A History of the World in 100 Objects (4 page)

Happily the book also includes voices from the communities or countries where the objects were made. This is, I believe, indispensable. Only they can explain what meanings these things now carry in that context: only a Hawaiian can say what significance the feather helmet given to Captain Cook and his colleagues (
Chapter 87
) has for the islanders today, after two hundred and fifty years of European and American intrusion. Nobody can explain better than Wole Soyinka what it means to a Nigerian now to see the Benin bronzes (
Chapter 77
) in the British Museum. These are crucial questions in any consideration of objects in history. All round the world national and communal identities are increasingly being defined through new readings of their history, and that history is frequently anchored in things. The British Museum is not just a collection of objects: it is an arena where meaning and identity are being debated and contested on a global scale, at times with acrimony. These debates are an essential part of what the objects now mean, as are the arguments about where they should properly be exhibited or housed. These views should be articulated by those most intimately concerned.

All museums rest on the hope – the belief – that the study of things can lead to a truer understanding of the world. It is what the British Museum was set up to achieve. The idea was articulated powerfully by Sir Stamford Raffles, whose collection came to the British Museum as part of his campaign to persuade Europeans that Java had a culture which could proudly take its place beside the great civilizations of the Mediterranean. The head of the Buddha from Borobudur (
Chapter 59
) and the shadow-puppet of Bima (
Chapter 83
) show how eloquent objects can be in pleading such a cause, and I cannot be the only person who looks at them and is totally persuaded by Raffles’s argument. These two objects take us to very different moments of Java’s history, demonstrating the culture’s longevity and vitality, and they speak of two very different areas of human endeavour – a solitary spiritual quest for enlightenment, and riotous public fun. Through them, a whole culture can be glimpsed, apprehended and admired.

The object which perhaps best resumes the ambitions not just of this book but of the British Museum itself, the attempt to imagine and understand a world we have not experienced directly but know of only through the accounts and experiences of others, is Dürer’s
Rhinoceros
, a beast which he drew but never saw. Confronted with reports of the Indian rhinoceros sent from Gujarat to the king of Portugal in 1515, Dürer informed himself as fully as he could from the written descriptions that had circulated around Europe and then tried to imagine what this extraordinary beast might look like. It is the same process that we all go through as we gather evidence, and then build our image of a world in the past or far away.

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.

Human life began in Africa. Here our ancestors created the first stone tools to chop meat, bones and wood. It was this increasing dependency on the things we create that makes humans different from all other animals. Our ability to make objects allowed humans to adapt to a multitude of environments and spread from Africa into the Middle East, Europe and Asia. From about 40,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, humans created the world’s first representational art. This Ice Age caused the world’s sea levels to fall, exposing a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that allowed humans to reach the Americas for the first time and spread rapidly across the continent.

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. What fascinated me then were the mummies themselves, the thrilling, gruesome thought of the dead bodies. Today, when I cross the Great Court or climb the front steps, I still see groups of excited children heading for the Egyptian galleries to brave the terror and the mystery of the mummies. Now I am much more interested in the mummy cases and, although this one is by no means the oldest object in the Museum, it seems a good place to begin this history through objects. Our chronological story begins in
Chapter Two
, with the earliest objects that we know were intentionally made by humans just under two million years ago, so it may seem slightly perverse to begin some way into the story. But I start here because mummies and their cases remain some of the Museum’s most potent artefacts and demonstrate some of the ways in which this history will ask – and occasionally answer – different kinds of questions about objects. I’ve chosen this particular mummy case – made in around 240
BC
for a high-ranking Egyptian priest called Hornedjitef, and one of the most impressive in the Museum – because it is still, remarkably, yielding new information and sending us messages through time.

