Bits and Pieces of the Living Past

If you are a certain age and come from an Anglo-Celtic or European background, your mental alignment and temperamental disposition will have rendered you, on balance, Eurocentric. Even the word Mediterranean—meaning centre of the earth, suggests this mindset, as do Far East and Middle East. Today, historians, archaeologists and anthropologists are dismantling this mindset at a furious pace, and as the globe contracts it has never been more opportune to celebrate our common origins and humanity. It even turns out, as revealed recently, that we mated with our Neanderthal cousins—and why should that surprise us?

In 2010, a collaboration between BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum led to the exhibition A History of the World in 100 Objects and a series of 100 podcasts, which are still available. It told the story of humanity and how we arrived where we are today—how humans across the globe have shaped objects and how objects have changed our world. The British Museum’s director at the time, Neil MacGregor, began the adventure with the 2300-year-old Egyptian mummy case of a high-ranking priest—Hornedjitef. The inside of his coffin had a painted map of the heavens as an aid to navigation. Hornedjitef had commissioned his own personal firmament and time-machine, one that allowed us, more than 2000 years later, to travel in the opposite direction back into his time. “The one thing his star-map didn’t predict,” quipped MacGregor, “was that he might ultimately wind up at the British Museum. Let’s face it, Bloomsbury might have been a bit of a disappointment to him.”

MacGregor made it clear, while discussing the museum’s oldest object, a two-million-year-old stone chopping tool from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, that human history is 99 per cent prehistoric, compared to which the developments from the steam engine to the credit card are a mere eye-blink. This chopping tool shaped by human hands enabled man to remove meat from animal carcases and crush bones to get the marrow, giving him a protein source which would slowly increase the size of his brain. This chopping tool had more chips removed from it than the task required, which suggests something interesting about mankind—the urge to make things more complicated than they need to be. MacGregor noted, “From this point on, we can’t survive without the things we make and, in this sense, it is making things that makes us human.”

Leaping forward some 600,000 years, he discussed a handaxe:

What would you take with you when you travel? Most of us would embark on a long list that begins with a toothbrush and ends with excess baggage. But for most of human history, there was only one thing that you really needed in order to travel—a stone handaxe.

It is not simply a practical tool—the Swiss Army knife of the Stone Age—it is also symmetrical, harmoniously proportioned and pleasing to the eye that made it. In other words, it is meant to be beautiful. So is this where art begins—with the desire for something greater than the utilitarian, something visually pleasing and thus a celebration of the skills acquired to make it so? Quite possibly. And this handaxe provides another valuable insight: the capacity for the maker to imagine, in the rough piece of stone, the shape he wishes to achieve—a huge conceptual leap. The person who made it was a person we could recognise as someone like us. And if he could shape a stone, he could probably shape a sentence.

In this remarkable exhibition, now at Canberra’s National Museum of Australia, Hornedjitef’s mummy case has been replaced by Shepenmehyt’s coffin (twenty-sixth dynasty, c. 600 BC) and there are other substitutions and additions as well. One comes from Egypt’s sister culture Mesopotamia. It is a royal lyre with a bull’s head modelled in gold leaf and lapis lazuli. One captivating detail in the Queen’s Lyre (c. 2500 BC) is the shell inlay decorating the sound box, depicting a wolf and a lion as waiters, serving a diner who is not visible. The wolf has carved the meat and brings the dressed heads on a platter, and the lion follows with a large jar of wine and a bowl. In the third register, a bear steadies a harp which is played by an ass. At the bear’s feet a small fawn shakes a rattle while beating a tambourine on his lap. We can’t know what it means except that music was played during meal times and that while animals were worshipped and sacrificed, they could also be depicted humorously. Perhaps the modern equivalent of such affectionate attention to animals is The Wind in the Willows.

So music mattered, and indeed this exhibition showcases many of mankind’s achievements: the domestication of plants and animals, irrigation, ceramics, metallurgy, the emergence of city states and hierarchical rule, religion, road building, weaponry, writing, philosophy, coinage, mapping the heavens, literature, music, sport, book-keeping and, last but not least, the credit card.

The Japanese Jomon Pot tells us about the very origins of fired clay, and the world of culinary and decorative possibilities which opened up thereafter. It seems the Japanese, some 7000 years ago, invented the first stew when they realised that accidentally fired clay would provide a container which didn’t leak or decompose, and could be subjected to long periods of heating with no ill effect.

A clay writing tablet with inscriptions in cuneiform suggests that accountants and tally-keepers got there before the poets and the story-tellers. This 5000-year-old piece from Mesopotamia records beer rations for workers, while the Flood Tablet, a densely incised clay slab from the same region made around 700 BC, reminds us that stories reaching us in the first instance through the Old Testament have their roots in far older myths.

