Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm a big Night at the Museum fan, so when the third film actually took place in the British Museum I knew it was a travesty that I hadn't been there yet.

Yes, all the exhibits were alive,I grant you, but they were so cool. The sheer variety on display was more than I'd ever thought about. It reminded me that the place existed, basically, and I had a hunger to get my backside down south and experience the real deal: arguably the biggest and best museum in the country.

And I was not disappointed.

The British museum itself is free, situated on Russel street, which is easily reached from the major stations via the tube or bus. For me, it was a 20 min ride on the Piccadilly line (westbound) from St Pancras station and a short walk. The museum itself is a large traditional building with Edwardian classical styling, but as soon as you walk through into the main hall you can see that this is no ordinary structure. The entrance hall is sweeping and beautiful in a loose circle, with the temporary exhibits occupying the upper floor of the central circle, and with all the other steady exhibits spread around it across five levels.

Luckily there are plenty of facilities and cafes (and gift shops!), so while nothing's cheap you can easily spend all day having a good explore. Personally we spent well over 6 hours there, until our howling feet and fatigue claimed us and we had to call it a day. Even then, there is plenty to come back for.

"Six Hours?! How Much is There to See, Really?"

A whole world. Despite the name, The British Museum really isn't just about the history of Britain, or even the British Empire, but exists as a capsule of the whole world's cultures. You can find treasures from the Ancient Near East, the Islamic World, Africa, Egypt, China, South & South East Asia, Japan, Korea, The Pacific and Australia, Mesoamerica, Central and South America, North America, Prehistoric Europe, The Greek World, The Roman Empire, Roman Britain, Medieval Europe, Renaissance and Later Europe, Modern Europe and America, as well as modern examples of art mixed in with each culture. Having almost all of the world's cultures in one place to seamlessly journey through is -to put it bluntly- a goddamned revelation.

This stunning mural of an Assyrian lion hunt went on for several ROOMS at full scale.

"But Colonialism!"

Yes, I know that the British Museum is at the centre of debates on colonialism in museums, and I have mixed feelings on the subject that I have already written about at length here:

http://preludesblogofwords.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/what-can-digital-heist-of-bust-of.html?m=1

But you can't argue against the sheer awe at walking around this whole world of art and history in a day and what this can teach you. Everything is beautifully curated and treated with great respect and value and by holding everything side by side, no one item is treated as being more important than another, or one culture as being 'superior' to another. The end effect is all so amazing that it makes you proud to be human.

"Ok, So What Are The Highlights?"

As well as the general feeling of awe and discovery that comes with experiencing so many cultural treasures side by side, the thing that stuck out most to me were the sheer sense of scale that the museum was able to accommodate. 

For example, there were plaques of the beautifully intricate Assyrian lion hunt, snaking through rooms in a  dramatic tableaux. There were panels from the flipping Patheon (!), in full scale, wrapping around the whole building. Huge Egyptian pharaohs stared down at you, and Assyrian gatekeepers smiled next to the storeys-high gates themselves. Noble totem poles stood as markers and full-floor mosaics decorated the stairwells. Reams upon reams of orange and black pottery, and intricate gold-work, fabulously detailed islamic tiles, ticking timepieces and curios nestled against one another in displays. I have never seen anything like it.

One of the many Pharaohs keeping an eye on us.

In addition to the scale, what really excited me was finally seeing in person so many of the treasures that I has viewed in countless picture books about history while I was growing up. It was like encountering a celebrity!

"Look! A real easter island figure!"

"oh my god it's the jade-mosaic aztec snake. I've never seen it in real life!"

"Oh Jesus that's THE Lindlow bog man!"

"HOLY BALLS THAT'S THE GODDAMNED ROSETTA STONE!!!"

In the end, It's just very hard to describe how the sheer wonder of the place hits you right in the gut. All you can do is to go see it for yourself.

A beautiful part of the African exhibit

Bonus feature: One very happy blogger.

Antikythera mechanism

History has a habit of erasing itself and sometimes our ancestors really surprise us.

Often the nuances of what really occurred throughout history is lost, often by wilful erasure or through misfortune. Western history, on the whole, has a significant preference for keeping things narrative: we like the idea of marching nobly forwards and into increasing technological and cultural sophistication. We love to think that with every generation we improve ourselves and evolve and, as a result, often we view our ancestors as primitive and - horribly- even stupid.


But, of course, they weren't. And history in reality can come in all shapes, not just linear. Sometimes the technology that we view as 'modern' existed much, much earlier and, for some reason or another was lost of future generations.



For example, the popular conception of Japan has always been one of skilled samurais and, following the Tokugawa period in Japan, guns and gaijin influence were banned. Many people, looking to Japan, view gun culture as invasive and unnatural, dragged in by foreign influence. But, in reality, guns had been a part of Japanese weaponry since 1270ad, and it was due to political influences that this technology was wilfully rejected and, eventually, forgotten. Firearm technology stalled, missing out on hundreds of years of potential development.