If we come back to a museum that we visited as a child, most of us have the sense that we have changed enormously while the things have remained serenely the same. But they haven’t: thanks to continuing research and new scientific techniques, what we know about them is constantly growing. The mummy of Hornedjitef is housed in a massive black outer coffin in the shape of a human body, an elaborately decorated inner case, and then the mummy itself, carefully embalmed and wrapped up with amulets and talismans. Everything we know about Hornedjitef we know from this group of objects. In a sense, he is his own document, and one that continues to give up its secrets.

Hornedjitef arrived at the Museum in 1835, ten years or so after the mummy was excavated. Egyptian hieroglyphic script had just been deciphered, so the first step was to read all the inscriptions on his coffins, which told us who he was, what his job was, and something about his religious beliefs. We know Hornedjitef’s name because it is written on his inner coffin, along with the fact that he was a priest in the Temple of Amun at Karnak during the reign of Ptolemy III – that is, between 246 and 222
BC
.

The inner coffin has a fine gilded face – the gold indicates divine status, as Egyptian gods were said to have flesh of gold. Below the face is an image of the sun god as a winged scarab beetle, symbol of spontaneous life, flanked by baboons who worship the rising sun. Like all Egyptians, Hornedjitef believed that if his body was preserved he would live beyond death, but before reaching the afterlife he would have to undertake a hazardous journey for which he needed to prepare with the utmost care. So he took with him charms and spells for every eventuality. The underside of the lid of the coffin is decorated with inscriptions of spells, images showing gods, who act as protectors, and constellations of stars
.
Their position on the lid suggests the heavens stretched out above him, turning the whole coffin interior into a miniature cosmos: Hornedjitef has commissioned his own personal star map and time machine. Paradoxically, his meticulous preparation for the future now allows us to travel in the opposite direction, back to him and his world. And beside the numerous inscriptions, we can now begin to decipher the thing itself – the mummy, its case and the objects it contains.

Inside the lid of Hornedjitef’s inner coffin

Thanks to advances in scientific research, we can learn much more about Hornedjitef today than was possible in 1835. Especially in the last twenty years, there have been huge steps forward in ways of gathering information from objects without damaging them in the process. Scientific techniques allow us to fill in many gaps which the inscriptions don’t touch on – the details of everyday life, how old people were, what kind of food they ate, the state of their health, how they died and also how they were mummified. For example, until recently we have never been able to investigate inside the linen wrappings of the mummy, because unwinding the wrappings risks damaging them and the body. But now, with CT scanning techniques that are used on living people, we are able to see beneath the surface of the linen to the objects wrapped inside the cloth and to the body beneath.

The mummy wrapped in linen, partially covered in its cartonnage

John Taylor, Curator of our Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, has been researching the mummies in the British Museum for more than two decades, and in recent years he has taken a few of them to London hospitals for special scans. These non-invasive, non-destructive examinations have yielded great insights:

We can now say that Hornedjitef was middle aged to elderly when he died, and that he was mummified according to the best methods available at the time. We know that his internal organs were taken out, carefully packaged up and then put back inside him; we can see them there, deep inside. We can see that they’ve poured resins – expensive oils – into his body to preserve him, and we can also detect amulets, rings and jewellery and little charms placed on him beneath the wrappings, to protect him on his journey to the afterlife. If you unwrap a mummy it’s a very destructive process, and the amulets, which are very small, can move out of place; the positioning of them was absolutely crucial to their magical function, and by scanning the mummy we see them all exactly in position in the same relationships to each other that they had when they were placed there thousands of years ago, so that is a huge gain in knowledge. We can also examine the teeth in great detail, establishing the wear and the dental disease that they suffered from; we can look at the bones, and have seen that Hornedjitef had arthritis in his back, which must have been very painful.

Recent scientific advances have allowed us to find out about a great deal more than Hornedjitef’s bad back. Being able to read the words on his coffin tells us about his place in society and what that society believed about life after death, but the new techniques enable us to analyse the materials with which mummies were prepared and coffins made, which helps us understand how Egypt was economically connected to the world round about it. Mummies may for us be quintessentially Egyptian, but it turns out that it took far more than the resources of Egypt alone to make them.