One tiny object comes from one of the most enigmatic and mysterious of civilisations, that of the Indus Valley in Pakistan. This great culture, which existed in north-west India 5000 years ago, is today one of the great archaeological discoveries, and some of its story has come our way by small seal stones carved from soapstone about the size of a postage stamp. The discovery of one of these, with an engraved cow which resembles a unicorn, led in 1906 to the excavation of cities of remarkable sophistication, with carefully laid-out grids, housing plans and advanced sanitation systems. These cities housed 30,000 to 40,000 people. The symbols on the seals have yet to be deciphered.

The world’s first coins made their appearance in Lydia (now in western Turkey). Its ruler King Croesus made good use of Lydia’s rich metal resources to provide a standard means of exchange which was not perishable. The gold coin in the exhibition depicts a bull and a lion in combat—imagery which was widespread throughout the Middle East.

In a far-flung Roman outpost in Suffolk, a silver pepper pot (the Hoxne Pepper Pot) was found in 1992 amongst the largest hoard of Roman silver and gold ever discovered in England. It dated from the fourth century and the information it gave archaeologists was extensive. Roman administration in Britain during the fourth century was unravelling before the pressure of seafaring groups, and the Romans were slowly withdrawing from England. If you were a wealthy Roman family you were particularly vulnerable to raiders in search of booty. The only choice was to bury it. The pepper pot had been carefully wrapped with hundreds of other valuable and carefully crafted objects in gold and silver, along with 15,000 Roman coins, and buried in a wooden box. Perhaps its owners hoped to return to the site later and retrieve their treasures. The only clue to the owner’s identity is the fact that several objects are inscribed with the name Aurelius Ursicinus.

This delightful little pepper pot, constructed to resemble the upper half of a Roman matron with her features picked out in gold, tells another story as well. Spice has, through the centuries, been big business. The Muslim, Portuguese and Dutch empires became fabulously wealthy as each in turn controlled the luxuries that were traded all the way from the fabled Spice Islands. Wars were fought over pepper then, just as wars are fought over oil today. This was a very expensive pepper pot, but its contents may have been even more valuable.

Close to the time when it was buried in the Suffolk countryside—perhaps even in the same century—across the other side of the world (which would not reveal itself to Europeans for more than a thousand years), some artisan was carving a ceremonial ballgame belt. It was associated with the first team sport known to world history and it took place on the playing fields of Central America. Few football fans—chanting, singing and cheering with an almost religious fervour around the world—would know that the earliest known team sport began in Central America.

When this horseshoe-shaped object in polished grey-green stone (possibly jadeite) first arrived at the British Museum in the 1860s, there was confusion about its function or purpose. Could it have been a yoke for a carthorse? No. It was far too heavy. It was decided that it represented the padded leather and cloth belts worn for hip protection in ball games, and was intended for a ritual ceremony at the start of the game. Weighing around seventy-five to 100 pounds, it would certainly have slowed the most powerful of players down.

But these games were not just fiercely competitive and occasionally painful sporting events, they were integral to the belief systems of these ancient Central Americans and their view of the life-and-death struggle between man and his gods. A carved detail on the stone belt is a stylised image of a toad whose secretions were known to have had hallucinogenic properties. This may have represented an early example of a player enhancing his performance through drugs. Certainly this Mexican ceremonial belt acts as a powerful symbol of how far societies will pursue the obsession for mass organised sport.

The most effective way a ruler can stamp his authority on the minds of his subjects is through imagery. The fine silver coin with an idealised portrait of Alexander the Great, whose conquering expeditions took him as far as India, was actually struck forty years after his death in 323 BC. The ubiquity of his image across the ancient world, in coins, medallions and sculptures, might be compared to another image of immense authority, that of Chairman Mao, who appears on China’s red bank­notes today. Indeed, the public relations machine which kept alive the exploits and achievements of Alexander would be the envy of any of today’s public relations teams. The coin shows a youthful and purposeful Alexander with ram’s horns. The horns are associated with a hybrid of two important Egyptian and Greek gods, Amon and Zeus. Thus a small coin makes two big statements—it asserts Alexander’s dominion over both Greeks and Egyptians, and it suggests that he is both a man and a god.

Finally a Hebrew astrolabe, dating to around 1345 AD, and possibly Spanish, bears witness to the astonishing advances in mathematics and science in the medieval period. Astrolabe means “star finder” in Greek and this refined brass version was used to navigate, make mathematical calculations, determine horoscopes and establish the time. Its stars are identified by Arabic and Hebrew names and the months are in Spanish.

This inspiring exhibition begins in prehistoric times and finishes in the twenty-first century—which may not turn out to be so different from all our preceding centuries, if one considers the possibility that while we inhabit a high-tech world we are still driven by stone-age feelings.