A Certain Slant of Light

I've been talking about the preservation of history as a matter of written records, but as a trained archaeologist, I am obliged to note that history also inheres in the materials we leave behind, from the grand -- elaborate sarcophagi and ruined temples -- to the humble -- potsherds, post holes, and the bones of our meals.

Nobody really took much of an interest in that latter end of the spectrum until fairly recently, but museums for the fancier stuff are not new at all. The earliest one we know of was curated by the princess Ennigaldi two thousand five hundred years ago. Her father, Nabonidus, even gets credited as the "first archaeologist" -- not in the modern, scientific sense, of course, but he did have an interest in the past. He wasn't the only Neo-Babylonian king to excavate temples down to their original foundations before rebuilding them, but he attempted to connect what he found with specific historical rulers and even assign dates to their reigns. His daughter collated the resulting artifacts, which spanned a wide swath of Mesopotamian history, and her museum even had labels in three languages identifying various pieces.

That's a pretty clear-cut example, but the boundaries on what we term a "museum" are pretty fuzzy. Nowadays we tend to mean an institution open to the public, but historically a lot of these things were private collections, whose owners got to pick and choose who viewed the holdings. Some of them were (and still are) focused on specific areas, like Renaissance paintings or ancient Chinese coins, while others were "cabinets of curiosities," filled with whatever eclectic assortment of things caught the eye of the collector. As you might expect, both the focused and encyclopedic types tend to be the domain of the rich, who have the money, the free time, and the storage space to devote to amassing a bunch of stuff purely because it's of interest to them or carries prestige value.

Other proto-museums were temples in more than just a metaphorical sense. Religious offerings don't always take the form of money; people have donated paintings to hang inside a church, or swords to a Shintō shrine. Over time, these institutions amass a ton of valuable artifacts, which (as with a private collection) may or may not be available for other people to view. I've mentioned before the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala, which has eight vaults full of votive offerings that would double as an incomparable record of centuries or even millennia of Indian history . . . if they were studied. But making these things public in that fashion might be incompatible with their religious purpose.

Museums aren't only limited to art and artifacts, either. Historically -- especially before the development of the modern circulating library -- books got mixed in with other materials. Or a collector might equally have an interest in exotic animals, whether taxidermied or alive, the latter constituting a proto-zoo. More disturbingly, their collection might include people, individuals from far-off lands or those with physical differences being displayed right alongside lions and parrots.

What's the purpose of gathering all this stuff in one place? The answer to that will depend on the nature of the museum in question. For a temple, the museum-ness of the collection might be secondary to the religious effect of gifting valuable things to the divine. But they often still benefit from the prestige of holding such items, whether the value lies in their precious materials, the quality of their craftsmanship, their historical significance, or any other element. The same is true for the individual collector.

But if that was the only factor in play, these wouldn't be museums; they'd just be treasure hoards. The word itself comes from the Greek Muses, and remember, their ranks included scholarly subjects like astronomy and history alongside the arts! One of the core functions of a museum is to preserve things we've decided are significant. Sure, if you dig up a golden statue while rebuilding a temple, you could melt it down for re-use; if you find a marble altar to an ancient god, you could bury it as a foundation stone, or carve it into something else. But placing it in a museum acknowledges that the item has worth beyond the value of its raw materials.

And that worth can be put to a number of different purposes. We don't know why Nabonidus was interested in history and set up his daughter as a museum curator, but it's entirely possible it had something to do with the legitimation of his rule: by possessing things of the past, you kind of position yourself as their heir, or alternatively as someone whose power supersedes what came before. European kings and nobles really liked harkening back to the Romans and the Greeks; having Greek and Roman things around made that connection seem more real -- cf. the Year Eight discussion of the role of historical callbacks in political propaganda.

Not all the purposes are dark or cynical, though. People have created museums, whether private or public, because they're genuinely passionate about those items and what they represent. A lot of those men (they were mostly men) with their cabinets of curiosities wanted to learn about things, and so they gathered stuff together and wrote monographs about the history, composition, and interrelationships of what they had. We may scoff at them now as antiquarians -- ones who often smashed less valuable-looking material on their way to the shiny bits -- but this is is the foundational stratum of modern scholarship. Even now, many museums have research collections: items not on public display, but kept on hand so scholars can access them for other purposes.

The big change over time involves who's allowed to visit the collections. They've gone from being personal hoards shared only with a select few to being public institutions intended to educate the general populace. Historical artifacts are the patrimony of the nation, or of humanity en masse; what gets collected and displayed is shaped by the educational mission. As does how it gets displayed! I don't know if it's still there, but the British Museum used to have a side room set up the way it looked in the eighteenth century, and I've been to quite a few museums that still have glass-topped tables and tiny paper cards with nothing more than the bare facts on them. Quite a contrast with exhibitions that incorporate large stretches of wall text, multimedia shows, and interactive elements. Selections of material may even travel to other museums, sharing more widely the knowledge they represent.

It's not all noble and pure, of course. Indiana Jones may have declared "that belongs in a museum," but he assumed the museum would be in America or somewhere else comparable, not in the golden idol's Peruvian home. When colonialism really began to sink its teeth into the globe, museums became part of that system, looting other parts of the world for the material and intellectual enrichment of their homelands. Some of those treasures have been repatriated, but by no means all. (Exhibit A: the Elgin Marbles.) The mission of preservation is real, but so is the injustice it sometimes justifies, and we're still struggling to find a better balance.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/WA5QzG)