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February 9, 2018 - January 14, 2019
It is, as we know, the victors who write the history, especially when only the victors know how to write. Those who are on the losing side, those whose societies are conquered or destroyed, often have only their things to tell their stories.
A history through things is impossible without poets.
The Kilwa fragments demonstrate that the Indian Ocean is in effect an enormous lake across which cultures have been communicating for millennia, where traders bring not only things but ideas, and the communities around whose shores are every bit as connected as those around the Mediterranean. One of the things this object history makes clear is that the very word ‘Mediterranean’ – ‘the sea at the centre of the earth’ – is misconceived. It is not at the centre of the Earth, and is just one among many marine cultures.
The object becomes a document not just of the world for which it was made, but of the later periods which altered it.
The result may alarm a western eye used to regarding the work of art as an almost sacred space, but there is I think something very moving about these acts of aesthetic witness which create a community of shared enjoyment spanning the centuries, and to which we in our turn may be admitted – even if we do not add our seals.
If one of the purposes of an object history is to use things to give voice to the voiceless, then this slave drum has a special role – to speak for millions who were allowed to take nothing with them as they were enslaved and deported, and who were unable to write their own story.
Around AD 300 (Chapters 41–45), for example, with what seems like bewildering synchronicity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity all moved towards the conventions of representation which broadly they still use today, and all of them began to focus on images of the human body.
All museums rest on the hope – the belief – that the study of things can lead to a truer understanding of the world.
Dürer’s animal, unforgettable in its pent-up monumentality and haunting in the rigid plates of its folding skin, is a magnificent achievement by a supreme artist. It is striking, evocative and so real you almost fear it is about to escape from the page. And it is, of course – exhilaratingly? distressingly? reassuringly? (I don’t know which) – wrong. But in the end that is not the point. Durer’s Rhinoceros stands as a monument to our endless curiosity about the world beyond our grasp, and to humanity’s need to explore and try to understand it.
It was this increasing dependency on the things we create that makes humans different from all other animals.
When I first came through the doors of the British Museum in 1954, at the age of eight, I began with the mummies, and I think that’s still where most people begin when they first visit.
The brain is an extremely power-hungry mechanism. Although it accounts for only 2 per cent of our body weight, it consumes 20 per cent of our entire energy intake, and it requires constant nourishment.
One of the most important developments was that it started to become asymmetrical as it got to grips with a whole range of different functions – logic, language, the coordinated movement needed for tool-making, imagination and creative thought. The left and right hemispheres of the human brain have adapted to specialize in different skills and tasks – quite unlike the ape’s brain, which remains not only smaller but symmetrical.
From the point where our ancestors started making tools like this, people have been unable to survive without the things they make; in this sense, it is making things that makes us human.
Listening to the news on the radio, or watching it on television, it is easy to see the world as divided into rival tribes and competing civilizations. So it’s good, in fact it’s essential, to be reminded that the idea of our common humanity is not just an Enlightenment dream, but a genetic and cultural reality.
It now seems very likely that if you can shape a stone you can shape a sentence.
Why do all modern humans share the compulsion to make works of art? Why does man the tool-maker everywhere turn into man the artist?
Ice Age artists display a whole range of styles and techniques – abstract, naturalistic, even surreal – as well as using perspective and sophisticated composition. These are modern humans with modern human minds, just like our own. They still live by hunting and gathering, but they are interpreting their world through art.
In the art of this period you see human beings trying to enter fully into the flow of life, so that they become part of the whole process of animal life that’s going on around them, in a way which isn’t just about managing the animal world, or guaranteeing them success in hunting. I think it’s more than that. It’s really a desire to get inside and almost to be at home in the world at a deeper level, and that’s actually a very religious impulse, to be at home in the world.
there are now exciting new discoveries that really have no representations of women at all – most of the symbolism is very phallocentric – so my view at the moment is that sexuality is important in these early farming societies, but not in terms of reproduction/fertility, children and mothering and nurturing. It’s really more clearly about the sex act itself.
It’s almost personally, and religiously, offensive that you are playing God. When you take corn to be used for purposes other than to be eaten or be worshipped, even to be put into a car, it becomes a highly controversial issue.
