from thousands of cuneiform clay tablets and monumental temple carvings to objects of striking intimacy, including the crushed skulls of guards and guests entombed with a Sumerian queen.

From this material we developed the core narrative framework:  Journey to the City.

This organising idea explores the common factors that drive ancient and modern cities and their communities – identity, resources, organisation, belief – making the ancient Mesopotamian world feel not remote and exotic but relevant and recognisably human.

The most important interpretive decision was to frame Mesopotamia not as a distant curiosity but as the origin point of patterns of life; trade, writing, governance, community, that still define us today.

That reframing transformed the gallery from an archaeological display into a mirror of contemporary society.

The project's reach extended beyond the museum and Tim was subsequently invited to speak on the interpretation of cuneiform writing in museums at the Max Planck Institute in Germany – an example of Narrative Direction working at the intersection of scholarship and public experience.

Client: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

TGA: Narrative Masterplanning, Research, Stakeholder Engagement, Interpretation Planning, Content Development

Partners: HSD (Exhibition Design)