Exhibitions: 7 Millenniums Under One Roof

EXHIBITIONS 7 Millenniums Under One Roof "The last 6,000 years of human history are most interesting," Alfred North Whitehead once remarked to a dinner companion. If the philosopher could have attended the current exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., he would have had to increase his span by a millennium. The Archaeological Museum of Teheran and a major private Iranian collection have been spilled open to provide the U.S. with a show of 735 objects, many of them only recently discovered, from 7,000 years of Persian art.

The thriving cities where the art was fashioned—Marlik, Shapur,...