Art Museum Journal

Treasures: The World's Cultures from the British Museum
By STAN PARCHIN
September 6, 2009

 

Treasures: The World's Cultures from the British Museum features 309 artifacts and artworks from a premiere collection that trace the development of civilization. The sprawling 52,000-square-foot exhibition at Victoria's Royal British Columbia Museum in Canada runs from May 1 to September 30, 2009. A smaller version of the show, attended by 1.3 million people, toured nine Asian cities. This incarnation includes an additional 150 items, some specifically chosen to illustrate Vancouver Island's First Nations history. The objects displayed provide a vast panorama of human creative expression that began some 1.5 million years ago.

 

Organization of Treasures...
After an introduction to the British Museum, Treasures... is divided into seven areas: Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Oceania, the Americas and the Modern World. The galleries surround the Enlightenment Center, a hands-on activity room with computer stations devoted to four subjects: Death & Commemoration, Images of Beauty, Technology & Innovation and Language.

 

Prehistory, Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa
Treasures... begins in mankind's remotest past with Early Stone Age handaxes (1.6-1.4 Million B.C.) from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Discovered by Kenyan archaeologist Louis Leakey (1903-1972), the creation of these lava block implements with a stone hammer distinguished humanity from the rest of the Animal Kingdom.

 

Egyptian civilization is introduced by a scale replica of the Rosetta Stone (196 B.C.), excavated in 1799 by Napoleon's troops. The granodiorite monument's combination of hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek scripts aided in the 1822 decipherment of ancient Egypt's language by French philologist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832).

 

Artifacts describe Egyptian history, culture and funerary practices. Principal among them is the Ptolemaic Wooden Anthropoid Inner Coffin of Djeho (305-30 B.C.). Embellished with gold leaf, the painted sarcophagus was designed for a man of high social standing. Beneath the lid's large amuletic collar is a representation of the sky goddess Nut, her wings protectively outstretched. Under the deity is an image of Djeho's mummy atop four canopic jars that stored his preserved stomach, intestines, lungs and liver. The coffin's vertical inscriptions safeguard the deceased in the afterlife.

 

West and central African kingdoms are represented by 16th-century commemorative brass plaques from Benin, a Royal Portrait Statue (late 18th Century A.D.) from the Democratic Republic of Congo and woven Kente textiles from southeast Ghana.

 

Ancient to Modern Europe
Europe's history is chronicled from the pre-agricultural Upper Palaeolithic or Late Stone Age (12,000 B.C.) to the end of the 19th Century. The achievements of classical Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment are explained through carvings, coins, armor, sculpture, paintings, prints and drawings.

 

The King, Queen, Bishop, Knight and Rook from the celebrated Lewis Chessmen (ca. 1150-1200 A.D.) are five of the 92 walrus ivory pieces discovered in the Outer Hebrides in 1831. Possibly carved in Norway, they were created purely for entertainment purposes. A Rook in the guise of a bearded infantryman is attired in a conical helmet and pleated robe. The wide-eyed soldier brandishes a sword. His kite-shaped shield with heraldic designs is emblazoned with a cross, an emblem of the Catholic Church and its pervasive religious and political influence during the Middle Ages.

 

The Americas
The civilizations of Mexico and Central, South and North America developed advanced forms of social and political organization, art and architecture prior to European contact. Their cultural sophistication is seen in fine ceramic, stone and gold artifacts as well as intricately designed garments and accessories. Among them are carefully fashioned figurative vessels in the shape of animals, plants and deities. Produced by Moche craftsmen from northern Peru, these works were used by powerful lords to maintain important alliances and celebrate marriages.

 

The Modern World
Advances in technology added a global dimension to the political conflicts of the 20th Century. This sentiment is perhaps best expressed by Cristóvão Canhavato's Throne of Weapons (2001), a sculpture comprised of decommissioned rifles and other weapons collected after the end of Mozambique's civil war in 1992. Its welded parts, manufactured in Russia, Eastern Europe, Portugal and North Korea, transform the chair from a traditional symbol of African power and prestige into a representation of the international arms trade and its role in destabilizing governments.

 

Selected from more than seven million objects, the 309 works in Treasures: The World's Cultures from the British Museum poignantly describe the evolution of civilization from prehistoric times through the early 21st Century. The exhibition gives the viewer a reason to reflect upon mankind's past and present history as well as ponder its immediate future.

 

Sources
Fitzhugh, William W. and Elisabeth I. Ward (eds.), et al. Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (exh. cat.). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000, 304-305.
 
Treasures: The World's Cultures from the British Museum (exh. cat.). Victoria: Royal British Columbia Museum, 2009.