Nowadays Jomon pots are used as cultural ambassadors for Japan in major exhibitions around the world. Most nations, when presenting themselves abroad, look back to imperial glories or invading armies. Remarkably, technological, economically powerful Japan proudly proclaims its identity in the creations of the early hunter-gatherers. As an outsider I find this very powerful, for the Jomon’s meticulous attention to detail and patterning, the search for ever-greater aesthetic refinement and the long continuity of Jomon traditions seem already very Japanese.
When you are faced with a piece of ground where there are few limiting constraints, there are not many buildings
and it’s a sort of white piece of paper, the first thing you do is start putting a grid on it, because you want to own it and a grid is a way of owning it, a way of getting order. Architecture is really giving order, harmony, beauty, rhythm to space.
The great thing about looking at Gilgamesh today is that we see that, if we go back far enough, there’s no clash of civilizations between the Middle East and the West. We find in Gilgamesh the origins of a
common culture – its offshoots go off into Homer, the 1001 Nights, and the Bible – so it is really a sort of common thread in our global culture.
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Indeed it could be argued this
was the beginning of the very idea of the Middle East as a single theatre of conflict and control.
For Africans, the Nile has never been just an Egyptian river, and it’s claimed as fiercely by the Sudanese now as it was in the time of Taharqo.
the Persian Empire was based on the principle of the iron fist in the velvet glove.
The Persian Empire was more a collection of kingdoms than what we might immediately think of as an empire. Cyrus called himself the Shahanshah – the King of Kings – making clear that this was a confederation of allied states, each with its own ruler but all under firm Persian control. It was a model that allowed a great deal of local autonomy and all sorts of diversity – very different from the later Roman model.
In 1917, when the British government declared that it would establish in Palestine a national home to which Jews could once again return, images of Cyrus were displayed alongside
photographs of George V throughout eastern Europe. Not many political gambits are still paying dividends 2,500 years later.
As you’d imagine, because they for so
long were at war, Greeks and Persians had very different ideas of what a state should be. But precisely because they were at war, each tended to define the ideal state in opposition to the other.
The victory is not just political: it is artistic and intellectual.
A jaundiced, and misleading, way of describing the owners of the Basse-Yutz Flagons would be as the Iron Age ‘nouveaux riches’ – northerners looking to use Mediterranean design and taste to show off their own sophistication and aspirations. That view, first formulated by the Greek writers and rehearsed later by the Romans, has created the stereotype of an uncouth northern Europe in perpetual admiration of a cultured south. It is a stereotype that goes back more than 2,500 years, and it still shapes the way Mediterranean Europe thinks about the north – and even the way the north thinks about
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In Europe and Asia it is striking that self-definition was usually in distinction to others – partly by imitation but usually in opposition. Now I’m looking at an object from the Americas, from the lowland rainforests of south-east Mexico, and this Olmec face mask shows me a culture looking only at itself.
In the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Alexander became a model for rulers to emulate or reject: Augustus, the first Roman emperor, imitated Alexander by using his own image to represent imperial power to his subjects. In contrast, the Greek rulers of Egypt looked back to Egypt’s past in times of political weakness, and in India the Emperor Ashoka rejected oppressive rule altogether, promoting his peaceful philosophy through inscriptions on pillars across the subcontinent.
secularism in the Indian form means not ‘no religion in government matters’, but ‘no favouritism of any religion over any other’.
Contact between people is not always very obvious, so the circulation of goods, the circulation of imperially sanctioned objects, together with texts, is part of that symbolical assertion of what it means to be an empire.
bureaucracy as a guarantee of beauty.
The government nationalized some major industries and it regulated major industries for quite a long time, so they were often run by private entrepreneurs or people who had been entrepreneurs, but under state control. There are modern parallels here, because what we’ve seen in the past few decades is the emergence of a hybrid system in China, from an economy that was completely under state control to a more market-oriented model, but nevertheless very firmly under state direction.
The Chinese still know that the best gifts are always the ones that only the giver can command. In the time of the Han Dynasty, that was silk and lacquer cups. Today, when China wants to establish friendly relations, it still gives the present that nobody else can match – it’s known as Panda Diplomacy.
wherever you stand, they won’t look at you. Augustus is looking past you, beyond you, to something much more important: his future.
probably the events of the Hajj closely recall what would have
happened in pagan times at that centre.
Ironically, and rather wonderfully, instead of the images of the grand caliphs who built Samarra we see their slaves and their servants – retrieved from Hollywood cartoon caricature to poignant historical reality.
