Among the pieces on display during the exhibition are so-called hand axes, which were used in prehistoric times. In the Drents Museum, copies of half a million years old can be seen. “The oldest pieces in the Netherlands go back 300,000 years, what we show here is from 500,000 years ago. There are even pieces from an even more distant past that come from Armenian soil, up to two million years ago. So the country has an immeasurable history”, says the curator of the exhibition, Wijnand van der Sanden.
The idea for the Armenian-oriented exhibition was a journey from Drents Museum director Harry Tupan to Iran, in preparation for another exhibition. “I was there with some colleagues, and got a tour of a museum in Tehran. Then we suddenly saw stuff that we thought: what is this?”, admired Tupan. “That didn’t come from Iran, but from Armenia, colleagues said.” That visit started the ball rolling to bring Armenia to the Drents Museum.