Niokla Telsa is another example of lost potential. A legendary figure now among geek-culture, Telsa was said to have developed to have proposed a directed-energy weapon and even been able to remote-cast energy across large distances for free: something that could have catapulted the world into what we nowadays view as science fiction. But, due to pressure and theft by Thomas Edison, among other issues, so many of these ideas were never able to be developed.

Finally, even analogue computers are thought to be far, far older than we had ever anticipated. The discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism shook the world, as it showed that even the ancient Greeks had access to complex gear-work mechanisms that wouldn't resurface again for hundreds and hundreds of years and which had somehow been lost to their ancestors.
How might life had been if we had kept track of this technology and developed it?

The Antikythera Mechanism

This week I'd like to leave you in the hands of the brilliant Cracked.com, as they tell you about five fantastical ancient devices that prove that our ancestors were way more advanced than they often seem. 

The Lycurgus Cup, the Uunartoq disc, the salt drills of ancient China, the iron pillar of the Qutb Complex and Heron's programmable robots all show that our ancestors were very, very smart cookies indeed.

5 Advanced Ancient Technologies that Shouldn't Be Possible

As a Western Society, we are products of the Renaissance's fascination and deification of Classical Antiquity.

Augustus of Prima marble

 Large sections of our cultural values and what 'good taste' and 'class' comprise of are directly influenced by the romantic view of Ancient Greece and Rome that the educated upper classes held. The way they imitated the ancient artists and scholars shapes what we today view as 'beautiful' art. With the exploration of Roman art, our Renaissance ancestors discovered and prized the beautiful white statues that they uncovered of goddesses and emperors. Noting the skill involved, they in turn developed their own ways of improving and refining sculpture, but stayed true to the fine materials and ascetic - choosing pristine white marble for their own creations. The effect is beautiful and versatile and these pieces - ancient and later - are prized in countless galleries and country houses across Europe and beyond. Because of our appreciation of this aesthetic, this is how we believe sculpture should be achieved in traditional form, and we celebrate the Ancient Greek and Roman's 'refined' taste.

However, it seems that the reality of Ancient taste contrast jarringly with what we nowadays view as 'classical' sculpture...in fact we've been conditioned to view the reality as really quite garish.

Introducing the painted statues of Ancient Greece and Rome:

Augustus of Prima painted replica

 Countless Ancient status have been unearthed over the years, but when one was found with what appeared to be ancient paint pigments still clinging to its surface archaeologists and scientists banded together to analyse what this meant for our view of ancient art. One of the pigments in question was 'Egyptian Blue' and, through using advanced ultraviolet techniques to deconstruct what colours remained on the statue, it was identified to be a mix of skin colour - having been added in small amounts to pinks, whites and yellows to create a 'realistic' tone.

Realistically painted version of Caligula (31-37AD)
Reconstruction by Matthew Brennan, Virtual World Heritage Laboratory.

The above sculpture of Caligula, for example, was already very rare, being one of only two complete statues of the infamous emperor. When the University of Virginia set about trying to discover more about how this statue was coloured, the historical significance was poignant. Through colour analysis they discovered that Caligula is likely to have had brown hair. The use of gilt patterns shows some of the opulence of the statues and goes some way to explaining, for example, how they must have affected the subjected populations in the cities that displayed them. These pagan or political images were not imposing but ultimately blank slabs of white, but were instead bold, loud and potentially even lifelike.

“It is interesting to think about what kind of charge [these statues] must have had for Jews of the time,” commented Peter Schertz, a curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: “Jewish prohibition against idolatrous images must have made the appearance of classical statues both very frightful and, for some, somewhat seductive.”

Through all the various studies of these ancient statues, Ultraviolet light has been especially useful in discerning patterns and in the occasions when colours were visible. However to track each colour sometimes the scientists had to analyse deeper down to the very chemical compounds that made each pigment.

 In  galleries and auction houses often valuable old paintings are analysed to determine authenticity, and one manner is to look for particular organic elements in the paint pigments. Hundreds or even thousands of years ago, particular plants and materials were used to create particular colours and their presence shows that the art in question is the genuine article. In the same way, those studying the statues could work backwards by identifying what organic elements were present in the pigments: get the right combination and you would be able to identify what colour was used in that area.

We might ask why bother with such expensive material as marble if one was only going to paint it and, really, it's difficult to be sure. Some academics have suggested that the paint may have been fine enough to have enhanced the natural luminescence of the marble. Others suggest that the quality of the material was focused more on allowing for greater quality of sculpture, and that painting the already expensive material was seen to enhance its beauty and value spiritually rather than detract form it, even if it did hide some of the marble's attractive plain elements.

Painted ancient statues are now. admittedly, quite old news: Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulricke Koch-Brinkmann, for example, have spent over 20 years studying and painstakingly recreating classical statues to bring together this revelation...yet it is always quite a shock to the modern observer to see such a rejection of the colourless marble art that we know and love. It certainly goes to prove that the ancient world was never dull.

Istanbul Museum recreation of the Alexander Sarcophagus

Sources
- BBC4 Treasures of Ancient Rome
- True Colours
- The Ugly Truth
- Weird Science uncovers ancient art's true colours
- Was this Roman Sculpture of Gaius Caligula Painted?
- Greek Statues and their Technicolour Dreamcoats